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Painted on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, 28 years after Michelangelo completed the glorious and hopeful ceiling, The Last Judgment is full of stark images depicting the End of Days. James Connor uses the famous fresco as the lens through which to view the end of the Renaissance, arguing that Michelangelo's imagery and composition provide clues to understand the religious and political upheavals of the time. Uncovering the secrets behind the fresco, Connor details the engrossing stories of conspiring kings, plotting popes, and murderous rivalries between noble families like the Medicis and the della Roveres – all who were vying for control over Michelangelo and his art. The Last Judgment combines enchanting storytelling with incisive historical detective work, demonstrating how Michelangelo was inspired by Copernicus and how the Counter-Reformation arose from the ashes of the Renaissance.
The Last Judgment Michelangelo and the Death of the Renaissance James A. Connor THE LAST JUDGMENT 9780230605732ts01.indd i9780230605732ts01.indd i 5/5/2009 3:56:54 PM5/5/2009 3:56:54 PM This page intentionally left blank THE LAST JUDGMENT MICHELANGELO AND THE DEATH OF THE RENAISSANCE James A. Connor 9780230605732ts01.indd iii9780230605732ts01.indd iii 5/5/2009 3:56:56 PM5/5/2009 3:56:56 PM THE LAST JUDGMENT Copyright © James A. Connor, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above compa- nies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–60573–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America. 9780230605732ts01.indd iv9780230605732ts01.indd iv 5/5/2009 3:56:56 PM5/5/2009 3:56:56 PM CONTENTS Acknowledgments vi Prologue: Standing in the Sistine vii Introduction: The Dying Pope 1 One The Great Commission 17 Two Clement’s Brainstorm 31 Three Pope Julius’s Tomb 41 Four The Altar Wall 65 Five Colors 79 Six The Children of Savonarola 97 Seven Vittoria Colonna 113 Eight Sol Invictus 133 Nine Saints, Martyrs, and Angels 145 Ten The Outer Orbit: The Naked and the Dead 163 Eleven The Damned 173 Twelve The Censorship of the End of the World 185 Thirteen The Last Days of Michelangelo Buonarroti 201 Further Reading 211 Notes 215 Index 227 9780230605732ts01.indd v9780230605732ts01.indd v 5/5/2009 3:56:57 PM5/5/2009 3:56:57 PM ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A mong the living, I would like to thank my editor Alessandra Bastagli and her assistant Colleen Lawrie. They are the best editorial team I have ever encountered. Sometimes, they had to whack me like a stubborn mule, but the book was all the better for it. I would also like to thank my agent Giles Anderson, for being a steady rock of ages. Also, my wife Beth; without her ministrations, I couldn’t find my shoes. Finally, my mother Marguerette Woods Connor, who passed on the faith, both in art and religion. Among the dead, I would like to thank my father John Connor and Beth’s father William Craven, for their unstinting support, both in this world and in the next. Flannery O’Connor, whose literary riffs have driven me forward, and Michelangelo Buonarroti, whose divine madness transformed my life. 9780230605732ts01.indd vi9780230605732ts01.indd vi 5/5/2009 3:56:57 PM5/5/2009 3:56:57 PM PROLOGUE: STANDING IN THE SISTINE I t was August and Rome was sticky hot. We had made the mis- take of walking up the Tiber from Trastevere toward the Vatican, so by the time we arrived, we were sweaty and uncomfortable. The area along the Tiber smelled mildly of urine, and everyone we passed looked frazzled, even the long-time Romans. We wanted to see the Sistine Chapel because we had heard so much about it and about the famous ceiling, and, more to the point, we had seen Charlton Heston play Michelangelo in the movie. The way to the Sistine Chapel was through the Vatican Museum, at the end of the long tour past the Caravaggios, the Titians, the papal portraits by Sebastiano del Piombo, the statue of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a she- wolf, the busts of Livia and Claudius, of Tiberius and Nero. And there was never any place to sit down. It was as if they didn’t want you to stay and linger over the art. You were compelled to keep moving, on to the Sistine Chapel and then back out to the hot street. The problem with the Sistine Chapel is that the place is so astound- ing and the trek to get there is so long, that no one wants to leave. The room fills quickly with tourists, and the line into the chapel backs up like cars on an interstate. After the long haul through the museum, I was ready to find a side door and duck out. But