R. A. Scotti (2 page)

I first saw St. Peter's Basilica on a scorching late September day of my first week in Rome. I was nineteen and spending a year in Italy. An Italian cousin picked me up in the morning in a green-and-black Roman cab and we rode out to the beach at Ostia, where, in my one-piece American bathing suit, I appeared ludicrously overdressed.

I was living at CIVIS, an international house for students, and I had to be back by three o'clock at the latest. My group had a papal audience at four. I couldn't miss it, not only because no one stands up the pope but also because he and my father had been friends for years. They had met when my father was studying medicine at the University of Rome and Paul VI, then the young Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, was chaplain of an anti-Fascist student group. In his pre-pontiff days, he would visit us whenever church business brought him to the States. Somewhere I still have the photograph of his cat, taken on the balcony of his Vatican apartment, that he sent to me when I was nine or ten. He had to give the cat away when he was elected pope, and I had written to say how sad it was that the pope could not keep a pet.

On that September day, the sun and the wine at lunch and the salty Mediterranean air made time irrelevant. When I finally tore into CIVIS sunburned and sticky, it was well after three, and the group had left without me. CIVIS is a couple of miles north of the Vatican on the same side of the Tiber River, near Ponte Milvio, the bridge where Constantine, leading his army into the imperial city in
A.D.
312, saw a cross in the sky and the words
In hoc signo vinces
—“By this sign you will conquer.”

Constantine was a young general advancing on Rome to challenge Maxentius, the foremost contender to succeed the emperor Diocletian. With Christ so obviously on his side, Constantine defeated his rival easily and was crowned emperor. He mended his pagan ways and soon after built the first basilica of St. Peter.

Nothing happens quickly in Rome, but over the course of more than sixteen hundred years, a village grew up around Ponte Milvio. By the time I arrived, the old bridge still spanned the Tiber, but the road linking the village to the city proper had become a wide avenue with a bowling alley, a soccer stadium, and a half-mile stretch where prostitutes were allowed to solicit openly. (Only the bridge and the soccer stadium were mentioned in my guidebook.)

At three forty-five, I was standing at the bus stop just beyond the ancient bridge, in black dress, black heels, and black lace mantilla, prescribed attire for a papal audience but notably conspicuous for an average afternoon. The only vehicle in sight was a vintage pickup truck, one of those uniquely Italian three-wheeled contraptions. It appeared as ancient as the city as it hiccupped toward me. I stepped off the curb and waved. An immense workman with a very shiny, very black mustache sprouting beneath wide nostrils filled the cab. My father had warned me about Italian men. Being one himself, he knew the subject. But I was going to see the Holy Father—what could happen?—and the truck was going my way. Before the driver could protest, I edged in beside him.
“Il Papa,”
I said in my rudimentary Italian.
“Vaticano! Subito, per favore!”

St. Peter's should be hard to miss, but as we putted along, I strained in vain for a glimpse of the Basilica. As I was trying to orient myself, the truck lurched to a stop.
“Ecco!”
The driver pointed. Directly ahead of us, a line of stone columns stretched horizontally in both directions as far as the eye could see. Too flustered to recognize what they were, I began again.
“Il Papa
…
”
By then, it was about two minutes to four, and I must have sounded frantic, because the driver, gesticulating broadly, shouted,
“Si, San Pietro in Vaticano. Eccolo!”

“Ma, scusi,”
I ventured tentatively.
“Eccolo,”
he shouted louder, flailing his arms.
“Pazza Americana!”
His words chased me from the cab and trailed after me—“St. Peter's. Right there! Crazy American!” And so I entered the line of stone columns—Bernini's illusory colonnade. It is the first of the many illusions that compose St. Peter's.

Most visitors approach from Via della Conciliazione, the ostentatious avenue built by Mussolini to appease the papacy and trumpet the grandeur of the Church of Rome. Because I approached from the side, the colonnade concealed the Basilica until the precise moment when I stepped through the Doric columns into the sublime surprise of St. Peter's Square. No photograph, film, or book of art treasures had prepared me for the physical experience of that first encounter. Twin fountains sprayed into the vastness of the piazza. Between them, the obelisk brought by the emperor Caligula from Heliopolis ascended into heaven like a pagan convert. Ahead, spreading horizontally across the piazza and rising to the crescendo of the dome, appeared the first church of Christendom.

 

St. Peter's dominates the landscape of Rome. Its cold stones and immense size should make the human scale inconsequential. Yet coming upon it from any angle—seen at dusk from the Pincio when the dome glows in the sunset, at dawn as a pale globe on the city skyline, or even from the cab of a sputtering three-wheeled truck—the pilgrim or the prodigal is overwhelmed with a feeling of coming home. This is its magnificence and its mystery.

Both a brilliant failure and an extraordinary feat of architecture and engineering, the Basilica of St. Peter was the most monumental undertaking of the High Renaissance, and the story of its construction is as convoluted and controversial as the Church it serves. It is a grand adventure. A clash of titans in cassocks and artists' smocks. A sprawling saga of glorious imagination, petty jealousy, magnanimous collaborations, and incalculable cost. Begun as a symbol of Christian unity, the Basilica would fracture the Church and ignite the Protestant Reformation.

 

The landmarks of a city reveal its architects. From Windsor to Buckingham, London landmarks carry the names of peers of the realm. New York is a city of industrialists—Rockefeller Center, Carnegie Hall, the Chrysler Building. Roman landmarks bear the names of papal families—the Borghese Gardens, Palazzo Farnese, Piazza Barberini. There is a symbiotic relationship between the city and the Church. The popes who built St. Peter's also built Rome. They commissioned the fountains and gardens, palaces and piazzas, and from the rubble of a vanished empire created a new city that would be a worthy setting for a Christian imperium.

St. Peter's was a gauge of urban progress. When the Basilica grew, Rome grew. When construction lagged, the city lagged. But gradually, under the aegis of these discerning, liberal patrons, Rome once again became “the rendezvous of the world.” The splendor of Rome and
la fabbrica di San Pietro
—“the building of St. Peter's”—are so entwined that the history of one cannot be told without the other.

Rome seems an eternal story. It began twenty-eight centuries ago in 753
B.C.
, when, according to legend, Romulus built a town on a hill by the Tiber River. The story stretches across civilizations to 49
B.C.
, when Julius Caesar, having conquered Gaul, returned home to invent a capital; to 27
B.C.
, when Augustus made the city of the Caesars the center of the known world, an imperial forum unparalleled in splendor and power. As Rome grew, successive emperors added to its beauty. Hadrian built the Pantheon, an astonishing circular temple to the gods; Nero finished his palace in gold; and in just five years, Vespasian and his son Titus built an amphitheater for gladiatorial games that was so huge it became known as the Colosseo
*
—the colossus. By the fourth century, Rome was a city of some eight hundred thousand, spreading across the fabled seven hills on the east bank of the Tiber.

A millennium later, the Christian popes would cart the stone of the pagan city across the river to build their Basilica, and this extraordinary merging of the sacred and the profane would become the centerpiece of a second Golden Age.

Conceived on a grand scale, constructed at an unimagined cost, created from a confusion of ideas, St. Peter's consumed the talents—and in some cases the genius—of the greatest artists of the age, among them Bramante, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Bernini. They built at the command or whim of a pontiff-patron, often tearing up one another's plans and imposing their own contending visions. Designs were added to, jettisoned, cobbled together.

The popes who commissioned them were not cast from a single mold. They included aesthetes and epicures, monks and militants, a pair of Medici princes, a burgher, a bastard, a bookworm, at least two poets, a scholar, and a swineherd. If their morals were questionable, their taste was impeccable. They coaxed and commanded the greatest work from the largest number of master-artists ever engaged on a single project.

At times, the endeavor seemed more like the stone of Sisyphus than the rock of Peter. But over the course of two centuries, they shepherded the Basilica through intrigues and assassination attempts, through schism and the Sack of Rome, through the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Inquisition. Their passion for the arts created a world unsurpassed for the exuberance of its ideas and its freedom of expression.

Building St. Peter's spanned thirty papacies. The popes who contributed the most—the implacable della Rovere, Julius II; the suave Farnese, Paul III; the rough-edged Peretti, Sixtus V; and the brilliant Barberini, Urban VIII—were all old men: iron-willed, impatient, imperial pontiffs with much to accomplish and little time.

As building proceeded, the convulsions of history became a backdrop that changed like a series of stage sets. Over the decades of construction, the Church evolved, and the world evolved with it and sometimes because of it. Nationalism and religious revolution, one impossible without the other, reshaped Europe, and
la fabbrica di San Pietro
entered the Italian lexicon as a way of describing a project with no end in sight.

Motives are rarely pure or purely wicked, but a muddle of ambition, ambivalence, misperception, and sometimes desperation. If our own motives are often unclear, the motives of a pope or a painter five hundred years ago are at best conjecture. I have tried not to ascribe or assume motive and suggest it only when I can quote someone's own words. Since even these can be misleading, proceed with a generous mind.

APRIL 1506

W
rapped in a lavender cloak the color of dusk, riding headlong against a sharp north wind, Michelangelo Buonarroti made his escape. He had waited in his workshop behind Piazza Rusticucci for the cover of night, then, slipping through Porta San Pellegrino, the northern gate of the Leonine City,
*
he galloped along Via Cassia into the dangerous countryside beyond Rome. Thieves, cutthroats, and ravenous wolves scavenged in the
campagna,
but those terrors seemed less sinister than the ones he was fleeing.

“Sell all the furniture to the Jews,” he had charged his servants, and, in his haste, left everything behind. He took only his chisels and hammer, the tools of his trade—some would say his genius. They clunked in his saddle pack as he rode. The only other sounds were the drumbeat of the hooves, the bay of a solitary wolf, and his own breath, sharp and quick.

The wind bit through his cloak, which was thin now and worn through in spots. It had been a gift from his first patron, Lorenzo de' Medici, truly “il Magnifico,” dead fifteen years. Now in his place was a new patron, Giuliano della Rovere, His Holiness Pope Julius II—
il pontefice terribile
.

More than a singular individual, more than an ambitious man, although he was both, Julius II was a force of nature, restlessly moving from one grand enterprise to another. He did everything in a big way. He funded the arts, flayed his challengers, and sinned conspicuously. Romans called him “il Terribilis” with a mixture of awe and approbation. The incredulous Venetian ambassador to the Vatican summed him up this way: “No one has any influence over him, and he consults few or none…. It is almost impossible to describe how strong and violent and difficult to manage he is…. Everything about him is on a magnificent scale, both his undertakings and his passions.”

In the final hours of April 17, the first Saturday after Easter in the year 1506, the moon was waning, and the glorious promise shattered. Work and future abandoned, Michelangelo raced through the night, stopping at wayside hostelries for a fresh horse, then galloping on, afraid to rest until he was beyond papal dominion.

Michelangelo was just thirty-one and already recognized as the most talented artist in Christendom, the sculptor of
David
and the
Pietà.
He had been the pope's favorite, commissioned to fashion an enormous funerary monument. It would be “the triumph of sculpture,” he promised, two stories of milk-white marble, carved with forty statues, each one several times larger than life. But an even grander enterprise had eclipsed all thoughts of the tomb.

At daybreak, Pope Julius would lay the foundation stone of a new Basilica of St. Peter that in size and scale would exceed the most monumental temples of the emperors. Nothing comparable had been ventured since the imperial days of Rome when a limitless supply of slave labor had made the wonders of the ancient world feasible.

Michelangelo would have no part in it.

 

In his
Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects,
Michelangelo's friend and student Giorgio Vasari
*
wrote, “The most benign Ruler of Heaven in His clemency turned His eyes to the earth, and having perceived the presumptuous vanity of men which is even further removed from truth than is darkness from light, and desirous to deliver us from such great errors, sent down to earth” Michelangelo Buonarroti.

In the tight, fractious circle of Renaissance artists, where papal patronage was coveted and rivalry was intense, there was no fair way to compete successfully against such a talent, and no easy way to handle him.

Michelangelo already had the dimensions of myth and the disposition of a martyr. He was the patent for the artistic temperament—rickly, uncompromising, egotistical, immodest, self-absorbed, and slipping toward paranoia. “It is only your devotion to the great work to which you have given yourself that makes you seem terrible to others,” a Florentine patron reassured him.

The sky was growing lighter when Michelangelo crossed into Tuscany, his home ground and beyond the jurisdiction of Julius. Still shaken by the anguished day, he stopped to sleep in a hostelry in the town of Poggibonsi, still twenty miles from Florence. He was slouched over a wooden refectory table, its surface scarred and stained, with a heel of bread and a flagon of wine, when he heard the stomp of boots and the clamor of demanding voices.

Like the Roman emperors, Pope Julius had eyes and ears everywhere, and Michelangelo had barely left the walls of the city behind when papal horsemen were in pursuit. With a sudden rush of wind and flash of light, the door of the inn burst open. Five papal couriers surrounded him, and in the name of Pope Julius II of Liguria, commanded him to return with them to the Vatican. They carried a personal message from “His Blessed Holiness.”

Breaking the wax seals—the crossed keys of the Apostolic See and the della Rovere oak tree, the pope's family crest—the captain barked out the message: “From the Most Holy Father: Return to Rome under threat of punishment.”

The words were as portentous as the snarl of Cerberus, but Michelangelo could disobey with impunity because he was on the soil of the Signoria of Florence. There were rude exchanges, some shoving, and more threats, before he agreed to an uneasy compromise. He would write an answer to Julius.

The innkeeper brought pen, ink, and parchment, a coarse sheet, not worthy of its recipient, but there was nothing else. The table was cleared, a fresh lamp lighted. Michelangelo loosened his cloak to free his arm, wiped his hands on his breeches to clean them of crumbs and sweat, and flexed his fingers, stiff from gripping the reins for so many hours. Bending over the parchment, he scratched out each word: “Most Blessed Father…”

For the sculptor of the giant
David,
almost seventeen feet tall and carved from a single marble block, his letters were small and cramped. After a perfunctory request for pardon, he wrote with indignation and wounded pride, in effect serving warning to Julius “that he would never again return to the sacred presence, since the pope had caused him to be driven away like a criminal, that his faithful service had not deserved such treatment, and that his Holiness should look elsewhere for someone to serve him.”

Later, Michelangelo would hint of a nefarious plot against him: “If I were to remain in Rome, my own tomb would have come before the pope's,” he would write. “This is the reason for my sudden departure.”

 

Within the walls of the Vatican, boulders of abandoned marble loomed like snowy mountains in the shadowed piazza. Bonfires burned and torches flared in the windswept night. Pickaxes swung, cracking ancient stones. Shovels clanged against broken skulls. The laborers sweated in the chillness, enclosed in twenty-foot walls of earth, and digging deeper, through the gardens of Agrippina and the stones of her son Caligula's Circus, through the necropolis of ancient Rome and the killing fields of the emperor Nero.

The piers of the new Basilica of St. Peter would be so massive that each foundation trench had to be twenty-five feet deep. Huge baskets were lowered into the pit by a series of pulleys, filled with dirt, raised, emptied, lowered, and filled again. The laborers dug in a steady rhythm, displacing layer upon layer of history. Ager Vaticanus was not virgin soil.

Named for the
vati,
or “soothsayers,” who augured there in classical times, the Vatican field lay on the west bank of the Tiber River, between the hills of Monte Mario to the north and the Gianicolo to the south. Since it was located across the river and well outside the main city, the Vatican had been a convenient place for Roman emperors to bury their dead and slaughter converts to the radical messianic cult of Jesus of Nazareth.

In the first, inky morning hours, the weary laborers drew up the last baskets of dirt and climbed out of the trench. Shovels slung over their shoulders, they filed home across the Ponte Sant'Angelo, their sweat polluting the air. The wisteria that spread in wild abandon over the seven hills of Rome should have been sending its sweet perfume across the city, but this was a nasty April. The wind rushed south from the bony Apennines, churning the murky water of the Tiber. It flattened the tall grasses of the marshes, incubator for the malaria virus that swept through Rome every year or so, thinning the population, and blew away the fetid odors of garbage, fish bones, and offal that made the Vatican Borgo as malodorous as a cesspool.

Yards of canvas like the sails of a Roman galley billowed over the excavated earth. The wind slapped the canvas and swirled through the construction yard by the papal palace, raising a fine white dust that turned the site into a flour bowl. At first light, April 18, 1506, a ribbon of cardinals began snaking across the cluttered yard. Trailed by an entourage of secretaries and servants, they picked their way around the ancient stones, pilfered from the Colosseum on the pope's orders, around the mounds of travertine carted from quarries in Tivoli and Michelangelo's boulders of milk-white marble.

By dawn, every prominent figure in Rome had converged on the site. Cesare Borgia, the vicious bastard son of the previous pope, was in the audience, feigning goodwill. Rumor was that Julius held him hostage. There was a contingent from Florence: the ambassador and wit, Niccolò Machiavelli; and the heirs of Lorenzo il Magnifico, Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici and his bastard cousin Giulio. Both would become deplorable popes. A third future pope, the elegant young monsignor Alessandro Farnese, who would become Paul III, attended with his mistress. Julius's current favorites—the banker Agostino Chigi, on his way to becoming the richest man in Rome, and the architect Donato Bramante, who was designing the new Basilica—occupied places of honor beside members of the pope's family, his youngest daughter, Felice, and his cardinal-cousin Raffaele Riario, the chief financial officer of the Church.

To the blare of trumpets and the ring of applause, a line of thirty-five cardinals processed to the lip of the excavation pit. The wind whipped their crimson cassocks and swirled through the crowd, carrying gossip with the dust. The renegade artist Buonarroti had absconded in the night like a criminal, his contract unfulfilled, his work in limbo. Pope Julius was in a fury, his day of glory spoiled by the sculptor's surreptitious flight.

Behind the cardinals, carried aloft in the
sedia gestatoria,
Julius towered above the crowd like a thunderhead and tossed commemorative coins into upstretched hands. He was sixty-three years old, an old man by Cinquecento standards, but he was built like a bull—powerful neck, powerful shoulders—and his tendency was to charge like a bull, trampling impediments and opponents alike. He never retreated except to regroup, to gain time and disarm his enemies. He charmed. He finessed. He even managed an occasional moment of humility, if it assured that his will would prevail. But he was never deterred.

As bearers lowered the chair by the lip of the pit, he stepped out, shrugging violently to shake the dust off his cope. The heavy brocade embroidered with gold thread was beginning to look like a baker's smock. Two masons descended first, followed by two cardinals, and then the pope, grim-faced. He climbed down the ladder carefully, his ringed fingers grasping the rungs, encumbered by the heavy clothing, the weighty tiara, descending lower, lower yet. The Ager Vaticanus was marshy, the earth in the pit damp, the air close.

As Julius disappeared into the trough, the crowd pressed forward for a better view. Dirt flew, striking his tiara. For a terrifying moment, he thought the sides would cave in and bury him. The foundation pit would become his tomb, not the magnificent sarcophagus abandoned without permission the night before by the impudent Buonarroti.

The trench was “like a chasm in the earth,” the papal master of ceremonies, Paris de Grassis, recorded in his journal, “and as there was much anxiety felt lest the ground should give way, Pope Julius thundered out to those above not to come too near the edge.”

An urn holding a dozen commemorative medals, signifying the twelve apostles, was lowered into the pit. Cast of bronze and gilded, the medals featured on one side an image of the pope and on the other a picture of the new church. Julius placed them in an opening dug beneath the spot where the foundation stone would fit—a block of marble, “four palms wide, two broad, and three fingers thick”—the first stone of the new Basilica of St. Peter.

 

Looking back across centuries of checkered history, across the lapses in Christianity and compassion, across the bloody crusades and Inquisition, it seems more than happenstance that, of his twelve apostles, Christ chose Peter to lead his new church.

Simon Peter, so clearly flawed, seemed to be the least among the disciples. He lacked the poetry of John, the curiosity of Thomas, even the boldness of Judas. He was ignorant, impulsive, unreliable, and boastful. He was one of us. He shared our ebullience and our errors. He was the first to swear his undying faith, and the first to fail. The first to volunteer to watch through the night with Christ, and the first to fall asleep. Even after he became the first pope, it was said that Jesus caught him on the Via Appia fleeing from Nero's dangerous city.

On the shoulders of this empathetic, eminently fallible man, Christ placed the future of the Church, and the humanity of Peter, that uneasy balance of sinner and saint, has sullied and sustained his Church ever since. A communion of sinners who would be saints, led by the most mortal of men—such is the enduring strength of the Roman Catholic Church. That boundless acceptance of a willing spirit foiled time and again by weak flesh has confounded those who have prematurely prophesied its end, from the unforgiving Luther to the unyielding evangelicals.