We have had 267 popes officially listed; of some we know very little, many have been profoundly virtuous and loved, while some few have been spectacularly bad. Pope Julius II (b. 1443, Pope 1503-1513) was the antithesis of everything we would expect from the successor to St Peter. His concerns were strictly secular. However, he used his influence and his huge income to change the face of Rome and the Vatican, giving us many of the greatest works of religious art we know today. For which we can only be grateful. Among them is the Basilica of St Peter’s in Rome which was opened exactly 400 years this month on 18 November.
Pope Julius II, who decided to replace the 1100-year-old first St Peter’s Basilica, had a fearsome temper and was not a man to be trifled with. He was a master politician, military commander, and perhaps the greatest patron of the High Renaissance. His legacy permanently reshaped the geopolitics of Italy and the visual landscape of the Vatican. He had been made a bishop and a cardinal while still in his twenties by his uncle the earlier Pope Sixtus IV and reputedly achieved the papacy by judicious allocation of funds from his church income and plain bribery. Once he became pope he legislated without any embarrassment that a papal election that was bribed (the sin of simony) was automatically invalid.
In a thoroughly ‘unpapal’ fashion – his nickname was the Warrior Pope – he put on his silver armour and led papal armies into battle. His primary political goal was to consolidate the land holdings the papacy held in central Italy – driving out rival powers like the Venetians and the French – in order to make his role as pope more independent of other powerful states. Earlier popes had been forced by the French to move to Avignon and the resulting absence had left Rome a crumbling medieval city as well as the papacy itself in disarray. One can understand his motivation to re-build and re-empower but his methods were brutal.
Early on in his papacy he established the Swiss Guard for his personal security. The back story of this is, I think, rather appealing. The Swiss-German banking family, the Fuggers (who played a decisive role in the Reformation), had made loans to Julius, and when he felt he was in personal danger, the bank decided that their investment needed security and so they funded around 100 Swiss pikemen to protect their asset (one can only presume the loans were very large). The guards’ uniform, supposedly based on a design by Michelangelo, is chiefly blue and yellow – colours taken from Julius’s coat of arms. The red comes from the arms of the Medici Pope Leo X who followed him. They used to be thought of as ceremonial, but after the attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II in the 1980s they are armed with modern weapons and are carefully trained in counter-terrorism.
All of Julius’s ideas were expensive, and above all was the building of St Peter’s. To raise money throughout Europe he argued that just as a pilgrimage earned an indulgence, (think of Compostella or Jerusalem or Canterbury), a donation to rebuild such a holy place was a pious act which, if accompanied by the usual conditions, could also earn a plenary indulgence. Now the basic concept of indulgences was a thousand years old: penance, prayer or pilgrimage that would bring about “the forgiveness of the temporal punishment due to sin after the sin itself has been forgiven”. Julius’s fund-raising plan became one of the great trigger points of world history. Before long, in Germany a Dominican friar Johann Tetzel was collecting money as he chanted:
“As soon as a coin in the coffer rings,
the soul from purgatory springs.”
At this appalling distortion plus the extraordinary, accumulated scandals in the church at that time – particularly from the Roman Curia – an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther, a professor of moral theology at the University of Wittenberg, traditionally nailed 95 Theses for discussion to the door of the castle church – and the Reformation was born. With Protestantism, the face of Europe and part of the New World were metaphorically changed forever.
Julius literally changed the face of Rome. He hired Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and then to carve his tomb choosing the Hebraic figure of Moses rather than a more traditional Christian one. And Moses, now in the church of St Peter in Chains, is magnificent – tougher and more thought-provoking than the relative softness of the young man’s Pieta in St Peter’s. The Pope established the Vatican Museum and built and assembled a magnificent collection of ancient classical sculptures amongst which are the Laocoon and the Apollo Belvedere. He refused to live in the papal apartments of his loathed Borgia predecessor Pope Alexander VI, and engaged a very young Raphael to decorate the four Stanze; one fresco is the famous School of Athens – a peak of high Renaissance learning for his rooms in the Vatican.