there were no side doors except the ones leading to the Vatican Gardens, and the Swiss 9780230605732ts01.indd vii9780230605732ts01.indd vii 5/5/2009 3:56:57 PM5/5/2009 3:56:57 PM viii The Last Judgment Guards were standing around there looking like cops. Once inside, most of the people clustered in the middle, craning their necks to see the famous ceiling. That was why I had come, and I joined them. I was a little disappointed because the ceiling was very high and I couldn’t see much of the detail. Sidling up to tour guides who pointed out the various panels, I squinted and peered like everyone else until my neck began to hurt. After a few minutes, tired of peering, I looked for my wife to grouse at her about the heat and about my aching feet, and to ask her to follow me out of the chapel onto the street where we could get a glass of water or maybe a beer. As I turned to find her in the crowd, my eye caught the altar wall and stuck there, at Michelangelo’s other great Sistine fresco, the Last Judgment. Unlike the ceiling, which unfolds the long story of salvation history spun out over thousands of years, the Last Judgment captures a single instant, stop-time as in a photograph, a mad swirling drama like storm clouds caught in the act, a fresco full of terribilità, the catastrophe at the end of time. It was angst to the point of fury. Terribilità is the term that his contemporaries used to describe Michelangelo’s personality as well. It was an apt description, for Michelangelo was the first great Romantic hero, hounded by guilt, grumpy, easily wounded, brooding, fretful, fearful, raging. Probably a homosexual at a time when even the accusation of sodomy could get you executed, he likely lived a chaste life, beset by the kind of free-floating guilt that only Catholicism can generate. The Last Judgment was Michelangelo’s most direct expression of the terror at the bottom of his psyche. The fresco, newly restored to the bright colors that Michelangelo intended, drew me in and I stood trans- fixed. For the first time that day, I forgot how hot it was and how much my feet hurt. The effect of the entire fresco is like a cyclone—with the dead rising in the lower section on Christ’s right side, launching themselves heavenward like Atlas rockets, swirling over the top, and the damned battling angels and demons alike on Christ’s left hand, sinking violently to the River Styx and the boat of Charon, who ferries the damned to 9780230605732ts01.indd viii9780230605732ts01.indd viii 5/5/2009 3:56:57 PM5/5/2009 3:56:57 PM ix Prologue eternal punishment. Here was Dante mixed with Savonarola, a vision of the end of the world as disastrous as atomic war, exploding in the sky with Christ as the judge. Michelangelo’s fresco depicted a last judgment unlike any other that I had seen. This was a common theme for artists around Rome and, indeed, throughout Italy and Germany, especially after the four- teenth century and the Black Death. Judgment scenes are intensely cosmological, summing up creation in one big bang. But in the other examples that I had seen, the end of the world was also stately, frozen, and hierarchical. Christ appeared at the top of every fresco, with the saints and angels directly below him, the souls in purgatory below them, and the damned at the bottom, often being jeered at by demons. These paintings almost always depicted a medieval universe, a biblical flat earth with the firmament of heaven stretched over the top, and the empyrean, full of divine fire, over that. Evil was down and good was up. The rest was simply a matter of putting people in their proper sta- tions in between. The poor of the earth, the martyrs and the prophets, the suffering and the repentant sinners were first and those who had once been first—the kings, the barons, the lords, and yes, even the popes—would be last. But this was not the design of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Here, Christ is at the dramatic center of the fresco, so that souls ris- ing from the earth and sinking back down swirl about him and over his head. The static design of other last judgments had given way to a terrifying dynamism, full of tension and anxiety. Even the elect look to Christ, fearful of their own status in the kingdom of God. The damned, of course, show nothing but terror, eyes wide with fear of the place that awaits them. “And who shall abide on the day of his coming,” said Isaiah the prophet, “and who shall stand when he appeareth?” And what a different Christ this was! Unlike the immobile, conven tionally bearded Christ of Byzantine and Medieval iconogra- phy, this Christ rises from his seat in anger, determined in the act of condemnation. He is depicted as a young Apollo, beardless and with curly hair, surrounded by a golden aureole as if lit by the sun itself. 