The most popular architect in or about Rome in this age was Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola. Coming from Bologna to study the classic ruins, he formed his style by marrying the Pantheon of Agrippa to the Basilica of Julius Caesar, seeking to combine cupola and arches, columns and pediments; and, like Palladio, he wrote a book to propagate his principles. He achieved his first triumph at Caprarola, near Viterbo, by designing for Cardinal Farnese another vast and luxurious Palazzo Farnese (1547–9); and ten years later he built a third at Piacenza. But his most influential work was done at Rome in the Villa di Papa Giulio for Pope Julius III, the Porta del Popolo, and the church of the Gesù (1568–75). In this famous edifice, built for the rising Jesuits, Vignola designed a nave of impressive breadth and height, and converted the aisles into chapels; later architects would make this church the first clear manifestation of the baroque style—curved or contorted forms surfeited with ornament. In 1564 Vignola succeeded Michelangelo as chief architect at St. Peter’s, and shared in the honor of raising the great dome that Angelo had designed.
VII. MICHELANGELO: THE LAST PHASE: 1534–64
Through all these years Michelangelo had survived as an unruly ghost from another age. He was fifty-nine when Clement died, but no one seemed to think that he had earned the right to rest. Paul III and Francesco Maria of Urbino fought over his living body. The Duke, as executor for Julius II, clamored for completion of his uncle’s tomb, and flourished a contract long since signed by Angelo. But the imperious pontiff would not hear of it. “For thirty years,” said Paul to Buonarroti, “I have wanted you to enter my service; and now that I am Pope will you disappoint me? That contract shall be torn up, and I’ll have you work for me, come what may.”55 The Duke protested, but finally settled for a much smaller mausoleum than Julius had dreamed of. The knowledge that the tomb was an abortion shared in darkening the Titan’s later years.
In 1535 the triumphant Pope issued a brief appointing Michelangelo chief architect, sculptor, and painter at the Vatican, and proclaiming his eminence in each field. The artist was made a member of the papal household, and was given a life pension of 1200 crowns ($15,000?) a year. Clement VII, shortly before his death, had asked him to paint a fresco of The Last Judgment behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel. Paul proposed that this commission should now be carried out. Michael was reluctant; he wanted to carve, not paint; he was happier with hammer and chisel than with the brush. The very size of the wall to be painted—sixty-six by thirty-three feet—might have given him pause. Nevertheless in September, 1535, aged sixty, he began his most famous picture.
Perhaps the repeated frustrations of his life—the maimed mausoleum of Julius, the destruction of his statue of that pope at Bologna, the unfinished façade of San Lorenzo, the unfinished Medici tombs—had accumulated in him a bitterness that poured itself into this consummation of divine wrath. Memories of Savonarola may have come back to him across forty years—those dire prophecies of doom, those denunciations of human wickedness, clerical corruption, Medicean tyranny, intellectual pride, and pagan joys, those blasts of hell-fire searing the soul of Florence; now the dead martyr would speak again, from the most intimate altar in Christendom. The somber artist whom Leonardo had called learned in Dante would soak himself anew in the brine of the Inferno, and put its horrors on the wall where for generations to come future popes might have that inescapable judgment before them as they read the Mass. And meanwhile, in this citadel of a religion that had till lately scorned and maligned the human body, he would be a sculptor even with the brush, and would paint that body in a hundred conditions and attitudes, in the contortions and grimaces of agony, in the drowsy then excited resurrection of the dead, in inflated angels blowing the fateful summons, in a Christ still showing His wounds, yet strong enough, with His titanic shoulders and Herculean arms, to hurl into hell those who had thought themselves superior to the commandments of God.
The sculptor in him ruined the painting. This stern puritan, who day by day became more religious, insisted on carving in color massive and muscular bodies, until the angels that art and poetry had conceived as happy children, gracious youths, or lithesome girls, became in his hands athletes racing through the skies, and damned and saved alike were worthy of salvation if only because they were made in the image and likeness of God, and even Christ Himself, in His majestic anger, became an incarnation of the Adam of the Sistine ceiling, a god made in the image and likeness of man. There is too much flesh here, there are too many arms and legs, biceps and swelling calves, to lift the spirit to contemplate the wages of sin. Even the lecherous Aretino thought these pullulating nudes were a bit out of place. Everyone knows how Paul III’s master of ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, complained that such a celebration of the human form would more fitly adorn a wineshop than the chapel of the popes; how Michelangelo avenged himself by painting Biagio among the damned; and how Paul, when Biagio begged him to order the erasure of the portrait, replied with excellent humor and theology that not even a pope can release a soul from hell.56 Yielding to protests like Biagio’s, Paul IV bade Daniele da Volterra paint breeches on the more glaring parts; whereupon Rome called the poor artist il Braghettone, the breeches tailor. The noblest figure in the dark panorama is completely clothed—Mary, whose raiment is the Master’s last triumph in the painting of drapery, and whose look of horror and mercy is the one redeeming element in this apotheosis of human ferocity.
After six years of labor the picture was unveiled for the Christmas celebration of 1541. A Rome now entering upon a religious reaction against the Renaissance accepted The Last Judgment as good theology and great art. Vasari pronounced it the most wonderful of all paintings. Artists admired the anatomy, and were not offended by the muscular exaggerations, the bizarre attitudes, the carnal excess; on the contrary many painters imitated these mannerisms of the Master, and formed the mannerist school that began the decadence of Italian art. Even laymen marveled at the foreshortenings—which gave parts of the picture the semblance of relief—and the acute sense of perspective that had made the lower figures two meters in height, the middle figures three, the upper figures four. We who view the fresco today cannot judge it fairly; it has been injured by Daniele’s tailoring, a further draping of some figures in 1762, and the dust and candle smoke and natural darkening of four centuries.
After some months of rest Michelangelo began (1542) work on two frescoes in the chapel that Antonio da Sangallo had built in the Vatican for Paul III. One represented the martyrdom of St. Peter, the other the conversion of St. Paul. Here again the aging artist lost himself in violent exaggerations of the human form. He was seventy-five when he completed these pictures, and he told Vasari that he painted them against his will, and with great effort and fatigue.57
He did not feel too old for sculpture; indeed, he said, the hammer and chisel kept him in health. Even during the painting of The Last Judgment he had sought refuge and consolation now and then with the marbles in his studio. In 1539 he carved his stern and powerful Brutus (in the Bargello), worthy of the greatest Roman portrait sculpture. Perhaps he meant it to sanction the recent tyrannicide of Alessandro de’ Medici in Florence, and to serve as a reminder to future despots. Eleven years later, in a tenderer mood, he carved the Pietà that stands behind the high altar of the Florentine cathedral. He hoped to make this his own sepulchral monument, and he worked on it feverishly, often continuing his labor on it at night by the light of a candle fixed in his cap. But an over furious blow of the hammer so injured the statue that he abandoned it as irrevocably spoiled. His servant Antonio Mini begged it as a gift, received it, and sold it to a Florentine. It is an astonishing product for a man of seventy-five years. The body of the dead Christ is represented without exaggeration; the figure of Mary, unfinished, is tenderness petrified; and the noble face of the hooded Nicodemus could well portray, as some have thought, Michelangelo himself, who now so often meditated on the Passion of Christ.