Bramante’s move to Rome we owe to political history. When the French armies marched into Milan in 1499, they expelled the duke and dislocated the city’s cultural life entirely. They also perpetrated what is doubtless one of the greatest crimes against art ever committed; Leo-nardo’s clay model for the giant bronze horse which was to be the monument to Gian Galeazzo Sforza, Ludovico’s father, ignominiously fell to pieces after the French crossbowmen used it for target practice—a great loss indeed. Bramante and the bitterly frustrated Leonardo, were among the figures who left for Rome, and Milan’s loss was very much Rome’s gain. Like any other architect of talent, Bramante was soon absorbed in the grandeur and purity of its ancient structures.
Quite soon, Bramante’s obvious talents would be snapped up by one of the great “building popes” of the Renaissance, Pope Julius II. But he designed several nonpapal buildings first, and the most significant of them was hardly bigger than a summerhouse—a diminutive domed circular temple in the courtyard of the Spanish Franciscan convent and church, the Tempietto of San Pietro in Montorio, up on the Janiculan Hill. This may have been inspired by the ancient Temple of Vesta in Rome. The sixteen columns of its outer ring are all Doric, the order considered most suitable for commemorating robust and virile heroes, which Peter, no plaster saint, certainly was. Bramante worked to a modular scheme originally set out as a recipe for internal harmony by Vitruvius—all the chief dimensions, such as the diameter of the interior, are multiples of the column diameters. The tempietto is the first completely Doric building of the Italian Renaissance, as another pioneer architect, Sebastiano Serlio, pointed out: “We should give credit to Bramante, seeing that it was he who was the inventor and light of all good architecture, which had been buried until his time, the time of Julius II.”
Julius II was the name taken, at his election to the papacy by the College of Cardinals, by Giuliano della Rovere (1443–1513). This impatient, bellicose, and thunderously energetic man was the greatest patron of art the Roman Church had ever produced, and he would remain so until the partnership of Urban VIII Barberini and Gian Lorenzo Bernini more than a century later. His architect was Bramante, his sculptor Michelangelo, his painter Raphael.
This trio formed, without much question, the most remarkable body of artistic talent ever assembled by a single European man.
Raphael frescoed his suite of private papal apartments on the second floor of the Vatican, the chief one of which was known as the Stanza della Segnatura because in it Julius signed his name to essential documents. Some think that Julius himself, rather than Raphael, chose the narrative of images for these rooms.
As for Michelangelo, Julius was by far the most important, if difficult, client he ever had—just as Michelangelo was the most difficult and important artist Julius had ever employed. The sculptor embarked upon a colossal and never-to-be-finished project for Julius’ tomb in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli. He very reluctantly frescoed the ceiling and end wall of the chapel in the Vatican which, having been built by Julius’ uncle Pope Sixtus IV (reigned 1471–84), was known as the Sistine, and later decorated the Pauline Chapel, also in the Vatican, with scenes of the conversion of Saint Paul and the crucifixion of Saint Peter.
And Bramante—an aging man when he came into Julius’ employ, more than sixty years old—took on the Herculean task of finishing the work Alberti had started, creating a new symbolic center for Christianity by demolishing Constantine’s Basilica of Saint Peter and building an entirely new one. It would be the biggest church in the world.
That Julius II was a monster of will and appetite has never been in doubt. You could not defy him with much hope of survival, let alone success. He was known to his court and the rest of Rome as il papa terribile, the terrifying pope—or, if you wanted to shift the meaning an inch or two, the dreadful father. He did not call himself Julius for nothing. His model was antiquity’s Julius the First—the all-conquering, all-seeing, all-remembering, and godlike Julius Caesar, conqueror of Europe and remaker of Rome, Roma triumphans, the city around which the rest of the world turned. Julius II was determined to restore, not just superficially refurbish, the scope of the Catholic Church’s political power, which had suffered all-too-apparent losses through the translation of the Papacy to Avignon.
For this, it was necessary to expand the Papal States, an effort which could be tried by diplomacy but only underwritten by military force. Thus Julius II became the first and last pope to lead an army from horseback, wearing plate armor. (His papacy also brought the foundation, on January 21, 1506, of the Swiss Guard, who today are merely pushy Vatican cops with flapping yellow uniforms but in the sixteenth century were a serious force of halberdiers dedicated to protecting the person of the pope—an ecclesiastical Praetorian Guard.)
Much of the money for his military enterprises came from Italy’s textile industry. The dyeing of cloth requires a fixative, which in the sixteenth century was a mineral, alum. Most alum had come from Turkey, but large deposits of it were to be found north of Rome, in an otherwise unremarkable spot named Tolfa. The mines of Tolfa, with their virtual monopoly on the mineral, rose with the textile trade and so were a large source of income for the Papacy.
In 1503, when Julius was elected pope, the city of Rome was in difficult straits. In some respects it hardly functioned at all as a city—it lacked a strong central government and was divided up into quarrelsome and isolated districts, run in an improvised way by the entrenched heirs of medieval clans. It was plagued by crime, particularly in the dock areas of the Tiber, the Ripa and the Ripetta, where trade was dominated by mafiosolike thugs. Some banks had closed, unable to hold up against the creeping devaluation of the currency. The price of corn had doubled. The ancient system of water supply was near collapse, despite Nicholas V’s earlier efforts to fix it. There were frequent outbreaks of plague. Some riverside parts of Rome had turned malarial—even Julius II had a bout of malaria, though not a grave one.
Against this background, Julius’ actions, even if resented by many Romans, made considerable sense. He stabilized the price of bread by setting up public bakeries. He brought in cheap grain from Sicily and France, he prohibited immigration, tightened the screws of tax collection and confiscated the estates of several immoderately rich cardinals who had conveniently died. They were replaced by newly appointed cardinals, all friends of Julius, who were also rich but could be relied on to obey him. And of course the Church was directed to wring every penny it could from the sale of indulgences, that abusive and superstitious practice by which the faithful could supposedly buy remission from Purgatory in the next life by giving hard cash to Rome’s agents in this one. “When you open your purse strings and the cash bell rings, the soul flies out of Purgatory and sings.” Disgust at the indulgence trade would be one of the forces that drove the Protestant Reformation, but at first the Catholic hierarchy did not realize how furious an industry it was growing to be. Thanks to these emergency measures, the papal treasury, which had about 300,000 ducats in 1505, rose to 500,000 in 1506.