Pope Julius II, born Giuliano della Rovere, has come down to us as “the Warrior Pope”. This is with good reason: his pontificate, which lasted from 1503 to 1513, was an action-packed and often terrifying Renaissance blockbuster. The television channel Showtime had a huge hit in 2011-2013 with its series The Borgias. It could do so again with Julius, the successor of Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia).
Julius’s pontificate is well known for its domestic, foreign policy and military achievements, and for its consolidation of papal power. He was a formidable man of action, riding at the head of his armies and leading troops into battle. There were great victories and hard losses. As one Venetian ambassador is said to have remarked, Julius believed himself “lord and master of the world’s game”. It was Julius who issued the dispensation allowing the future Henry VIII to marry Catherine of Aragon.
But are the political and military events of his reign why Julius is most interesting to us today, or should we perhaps look elsewhere for his lasting legacy? Surely it is his contribution to the art of the High Renaissance which endures. He was one of the most important patrons in the history of European art. It is his staggeringly ambitious and successful patronage of art and architecture which most often touches our lives today. (And the Henry VIII thing.)
It is almost unthinkable to imagine the patrimony of the Church without Julius. Is this a controversial view? It shouldn’t be; it certainly isn’t a new one. Contemporaries saw it and Vasari called him “a patron of genius”. Julius the general founded the Swiss Guards, but Julius the benefactor commissioned Michelangelo to design their uniforms.
His legacy is forever entwined with that of three artistic geniuses: Bramante, Michelangelo and Raphael. From this triumvirate Julius commissioned the Belvedere, the so-called “Julius Tomb”, the beginnings of the new St Peter’s, the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the Vatican Stanze. These works are keystones in the history of art. All three of these artists responded to the energy and agenda – the challenge – of Julius.
If we close our eyes to these most famous commissions for a moment and look only at the apse of the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, we really do begin to appreciate the point. It was designed by Bramante, the vault was painted by Pinturicchio, the tombs were carved by Andrea Sansovino and the stained glass was made by French artist Guillaume de Marcillat. All under Julius.
If, as many believe, this was the greatest constellation of artists ever to work for one patron at the same time, then, as art historian Howard Hibbard memorably wrote some 40 years ago, we must indeed “hail Julius as the most perspicacious as well as the most fortunate patron the world has ever known”.
In Bramante Julius found an architect to give form to his architectural visions. His 1503 commission for the Cortile del Belvedere was the most ambitious architectural undertaking since Antiquity. The design references and reinterprets cultural and architectural forms not seen inRome since Antiquity and thus created new forms to be emulated: it was to house the first architectural garden, the first permanent theatre and the first museum since that time. It drew on imperial ruins such as those of the ancient Hippodrome of the Palatine and, for the new bank of loggias, the Septizodium on the Palatine.
The rebuilding of St Peter’s was intended to be a statement about the place of Julius’s papacy in the course of universal history. Bramante declared that he wanted to place the dome of the Pantheon over the Baths of Caracalla. Once finished, it was the central artistic achievement of the Roman Renaissance, and Julius was the decisive initial patron.
Personal glory and mythology were undeniable motivations. These are inescapable in the so-called “Julius Tomb” commission given to Michelangelo by Julius. If completed to Michelangelo’s designs, this colossal freestanding monument would have been a dominant feature of St Peter’s. Ascanio Condivi, a contemporary and biographer of Michelangelo, wrote that the tomb was to be decorated with sculpted figures personifying the liberal arts. But with a twist: they were lashed to the tomb as slaves and captives, literally constrained by the death of their great patron.
The providential nature of Catholicism and the re-affirmation of papal supremacy against conciliar challenge find their fullest and most extraordinary expression in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. We can appreciate this perhaps most easily in the figures of the sibyls. The Cumaean Sibyl foresaw, as related in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, the coming of the Son of God, conceived by a Virgin, who would make Rome the perpetual seat of His priesthood and of His eternal empire. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling reconciles Jewish and Gentile tradition as culminating in the Roman Church.
Julius took an active interest in the progress of the work and would have endorsed its agenda. When Michelangelo refused to show Julius his work in progress, Julius is reputed to have beaten him with a stick.
Michelangelo was reluctant to take the commission in the first place. He considered himself a sculptor, not a painter, and he didn’t like painting affresco. To ask a man who didn’t fancy himself as a painter to decorate the Sistine Chapel was very Julius: he discerned and compelled greatness.
Raphael, commissioned by Julius to create the frescoes for the Vatican Stanze, produced a series of works which fuse humanist learning with Christian theology and papalist doctrine – a combination that contemporary orators and Julius himself considered to be the cultural achievement of his court. They are among the crowning glories of Western art.
Consensus holds that Julius II himself is unlikely to have directed the content, yet there is a strong case to be made for the Stanza della Segnatura, home to The School of Athens, as having housed Julius’s personal library. Either way, he knew the power of great art and, within reason, gave great artists their freedom. Raphael’s School of Athens speaks to Julius’s providential mission to promote ancient and humanist scholarship ad maiorem Dei gloriam. Julius’s Rome was to be a New Jerusalem and a New Athens, a syncretic fusing of Christianity and Antiquity in a new Golden Age.
Raphael’s portrait of Julius II (pictured below), arguably that artist’s most powerful and haunting work, is charged with an almost terrifying realism. It is far from triumphal: it shows the Pope in mourning after his loss of Bologna in 1511.
History was made quickly in the Renaissance. In 1508 Michelangelo cast a colossal bronze equestrian statue of Julius to celebrate his original victory at Bologna in 1506. By the time of Raphael’s portrait and the ultimate loss of that city, Michelangelo’s work had been destroyed – and sold for scrap.
We should not confuse aspiration with achievement: it took some 120 years to build St Peter’s, a wing of the Belvedere courtyard collapsed in the 1530s and Julius II’s tomb was never finished in anything like its original megalomaniac form. Did Julius II really believe that a new age of a Christian Roman Empire had actually dawned with his reign? It’s possible: given the art he commissioned, it would be odd if he didn’t.
No one would dispute that Julius was truly Il Papa Terribile – a fearsome and towering figure. But in art he was probably also Il Sagace and certainly Il Fortunato.
In 1506, a farmer named Felice da Fredis was digging in his vineyards on the Esquiline Hill and unearthed the Laocoön, famed as one of the most beautiful lost statues from Antiquity. Julius sent Michelangelo and Giuliano da Sangallo to the excavation to verify the find. He bought it at auction, put it on display in the Octagonal Court of the Belvedere and opened up this court to visitors. In so doing he can be said to have founded the Vatican Museums.
Is this collecting rather than patronage? Il Sagace would have understood the distinction but would not have laboured the point. His achievement was to both recognise and to catalyse genius.
Stephen Withnell is a DPhil student in architectural history at Campion Hall, Oxford, director of strategy at Stonyhurst College and a governor of Westminster Cathedral Choir School
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