Above all, he was responsible for the re-building of St Peter’s.
He had already commissioned Donato Bramante to design the Via Giulia, the first major straightened Renaissance thoroughfare pushing through the maze of medieval alley-ways to streamline commerce near the Vatican. Now he asked this celebrated architect to repair, and when this seemed impossible, to design a replacement St Peter’s. It was the job of a lifetime. Bramante designed a High Renaissance central plan featuring a Greek cross (four equal arms inscribed within a square) topped by a massive central dome inspired by the ancient Pantheon and Roman baths, but by the time of his untimely death eight years later, construction had barely reached the massive crossing piers and drum. Raphael took up the task, stretching the eastern arm of the cross to create a longer nave, but he died aged 37 only six years later. Not surprisingly, after these two unexpected deaths, construction trailed off. Years later (1546) and five years after he had finished the great Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, and when he was aged 71, Michelangelo was appointed as architect; he stretched the arm further to enlarge the church so that the initial Greek cross design had become the shape of a Latin one, and engineered the double-shelled dome, which utilized an inner brick shell and an outer lead shell. To support this immense weight, he modified the supporting piers, ensuring the structure could withstand the vertical forces of the colossal dome. For 18 years until his death at 89, Michelangelo worked on the great basilica free of charge, ‘giving his service to God’. The design was cleared and simplified but there was still an enormous amount to do. The dome was an architectural marvel; at 452 ft it is the tallest dome in the world with an internal dimeter of over 40 m. Around it in gold lettering over 2 m high in Latin are the words from St Matthew’s Gospel “Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church, and I will give you the keys of the kingdom of Heaven”. The soaring space and assertion of power was a very long way from Caesarea Philippi and the humble group of disciples in Galilee.
For another 60 years through the Council of Trent, the Battle of Lepanto (Our Lady of Victories), the trial of Galileo and another 14 popes to Urban VIII, the building progressed slowly. Carlo Maderno designed the façade of the church including the central balcony from which Habemus Papam is announced; it is a handsome plan but it effectively obscures the bottom part of Michelangelo’s dome – which can now best be seen from the Castel Sant’ Angelo. The final great name associated with the building is Bernini.
He was responsible for the design of the baldacchino – the 29 m tall gilded bronze canopy with twisted Solomonic columns (thought to be in the style from the Temple in Jerusalem) standing over the high altar – and therefore over the tomb of St Peter below. He also designed the ‘Chair of St Peter’ – the monumental bronze and gilt sculpture in the apse that encloses the ancient wooden chair and is supported by four Doctors of the Church, set beneath a glowing alabaster window of the Holy Spirit.
His was also the plan of the vast piazza crowned by no less than 140 saints that leads to the basilica – a design that was supposed to be welcoming arms. An extraordinary achievement.
Image 1: Raphael. Pope Julius II. National Gallery London. He started the redesign of St Peter’s Basilica. It is an extraordinary portrait of intimate, detailed realism. He grew his beard starting in June 1511 to mourn the military loss and political disaster in Bologna, following ancient Roman traditions where men stopped shaving during times of grief or defeat. He vowed not to shave until foreign occupiers were driven out of Italy. He became the first pope since antiquity to wear a beard, openly challenging centuries-old canon law. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Image 2: Pietro da Cortona. Pope Urban VIII. Capitoline Museum Rome. Opened St Peter’s Basilica. The figure here is subsumed into the froth and rustle of lace and silk of his role. By now a beard has become the fashion which continued until 1700. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Image 3: Swiss Guards at Vatican City (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Image 4: Portrait of Jakob Fugger by Albrecht Dürer, 1518 (Staatsgalerie Altdeutsche Meister), Augsburg . (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Image 5: Michelangelo, Moses, for Tomb of Julius II, Church of St Peter in Chains, Rome. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Image 6: Raphael. Vatican Stanze, specifically the School of Athens. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Image 7: Dome of St Peter’s Basilica, Rome. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Image 8: Baldacchino of St Peter’s Basilica, Rome. (Source: Wikipedia)
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