R. A. Scotti (20 page)

T
he old man shuffling back to center stage was as combative and uncompromising as he had been when Julius and Bramante relegated him to the impossible ceiling. Michelangelo had resisted then, and he resisted even more forcefully when Paul asked him to complete the Basilica.

He had never supervised a big construction yard like St. Peter's. He had never worked for a committee, and he was leery of the Fabbrica. Organized by Pope Clement, it had gained authority and influence in collusion with Sangallo. Michelangelo dismissed it as a factory intent on enriching itself.

Paul pressed. Michelangelo made excuses. Paul pressured. Michelangelo refused. The whims of popes infuriated him. Paul flattered, insisted, wheedled, commanded. He was willing to conciliate, but just so far.

A century after Nicholas V imagined a new Basilica and almost four decades after Julius II laid the foundation stone, Michelangelo agreed “with infinite regret” to become chief architect, sculptor, and painter to the Vatican. Julius had been seventy when he died, and Michelangelo would be seventy when, having finally conceded defeat and let go of the tomb, he agreed to take over Julius's grand enterprise.

Michelangelo had reasserted the supremacy of the Church with the
Last Judgment.
Now he would renew the simple faith of Peter in its grandest construction. Under Antonio the Fabbrica had corrupted a glorious expression of Christian faith into an ostentatious display of vanity. The Basilica had become a work of show. He would make it once again a work of faith, affirming again the words on the foundation-stone medal—“Not for ours, Lord, but for your glory.”

Michelangelo complained that the work of St. Peter's had been imposed on him as a penance by God and refused to accept payment.
*
It was an act of conscience and maybe a grudging contrition. He would build the first church of Christendom for the glory of God, and, perhaps, the memory of Julius—but on one condition: that he would have full and complete authority, responsible to no one except the pope himself.

After a lifetime wrestling with pontiffs and prelates over the doomed tomb of Julius through charges and countercharges, slavish labor repeatedly halted, aborted, and diminished, Michelangelo insisted on setting his own unequivocal terms. He refused to work on St. Peter's unless Paul put in writing that he, Michelangelo Buonarroti, born in Florence in the year 1475, would have absolute, complete, and total authority, and that it could be altered or overridden only by the Holy Father himself.

What Michelangelo demanded, Paul III decreed. He issued two official, apostolic letters, one in January 1547 and a second in October 1549, granting Michelangelo complete authority
motu proprio
—“of his own accord.” Reluctantly, grudgingly, and as he described it, “
contro mia voglia con grandissima forza messo da papa Paolo nella fabbrica di San Pietro
”—“building St. Peter's against my will and with the greatest force exerted by Pope Paul”—Michelangelo turned to the Basilica. He had full authority, and he used it like a bludgeon.

The officials of the Fabbrica assumed that construction would continue according to Sangallo's model and at a comparably high cost. They may have expected an elderly man mellowed by the years, whom they could manipulate. Or an impractical artist who wouldn't bother with such details as supplies and costs. They certainly didn't anticipate Michelangelo.

He was a singular talent and a singularly difficult individual—crabby, suspicious, beatific, inspired—who always wanted to do everything himself. In a perfect world, he would have chosen the supplies, quarried the travertine, cut and placed the stones, built the scaffolding, slaked the lime, mixed the cement, and carved the cornices. No detail was too mundane to consider. No idea was too challenging to confront.

Michelangelo rejected the dark designs of Sangallo. Antonio's model was an elaborate, overwrought conception—a mistaken notion that more ornate meant more majestic. It had “so many projections, spires and bits of pieces,” Michelangelo complained, “that it looked more like a German work than a good antique style or a beautiful charming modern manner.”

After what the German troops had wreaked on Rome, the comparison was incendiary, but his criticism did not stop there. Antonio's Basilica was too big, too osten$tious, and too expensive. In his always-colorful hyperbole, Michelangelo said, “If it were attempted, one would sooner have been able to hope to see the last day of the world than St. Peter's finished.”

According to his harsh, always dramatic judgment, Antonio had bastardized Bramante's design, mangled and desecrated it:

Michelangelo had been a lifelong friend of Giuliano da Sangallo, but he had little use for Antonio. He found the nephew artistically dull and personally arrogant, his building solid but uninspired. Added to his personal distaste and artistic disdain were Michelangelo's suspicions that Antonio's cronies had been fleecing the Church, more intent on lining their own pockets than in glorifying God with a new Basilica. He accused
la setta Sangallesca
—the Sangallo set—of giving suppliers kickbacks, accepting shoddy materials, and padding the accounts.

On November 30, 1546, he fired Antonio's two closest collaborators, saying that he didn't want anyone who had worked for Sangallo to work for him (“
che non voleva…homo et officiale e ministro che fossero stato al tempo del Sangallo
”). The next day, he assembled the officials of the Fabbrica and announced that he was in sole control of the construction yard and would answer only to the Holy Father.

Late in January, when his nomination was officially ratified, Michelangelo put the Fabbrica on further notice. There would be no more stealing or fraudulent acts. Special arrangements with the quarries were forbidden, and all supplies would go through him. He did not mince words:

 

When Michelangelo came to St. Peter's, integral parts of the Basilica were fixed. The monumental crossing that defined the scale of the edifice and the size of the dome was complete. The south arm of the Basilica was finished and vaulted, fixing the size of the transept, and the east arm was partially finished. Working within those constraints, he made a clay model in just fifteen days, compared with Antonio's five years, and for a fraction of the cost—87 ducats, compared with the four-to-six-thousand-ducat cost of Antonio's model. As much as possible, given how far construction had progressed, Michelangelo returned to the essence of Bramante's original plan.

