R. A. Scotti (21 page)

If Marcellus had hoped to be a peacemaker, the attempt failed utterly. Michelangelo delivered a fierce rebuttal:

Although the next four popes reaffirmed Michelangelo's mandate, the pace of construction slowed after Paul III's death. The river of gold that had been flowing through Spain to the Vatican since the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella dried up. In 1556, when the wall of the drum had reached the height of the windowsills, construction was suspended for lack of funds. It did not resume until 1561. Although the work of quarrying and transporting the travertine for the drum continued, Michelangelo lost five critical years. It was a lonely, despairing time. “I have lost my memory and my wits,” he wrote to Vasari, but “if I quit…I would make a few thieves happy and would be the cause of the building's ruin, and perhaps even of having it shut up forever.”

When work finally resumed, Michelangelo was half-crippled, his body weakened by age and illness. He needed help now to mount and dismount, but he still rode to work on a docile, slow-gaited chestnut pony, plodding to the same site he had once fled. Although the young man who had galloped away from the Basilica swathed in a lavender cape was unrecognizable, his passion was undiminished.

At eighty-six, Michelangelo was still waging art—obdurate, intransigent, unforgiving, sparing neither himself nor others. Gradually, the new church began to emerge on his terms, according to his vision. The south crossing was almost finished and work was under way on the north wall.

Ambitious young architects carped that he was impossible to work with. He was too old. His faculties were failing, and the building was suffering as a result. But he refused to go gently until, as he wrote to Vasari, St. Peter's is “brought to completion, so that it could not be changed and given a different form…. I am at the eleventh hour, and not a thought arises in me that does not have death carved within it; but God grant that I keep him waiting in suspense for a few years yet.”

Michelangelo's method of building was very personal. Instead of drawing to scale or giving the masons precise measurements, he made small clay models and sketched individual parts—a window, say, or a cornice—to capture the effect he wanted to achieve. Sometimes he had sections made first in wood and positioned exactly so that he could see how they would look. In his last years, age and illness kept him from the work site, and misunderstandings multiplied. When a master mason miscalculated the vaulting of the south apse, a large section had to be destroyed at great expense. “If one could die of shame and suffering, I should not be alive,” Michelangelo said. Unable to cope any longer with the multiple difficulties and frustrations inherent in such a monumental project, he agreed to the appointment of a foreman.

Michelangelo outlasted every contemporary, every rival, or would-be rival, and went on working until the very end, completing the drum and part of the attic. He wanted, at the very least, to bring the dome to a point of construction where his design could not be changed.

Michelangelo died on February 18, 1564, fifty-one years almost to the day after Julius. He was in his eighty-ninth year and still struggling for the unattainable. Inscribed on a memorial raised in his honor in the Church of Santi Apostoli are the words:
Tanto ho-mini nullum par elogium
—“No praise is sufficient for so great a man.”

Michelangelo was as powerful in death as he had been in life. His spirit and his Basilica lived on, protected by every successive pope as if it were a Church dogma.

Pius IV, a nasty man by all accounts (when he died angry Romans beheaded his statue), felt so bereft by Michelangelo's death that he could not bring himself to name a replacement for five months. He finally appointed Pirro Ligorio, one of the younger architects who had made the old man's final months so miserable. Ligorio was given the firm stipulation to follow Michelangelo's design exactly. When he deviated from it, Pius replaced him with Jacopo Barozzi, called Vignola, and gave him the same commandment.

Although Vignola disapproved of Michelangelo's unorthodoxy, he followed the master plan, completing the attic of the drum, where great garlands are now carved. Vignola also vaulted the north apse, and may have begun work on the minor domes.

 

It is one of the ironies of art history that the commissions Michelangelo rejected initially and was badgered, cajoled, and battered into accepting are his masterworks: the ceiling and altar wall of the Sistine Chapel and the Basilica of St. Peter.

His memory was so revered and his talent so intimidating that for more than twenty years, no architect or pope dared to tamper with his Basilica plan or raise his dome, until a self-taught swine-herd took control of the Church.

T
he consecration of Sixtus V was held in the open atrium of Constantine's church, with Michelangelo's unfinished dome casting a wide shadow behind it. Sixtus V bowed his head to receive the jeweled miter of Peter and extended his left hand to accept the shepherd's crook. He leaned heavily on the crozier and felt the cool of the golden shaft, the crude crook transformed through more than fifteen hundred years of Christianity into a symbol of power. As Bishop of Rome, Sixtus would use that power to the utmost, undaunted either by the lamented genius or his unfinished masterwork. As ambitious as Nicholas V, as redoubtable as Julius II, as shrewd as Paul III, Sixtus would leave his mark on Rome more indelibly than any other pope of the Counter-Reformation. He lived as austerely as a monk and dreamed extravagantly.

One of his first acts was to attempt the impossible. Since the imperial days of Rome, an Egyptian obelisk had stood in what had once been the Circus of Caligula. The obelisk had posed a nagging problem for every pontiff whose ambitions turned to a new Basilica. Its position at the south side of the old St. Peter's was a distraction, drawing the eye away from the main entrance (see Vatican plan, page 56). In Nicholas V's utopian plan for a papal Palatine, the obelisk was positioned where it is today, in the center of the piazza in front of the Basilica. But 320 tons of granite rising eighty-three feet in the air are not easily dislodged, let alone moved, and no engineer could figure out how to reposition it.

Michelangelo said flatly that it could not be done. Bramante, who always had ideas to spare, tried to finesse the question. He presented Julius II with a novel solution. Instead of moving the obelisk to align with the new Basilica, align the Basilica with the obelisk, a far simpler task. It required only repositioning the main entrance to face south and repositioning St. Peter's tomb accordingly. What seemed a clever and practical solution to the architect caused a papal explosion. Julius quashed the plan unequivocally. Bramante would accommodate Peter. Peter would not accommodate Bramante. And so the obelisk problem was accepted as insoluble, until the unmovable object met the irresistible force of Sixtus V.

In the early part of the first century, Caligula brought the granite monolith from Heliopolis to mark the site of his imperial circus. According to Pliny the Elder, it took twenty thousand slaves to lift the obelisk to its base, where it withstood the numerous barbarian invasions. Romans came to believe that the ashes of the original Julius, the first of the Caesars, were preserved in the bronze ball at the top.

 

Sixtus V did not suffer fools, excuses, or imponderables. If he wanted something to happen, he found the talent and the funds to realize it. The more impossible the feat, the more insurmountable the challenge, the more adamant he was to achieve it.

In 1585, the first year of his pontificate, the indomitable Sixtus announced a competition to transfer Cleopatra's Needle from the south side of the Basilica to the center of St. Peter's Square. More than three hundred architects, engineers, scientists, and savants from all over Europe submitted plans; some even suggested a miraculous intervention.

The winner was the pope's incorrigible favorite, Domenico Fontana. Like the Sangallos, the Fontanas were a building family whose name and livelihood are linked inextricably to the construction of St. Peter's. Domenico, his brother Giovanni, and his grandnephew Carlo Maderno made
la fabbrica di San Pietro
the family business. A small, wiry man who seemed to be in perpetual motion, Fontana had a sharp nose, long eyebrows like porch awnings, and a neatly trimmed beard. He was both an adept engineer and a clever showman. Instead of simply outlining his idea on paper, he rigged a model and demonstrated his plan to the pope. To show how confident he was of success, Fontana offered to pay all the expenses himself in advance.

Sixtus, who was so tightfisted that he kept the Vatican treasury in a locked strongbox in Castel Sant'Angelo, was delighted. He gave Fontana full power to requisition whatever materials he needed: block pulleys, iron banding, nails, hammers, mallets, beasts of burden, provisions, etc.

Fontana spent seven months in preparation. No detail was insignificant. He ordered quantities of hemp woven into miles and miles of rope, razed the small buildings that crammed the quarter-mile distance from the obelisk to the square, and built in their place an elevated track. Formed of embanked soil shored up with wooden beams, it ran from the monolith to the square.

Fontana studied the writings of the imperial historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who tells in detail how to raise an obelisk, and read Pliny's
Natural History,
particularly the thirty-sixth book, which describes how the ancient Egyptians moved the obelisks down the Nile:

Inspired by Pliny's description, Fontana devised a land-raft called the
strascini
. It resembled a series of flatbeds on wooden wheels. The eighty-three-foot monolith would lie on its side on the contraption and be transported along the runway to the square.

Fontana ordered seventy enormous winches to hoist the granite monolith from the base where it had stood for more than fifteen hundred years. Made from rough-hewn, carved oak, each winch had an open-box base with a spindle in the center for winding the rope. The plaited hemp, two feet thick and 350 feet long, was rigged from the obelisk and wound onto the winches. Eight square holes were carved into the upper portion of the spindle, and turning poles, cut from chestnut trees, were fitted into them. The poles were six feet long to give the men and the horses leverage. Each winch required two horses and ten men to work it.

By late March, a castlelike structure was rising beside the obelisk. Made of oak bars so immense that it took two pairs of oxen to haul each one, the wooden tower was secured with thirteen tons of iron. The obelisk itself was wrapped in straw, then crated in wooden planks lashed together with iron brackets. As the intricate preparations neared completion, a date was set.

Very early, on the morning of April 30, 1586, Pope Sixtus celebrated an open-air mass for Fontana and his crew. Then 907 men, 70 winches, and 145 horses assembled at the site, where a throng had gathered to watch. Spectators crowded on the rooftops of nearby houses and covered the Vatican hill. A gallows stood close by the scaffold tower, erected as a warning to anyone who uttered a sound. Sixtus had decreed that no one speak on pain of death during the difficult operation.

“
Benedicat vos omnipotens Deus
.” As his voice rose in blessing, the crowd stilled. Fontana mounted a rostrum to direct the operation. Men and horses assumed their positions. At the sound of a single trumpet blare, they began to move. Whips cracked. Ropes creaked. The winches started to turn. An eyewitness reported, “The wheels made such a noise that one might have thought the very earth was going to split and the sky above to open.”

At the first complete revolution, the granite monolith jerked from its ancient base. The winches turned again, and again. By the twelfth revolution, the obelisk was dangling ten feet in the air. The immense mass, which weighed as much as forty bull elephants, was lifting slowly when suddenly it stopped, all motion suspended. The ropes were giving way.

In the terrible silence, the gallows rope swung like a pendulum. No sound was uttered. Then a voice cried out, “Acqua alle funi!”—“Water the ropes!” Fontana followed the advice. With the ropes wetted, the obelisk began to lift again. Separated from its base with wedges, it was set into vertical position within the tower. Finally, an hour before sunset, as the earth trembled and the tower creaked, the obelisk was lowered onto the
strascini
without a scratch.

The man who had dared to shout was a sailor from Bordighera, a village on the Italian Riviera replete with palm trees. Sixtus, in gratitude, granted Bordighera the privilege of furnishing the Easter palms to St. Peter's in perpetuity. Every year in the week before Palm Sunday, a barge filled with palms drifts down the Tiber from Bordighera.

 

The obelisk lay on its side in the piazza throughout the summer months. While he waited for the cooler weather, Fontana had the tower dismantled and hauled piece by piece to the square, where it was reassembled. He built a new base in the center of the piazza, sealing within it three caskets of relics, and removed the ball from the top of the obelisk. Although no imperial ashes spilled out, Sixtus exorcised the pagan spirits anyway and consecrated the monolith to the Holy Cross. The ball was replaced with a cross.

At dawn on Wednesday, September 10, after the worst summer heat had passed, the obelisk was raised in St. Peter's Square. So many Romans turned out to watch that the piazza had to be cordoned off and grandstands set up around the perimeter. After fifty-two full turns of the winch, with bells, trumpets, and Palestrina's Vatican choir providing musical accompaniment, the obelisk was set down in the center of the piazza in front of what remained of the original basilica.

With guns firing from the ramparts of Castel Sant'Angelo and the crowd cheering, the workmen carried a jubilant Fontana around the piazza on their shoulders. That night around the obelisk, he gave a banquet for the workmen, and sent each one home with bread, cheese, ham, and two bottles of wine.

For achieving the impossible, Domenico Fontana was made Cavaliere della Guglia—“knight of the obelisk”—and given a pension of 2,000 ducats. His operation—which cost a total of 37,975 ducats—is still considered one of the boldest achievements in engineering technology. Fontana had reckoned the weight of the monolith with extraordinary precision and calculated that the equipment needed to raise it had to be of equivalent weight.

Attentive to every detail to the last, he had had a horse harnessed and waiting at the Leonine wall just in case the operation failed.