9780230605732ts01.indd ix9780230605732ts01.indd ix 5/5/2009 3:56:57 PM5/5/2009 3:56:57 PM [...]... about the Last Judgment, about the end of all things, about the sudden catastrophe of Christ’s return, when the wicked would be separated from the good with a curse The Last Judgment is described in the Gospel of Matthew, when the Son of Man returns on the clouds of heaven and all will be judged and when, as Jesus said, the last would be first, and the first last, and salvation would depend on the quality... many of them died—he had killed some 100,000 troops in his war to conquer the Netherlands 10 The L a st Judgment By the time the imperial army reached Rome in May 1527, the German soldiers had become ghosts of men, and all they cared about was food, wine, women, and gold The emperor’s army attacked Rome from the west, between the walls of the Vatican and the Janiculum hill, just south of the walls There... surrounding them and forcing them to eat feces and to drink urine as a mockery of the sacred bread and wine They looted every monastery, every church, and every convent they could find, hauling the nuns out and raping them They extorted money, tossed infants out of windows and laughed as they splattered on the streets while their mothers watched, forced the mothers to have sex with pigs or to run through the. .. included the evils of bishops and popes, the oppression of the poor by the rich, and the injustices perpetrated by the Medici, often calling to mind the lurid fate of sinners at the Last Judgment Later, toward the end of 1490, he preached another eighteen sermons during the four weeks of Advent, the season leading up to Christmas These drew such crowds that Savonarola’s career as a prophet and reformer... detested the Medici but worked for them nonetheless, to root out the leaders of the rebellion in Florence and to hang them Michelangelo went into hiding while the pope took savage vengeance on the city, his soldiers torturing and hanging the leaders, stripping others of their fortunes and sending them into the night as beggars Baglioni sent one priest who had preached against the Medici during the siege... these things for the least of my brothers and sisters, you failed to do it for me.” And they would be carried off by demons to the eternal fire prepared for Satan and his angels (Matthew 25:31–46) This is the world in which Michelangelo embarked on the pope’s great commission The upheaval of the Renaissance gave way to further upheaval as the Reformation began It was an electric time, abundant 16 The. .. which fit Michelangelo s mood after the violent death of the republic, but it was the sculpture Night that seemed most mournful, reminding all who saw it of the quick approach of death and the long silence of the tomb Clement micromanaged all of these projects from the Vatican, shooting off a letter nearly every day He directed Michelangelo about which type of wood (walnut) was to be used for the library... ants The pope’s general, Renzo da Ceri, refused to destroy the bridges leading into the Vatican because he overestimated his ability to protect the city and underestimated the fury of the Emperor’s army, and because he thought that it would lower the morale of the people Also, he feared that the houses in Trastevere, just south of the Vatican and on the same side of the Tiber, would fall into the river... down so they could hang him According to medieval rules of warfare, the sacking of a city should last only three days After three days, the Prince of Orange sent riders out among the men to tell them that the time had passed and that the sack had ended The soldiers ignored the messengers and continued to rape and loot Three days passed, then five, then ten Then six months had passed All throughout the. .. experiences during the Sack of Rome He claimed to have shot the arquebus ball that killed the Duke of Bourbon, while he was encouraging his men onward, climbing a ladder to the top of the wall The only man left in charge of the troops was the inexperienced Philibert, Prince of Orange, and he could not control the mob that had become his army They quickly breached the walls of Rome and spread through the city . The Last Judgment Michelangelo and the Death of the Renaissance James A. Connor THE LAST JUDGMENT 9780230605732ts01.indd. and the Dead 163 Eleven The Damned 173 Twelve The Censorship of the End of the World 185 Thirteen The Last Days of Michelangelo Buonarroti 201 Further