Michelangelo had a long memory for treacheries, real or imagined. All these years later, he still blamed Bramante for the failed tomb, yet he recognized the purity of the architect's design. Personal animosities were incidental beside artistic merit. Michelangelo had not forgiven the man but he admired the artist.

Bramante was “as skillful in architecture as anyone from the time of the ancients up to now,” he wrote. “The first stone of St. Peter's was laid by him, not as an obscure or confused plan, but in accordance with a design which is clear, comprehensive, and luminous. Those who departed from his thought left truth behind.”

Michelangelo's model stripped away Antonio's extraneous additions—bell towers, atrium, ambulatories, and chapels—and returned the Basilica to a central dome rising over a pure Greek cross. He shortened the barrel-vaulted arms and freed the cross from the inscribed square in which Bramante had set it, in effect eliminating the perimeter and creating a diamond shape, each point being an apse, the semicircular end of a main arm.

Michelangelo repeated Bramante's colossal order of Corinthian pilasters on the exterior and gave the outer walls the contours of a sculpture. Like the
David
that the young Michelangelo hewed from a huge block of marble, the exterior of St. Peter's seemed truly the rock of Peter, chiseled from a single stone.
*

His Basilica was smaller than Bramante's or Antonio's, and stark. He imagined an interior and exterior of bare, unembellished stone. After the tumult the Church had endured, out of years of incoherence and confusion, Michelangelo created unity. As Vasari wrote, “He reduced St. Peter's to its simplest form and greatest power.”

Not everyone saw it with that same clarity. When Michelangelo began tearing down Antonio's ambulatories, the Fabbrica deputies complained to the pope. His architect was squandering Basilica funds by demolishing work that was already complete. Paul supported Michelangelo, replying that he was saving three times what he was losing.

Backed by the full authority of the pope, Michelangelo followed his own schema, as secretive about St. Peter's as he had been about the Sistine ceiling. He never disclosed his ideas, only making blueprints of a specific section as construction was ready to start. Like Bramante, he was constantly revising, his design continuously in flux.

Although the dome had dominated the plans of Bramante and every architect who followed him, the engineering challenge it posed was so daunting that no one had attempted to raise it. Michelangelo played with the proportions of each part—base, drum, attic, cupola, and lantern—and the ratio of one to the other. As consumed by the dome as Bramante had been, he wrote to Florence for the specifications of Brunelleschi's cathedral dome, built a century before.

While he was experimenting with designs, Michelangelo took a number of practical measures to fortify Bramante's structure and disperse the weight of the dome. Antonio had strengthened the piers. Michelangelo reinforced them further and sank well-holes under their foundations, which he filled with concrete. He thickened both the piers and the exterior walls, shortening the distance between them. This reduced the breadth of the crossing from 69 to about 58.5 feet. Michelangelo also checked the strength of the Basilica foundations and devised a series of ramps so that mules could haul loads of material up to the various stages of scaffolding. These linked walkways allowed men and supplies to easily reach each level of construction.

Once these practical steps were complete, Michelangelo began building a circular base, about 12.5 feet high and 28.5 feet thick, for the drum to rest on. A passageway almost six feet wide ran through it, forming an external wall eight feet thick and an internal wall approximately fifteen feet thick. Narrow passageways, slightly less than three feet wide, cut through the interior wall, making stairwells to connect four spiral staircases within the wall of the drum.

Bramante's drum was similar to the tympanum of his Tempietto—a circle of evenly spaced columns with a continuous entablature. In Michelangelo's drum, colossal fifty-foot paired Corinthian pilasters frame sixteen windows and continue the unified order of the Basilica. The windows are large to flood the crossing with light and are designed to alternate with a triangular or half-circle eyebrow. More than sixty-five feet in height and more than six hundred feet in circumference, the drum is built of cemented masonry faced with thin slabs of travertine.

Michelangelo intended to carve statues to stand on the drum, forming a circle around the cupola. Although Carlo Fontana would revive the idea many years later, it was never carried out. With Bernini's “cloud of witnesses” over the colonnades and Maderno's giant Christ and his apostles commanding the façade, more statues would have been overkill.

 

Still a firebrand defending truth and beauty, Michelangelo built with undiminished fervor—and received the unwavering support of a succession of popes. Although repeatedly challenged by younger architects and Fabbrica administrators, he would not concede a pilaster, a cornice, or a column. For seventeen years, through five pontificates, he battled attempts to dislodge him or dilute his authority. Paul III and his successors—Julius III, Marcellus II, Paul IV, and Pius IV—repudiated all efforts to interfere with the impolitic artist. They ratified and extended his authority, and each remained true to his word.

Julius III, who followed Paul, not only renewed Michelangelo's mandate, he reinforced it with the threat of interdiction against anyone who dared “to reform or change in the least, at any time or in any way, the model and design made by you.” Julius would not even listen to a complaint against Michelangelo.

His successor, Marcellus II, tried to be more conciliatory. In an appearance of evenhandedness, he allowed the Fabbrica a hearing to vent its grievances. The officials rebuked him with bitterness: