R. A. Scotti (22 page)

M
oving the obelisk encouraged Sixtus to undertake other seemingly impossible projects. He not only demanded Herculean tasks, he believed they could be accomplished. His own experience had given him confidence that every obstacle could be overcome.

Born in poverty, Felice Peretti had herded pigs in the inhospitable mountain passes of the Marches, but there was no doubt in his mind that he was destined for greatness. His father, a gardener in Grottamare on the Adriatic Sea, believed that God had ordained his son to be pope one day. If the elder Peretti had understood the questionable moral character of so many of the popes over the past century, he might have prayed for a different destiny for his son. But he was a simple, God-fearing man, and the pope was the Vicar of Christ. What higher, more hallowed goal could he set for his boy.

The gardener's faith was based on a voice that spoke to him one night in a dream: “Rise, Peretti, and go seek thy wife, for a son is about to be born to thee and to whom thou shalt give the name of Felice since he one day will be the greatest among mortals!”

The story could only have been reported by Sixtus himself. Whether truth or biography invented to explain his name, which means “happy” or “fortunate,” Sixtus never intended to spend his life herding pigs. He must have been a precocious boy, because he taught himself to read, and when he was a teenager, he joined the Franciscan order.

The life of a humble mendicant would never have satisfied him. Early on, he earned some renown as a preacher and reformer and came to the attention of Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus. Encouraged by the Jesuit, Felice Peretti advanced steadily in the Church. He became grand inquisitor, general of the Franciscan order, a cardinal, and in 1585, pope.

Sixtus was the quintessential self-made man. He invented a Horatio Alger story for himself with the added fillip of divine intervention. Perhaps it was true, or perhaps he came to believe his own fiction. He certainly behaved as if he had a divine mandate to bring the Church through its crisis of faith and rescue Rome from the wreck of the Sack. His goal was not art but a vibrant, workable city.

Admired and feared in equal measure, Sixtus was a harsh, unpolished man possessed of raw ambition and practical good sense. Today he would make a formidable CEO. He scowls from his portrait, his face pinched, his expression vigilant. He certainly doesn't appear endearing. Small sharp eyes like lead beads and a nose as hooked as a hawk's give a predatory cast to his face. It takes no imagination to picture him as the grand inquisitor mercilessly grilling an uncontrite apostate. His portrait is bordered by a series of small rectangles. Each box celebrates one of his achievements.

Sixtus was both the spiritual authority of a divided church, struggling to regain its conviction and its conscience, and the civil authority of a broken city. Fifty years after the Sack, Rome still suffered from a ruined infrastructure, poor transportation, pervasive lawlessness, astronomically high rates of joblessness and crime, and no clean water. Sixtus took on not one but all of these intractable problems.

Neither the utopian dreams of Nicholas, the imperial ambitions of Julius, nor the aesthetic sensibility of Paul impelled him. He may have been history's first modern manager, because his only motivation was a desire to get the job done. Efficiency, productivity, economy, accountability, and results were his prime concerns. To suppose that even a fraction of what he demanded could be achieved seemed absurd, yet in his brief, five-year pontificate, Sixtus did it all.

He began with lawlessness. According to an old custom, each pope on his consecration day issued a blanket pardon to prisoners in the jails of Rome. Sixtus would have none of it. A law-and-order man from the outset, he was as impatient with the crime that plagued the city as he was with the dirty water that bred disease, the rutted paths that passed for streets, and the unfinished hulk of the Basilica that resembled another ruin. Instead of pardoning prisoners, he announced, “While I live, every criminal must die,” and ordered one sentence for all offenders: beheading.

To solve the chronic unemployment that bred crime, Sixtus proposed turning the Colosseum into a wool factory “to provide work for all the poor in Rome and to save them from begging in the streets.” Every workman would have a workshop on the ground floor and a free two-room apartment with an open loggia above it. If he had carried his plan through, the Colosseum might have been the first urban mall.

To facilitate transportation, Sixtus laid out the broad avenues that define the modern city. Slicing through the hills and fields of the ancient town, he built a network of roads that opened up the surrounding hills for housing, improved access into the city, and linked the important basilicas for the convenience of the pilgrims who were beginning to return to Rome. To ease congestion in the overcrowded inner city, he offered tax inducements to move to the newly opened exurbs.

The engineer who realized most of the pope's projects was Domenico Fontana. He redrew the map of the city for Sixtus, built a new papal palace at St. John Lateran and a new library in the Vatican, drained the unhealthy marshes, and piped in fresh water. The vaunted aqueducts of the Romans had crumbled years before. Fontana rebuilt them with twenty-two miles of overhead channels and underground pipes. Extending from Palestrina to the center of Rome, they fed twenty-seven fountains.

Out of the mouldering wreckage of the Sack, Sixtus raised a metropolis. No town planner until possibly Robert Moses four centuries later was more ruthless or more successful. Tearing down what he termed “ugly antiquities” if they interfered with his modernization plans, he transformed Rome from a Renaissance town to a Baroque city. Fifty years after being pillaged, burned, and humiliated, the city was reborn as a resplendent spiritual and political center.

Whether the concern was civil or sacred, Sixtus's approach was the same. Equal parts urban planner and reformer, he established the outlines and institutions of the modern Vatican. He reorganized the Curia into the fifteen congregations that remain the basic administration of the Church today, and he reformed the College of Cardinals, fixing the number of members. To spread the gospel of the Church, he established the Vatican printing press, and to protect its truth, he unleashed the full fury of the Inquisition.

Sixtus was sixty-five when he became pope, not a felicitous man in spite of his name, but intrepid. His rough edges were on display. He was uncouth, blunt, and even more impatient than Julius. His health was poor from years of poverty. He had much to accomplish, and he knew that time was not on his side.

Generally considered the father of modern Rome, Sixtus was the last of the great reforming popes of the Counter-Reformation and the last in the lineage of iron-willed old men, without time or patience, who pushed St. Peter's toward completion.

A
monastic quietude pervades the Basilica of St. Paul's Outside the Walls. It is a soothing sanctuary apart from the rush of the city. In June 1588, morning just breaking and the even cadence of monks chanting the matins seeping from the distant recesses of the choir, Giacomo della Porta and his assistant Domenico Fontana spread a huge drawing on the pavement.

Della Porta had been the chief architect of St. Peter's for a dozen years when Sixtus V became pope. He had started as a sculptor under Michelangelo, shaping stucco reliefs, and had built in his teacher's shadow. Michelangelo had taken on a number of major projects during his final years, and della Porta became the cleanup man, faithfully executing the master's designs for Palazzo Farnese, the Campidoglio, and now the Basilica of St. Peter.

According to the records in the Fabbrica archives, on the recommendation of Michelangelo's friend Tommaso de' Cavalieri, della Porta was named architect of St. Peter's on May 12, 1574. The Basilica progressed rapidly under his direction. Della Porta tore down the old Rossellino-Bramante tribune and rebuilt the west apse to conform to the other arms. He completed the large northeast corner chapel, called the Chapel of St. Gregory for Pope Gregory XIII, and raised the first of the minor domes over it. Then he broke ground for a corresponding chapel in the southeast corner. In June of 1584, the Fabbrica reported, “The Church of St. Peter is growing on every side.”

By 1588, della Porta had successfully completed more of the Basilica than any single architect, and he had never deviated substantially from his teacher. But on this June morning, he was proposing an extraordinary exception—a new Basilica dome, radically different from both Michelangelo's and Bramante's.

 

When he died, Michelangelo “left his soul to God, his body to the earth, and his goods to his nearest relatives.” Those goods included more than eight thousand ducats tied up in handkerchiefs and small bags and stashed in various places—a polished walnut box, a copper vase, and a majolica jug—as well as a variety of household items, including an iron bed with a white linen canopy, a kidskin blanket, and an assortment of linen and clothing. But his true last will and testament was the fifteen-foot scale model of the dome of St. Peter's, fashioned from limewood on a ratio of 1:15. Michelangelo had built the large model in his final years so that, in the event of his death, the Basilica dome would be completed exactly as he had intended.

Every pope since Paul III had sworn a solemn vow to continue Michelangelo's work precisely as he had ordained even after his death. Awed by his talent, intimidated by his genius, and bound by their promise, the popes became paralyzed. How do you follow genius? No one had been able to build the dome to Michelangelo's precise specifications or dared to suggest another plan. Twenty-two years later, the Basilica drum still loomed over the city like a headless giant—overgrown, neglected, moss and wildflowers sprouting in the window frames.

Michelangelo was a legend in life, and in death he had become one of the immortals. If artists were canonized for their talent, he would be seated at the right hand of God. Della Porta was an experienced, competent architect. He did not pretend to have the gift of his teacher, yet he had not simply modified Michelangelo's dome, he had redrawn it.

Now he and Fontana were laying a huge paper cutout of the new dome on the sanctuary floor of St. Paul's. The large open space was removed from the distractions of the city, and looking down from the adjoining choir at the cutout spread on the pavement, a layman like Sixtus V could picture the cupola clearly.

Della Porta was not easy with this new pope. The architect was a genial, easygoing man of ample appetites. He liked the good life—good food, good wine, good company, all in abundance. Sixtus was a fierce taskmaster, driven and driving. He had no patience with jobs unfinished or problems unsolved, and he wanted to see Michelangelo's dome rising triumphantly. In his determination to complete the Basilica, he had made the Fabbrica a congregation within his reformed Curia, renamed it somewhat grandly La Congregazione della Reverenda Fabbrica di San Pietro, and given it the means, the authority, and the money to get the job done.

Now, framed in the arch of the choir with the cardinal administrators of the newly organized congregation pressed around him, Sixtus appeared like a white staccato note in a field of red. Pushing the others aside, he leaned over the rail for a closer look.

For the entire century, ever since Bramante had drawn his first smooth saucer shape, the dome had posed a challenge: Could it be built? Could the piers bear its weight—even strengthened and reinforced several times so that now they were 240 feet in circumference, eight feet thicker than Bramante had made them?

Della Porta's reasons for altering the dome were practical, but even with his changes, the challenge was enormous, and success was not foreordained. In the ambivalence of a summer morning, he waited nervously for the pope's reaction, bowing humbly one moment, then straining the next to read the expression that clouded the papal countenance. Della Porta anticipated many questions from the former grand inquisitor. He expected the pope to consider the design over several weeks and confer with his cardinals, but Sixtus was as decisive in this as he was in all things. He asked only one question: How long will it take?

There was no way to predict with certitude. The last time an undertaking of such magnitude was attempted in Rome had been 1,450 years before, in the reign of the emperor Hadrian, when the dome of the Pantheon was raised.

How long will it take if all goes well, with God's help and no complications? Della Porta estimated ten years. Sixtus allowed him thirty months, and promised all the money and men he needed.

The architect must have tried to protest. Or he may have been so stunned that all thoughts and words emptied from his mind, and he stood speechless, staring at his own bold drawing. He could not deny or contradict the pope, and there was no common ground between them. He must have wanted to throw up his hands and curse such a ridiculous decree. Ten years, and he was being optimistic, a courtesy because the pope was an old man and dogged in his insistence on seeing the dome in his lifetime.

Rome was not built in a day, and neither was its church. It had taken Bramante seven years to set the piers, and then they had to be strengthened twice. It had taken Michelangelo seventeen years to build the drum, and now the pope was giving him, Giacomo della Porta, a mere mortal, not a genius, not divinely gifted, thirty months. It was a
scherzo malevolo,
“a black joke.”

Della Porta must have appealed to Fontana to point out, with humility, the utter, utopian madness of imposing such a timetable. Fontana was one of the few in the Vatican who enjoyed an easy relationship with the pope, and he knew better than to argue. Sixtus was in failing health. Death was more than a shadow. It was a proximate reality. He was determined to restore the city, and even more determined to see the dome of St. Peter's raised in his lifetime.

In the summer of 1588, as the Spanish Armada sailed toward Britain to regain England for the Church, della Porta began to raise the cupola. The construction yard in front of the Basilica teemed with masons, stonecutters, bricklayers, cement mixers—as many as eight hundred laborers. There were no siestas, no dinner breaks. The work was continuous night and day, every day, with only an hour of quiet for Sunday mass. In the wicked heat of the Roman summer, bolts of sun-bleached canvas stretched across the building site. The stench of manure from the mules and oxen that lugged the wagons, the rumble of the carts, the shouted orders, the belch of the forges, were ceaseless, and nights seemed louder than days because the din of the city quieted.

Bramante had analyzed the techniques of the ancient Roman architects. Michelangelo had sent to Florence for the measurements of Filippo Brunelleschi's cathedral dome. But each step in the construction was an experiment—a process based on a mix of imagination, guesswork, intelligence, and experience.

Over time, every aspect of the dome—its slope, contour, rise, and angle of elevation—had changed. Bramante's shallow hemisphere was a horizontal, saucer-shaped dome—a single shell of cemented masonry on the model of the Pantheon's. Antonio da Sangallo's dome was a tiered wedding cake. Michelangelo's rounded dome brought elements of Brunelleschi's Duomo in Florence to Bramante's Pantheon.

One of the most impressive constructions of the Renaissance, Brunelleschi's dome had taken sixteen years and enormous ingenuity to raise. It was the only model on a scale comparable to the Basilica dome, and Michelangelo borrowed several elements from it—the two shells, the ribbed construction, and the windows in the drum and cupola.

Double shells offered the advantages of a protective shield against the weather and a heightened, more visible profile. Della Porta's dome was also double skinned, but far bolder. While his inner shell retained Michelangelo's rounded contour, the outer shell that fills the sky over Rome diverged radically. Separating from the interior skin, it rises at a steep angle, changing the emphasis from a disk to an ellipse.

Della Porta's concerns were not purely, or even primarily, aesthetic. He believed that the higher, more pointed shape would disperse the weight and lessen the lateral thrust. Later science would support his theory. An elliptical arch generates as much as 50 percent less radial thrust than a hemispherical arch.

Physics was in its infancy, and as late as the sixteenth century, architects and engineers did not understand the science of statics and equilibrium—the engineering principles underlying the design of a stable structure. They knew, for instance, that walls had to have a certain thickness proportional to their height, but not the precise ratio of one to the other. The most basic analyses—how to determine the stability of a site or measure the thrust of an arch—were conjecture.

In essence, a dome is a series of arches, and conventional wisdom held that the semicircular Roman arch directed the thrust down into the piers, abutments, and foundation base. Architects knew that an arch exerted a thrust that had to be either balanced by another arch or absorbed, and that the mechanics of a dome are similar to those of a barrel. Both have a natural tendency, called hoop tension, to burst out. Still, calculations were often erroneous.

An architect like Bramante, constructing a monumental edifice on the scale of St. Peter's, had very little true understanding of the forces of physics involved—stress and strain, action and reaction, statics and tension. The surprise is not that the bell tower of Pisa listed or that the Gothic cathedral of Beauvais collapsed but that so many marvelous buildings have stood for so long. The principles of stable construction were not understood clearly until Galileo formulated the laws of mechanics and applied them to architecture.

Raising a dome of such monumental scale was an experiment never before attempted. The base of the drum began ten feet above the height of the oculus of the Pantheon, and if its construction were accomplished, the dome of St. Peter's would be the equivalent of a ten-story building placed on top of Brunelleschi's dome.

As the vaulting rose over the Basilica, how many times in the long nights of construction must della Porta and his masons have woken up in a cold sweat? Were the foundations deep enough? Would the drum hold the massive weight? Should they diminish the thrust of the cupola? Many prayers must have been offered and fervent promises made to God, to the Blessed Mother, and to St. Peter at each step in the precarious construction.

Michelangelo had intended the pilasters of the drum and the ribs of the cupola to act as buttressing forces. But by increasing the angle of elevation so radically, della Porta reduced those elements to little more than ornamentation. His heightened cupola is an almost perfect catenary curve. All its parts should support one another by their own weight, allowing it to hang freely between its two points of support in perfect equilibrium.

Della Porta formed the shells almost entirely of heavy masonry laid in a herringbone pattern. Frequently used by the architects of ancient Rome, the method of fitting bricks together in an inverted V design applies pressure equally from both sides, preventing hoop tension. The two shells spring from the attic as a single form for almost twenty-eight feet before they begin to diverge. As they separate, the space between them forms a third element that affords both ventilation and access. Sixteen ribs, corresponding to the sets of pilaster-framed windows in the drum, start at the point of departure. They divide the cupola into sections, creating a frame or skeleton. Carved at the base of each rib are three mountains, the symbol on Sixtus's papal crest. The ribs are uniform in width and extend through both shells, curving inward and tapering as they ascend, gradually increasing in depth as the distance between the shells widens, until the thickness is almost double.

Three rows of small eye-windows pierce each section, bringing more light into the interior dome and illuminating the vaulting. A team of masons worked on each section, constructing the shells simultaneously. The two skins begin as a solid, almost ten feet thick. At a height of just under twenty-eight feet, they start to separate, diverging gradually until there are ten feet between them at the apex.

To support the enormous weight and further counteract the outward thrust, three iron rings were forged in the Vatican foundry and fitted within the masonry—two in the solid mass of bricks where the curve begins, and the third midway to the apex. Like the iron bands around a wine barrel, the rings around the majestic dome of St. Peter's contain its tension. The larger iron rings weigh more than 18,000 pounds each, the smaller ones more than 16,500.
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