Julius was lucky to have a close friend and astute money manager in the Sienese papal banker Agostino Chigi (1466–1520), recognized as the wealthiest merchant banker in Europe, who had more than a hundred offices spread from Cairo to London and at one point held the papal tiara in pawn as security on his loans.
Thus Julius was able to indulge his appetite for Caesarian glory. This became especially clear after the papal armies annexed Bologna and expelled its Bentivoglio rulers in 1507, when an imperial procession exactly reminiscent of the original Caesar’s triumphs was arranged for him in Rome; along streets flanked by cheering crowds, he rode under triumphal arches to the Capitol. In 1504, a new and revalued silver coin bearing his portrait and known as the “giulio” was minted in his honor. The following year, Julius II commissioned from Michelangelo an enormous figure of himself, which was mounted on the façade of the Bolognese Church of San Petronio, but three years later, when his forces lost control of the city, this bronze giant was torn down, broken up, and recast as cannon. But by then Julius’ attention was preempted and occupied with other projects by Michelangelo, as well as by Raphael and Bramante.
Architecture took first place. Through new building on a grand scale, Julius intended to renovate the “decorum” of Rome, returning the city to the grandeur and authority its ancient buildings had once conferred on it. Julius Caesar had given Rome a renewed spiritual center through his constructions. Julius II would do the same, by rebuilding Saint Peter’s on a hitherto unimagined scale.
In 1505, Bramante began a series of additions to the Vatican Palace: the terraces of the Belvedere Courtyard. These were private, of course—indeed, so much so that they were designed to be seen from one main vantage point, the window of the pope’s study, the part of the papal apartments overlooking the downhill slope toward the Tiber known as the Stanza della Segnatura. Modeled on the huge imperial palaces of antiquity—Nero’s Domus Aurea, Hadrian’s Villa—they would tell the visitor that a new Catholic and papal Rome comparable in every way to the old imperial and pagan Rome was on its way. Naturally, Julius wanted this gigantic affair—a hundred meters wide and three hundred long, with its stairs, ramps, formal gardens, arcades, fountains, nymphaeum, and open-air theater—to be finished tomorrow, if not yesterday. It would have the most impressive and precious collection of antique sculpture that existed: the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön, the Belvedere Torso were all there. The words of Virgil’s Cumaean Sibyl, warning off the ignorant—“Procul este, profani” (“Begone, you uninitiated”)—were cut into the stone of the spiral staircase ramp near the sculpture court. You could ride a horse up this ramp. Its architrave bears on a series of columns, which get slenderer and more refined as one ascends: the Tuscan order at the lowest level, giving way to the Doric, and then to the Ionic, and finally the Composite.
The fresco of Parnassus was painted on the north wall of the Stanza della Segnatura, above its window. The view from the window was of a part of the Vatican Hill traditionally considered sacred to Apollo. Another part of its mythic history was that Etruscan priests used to watch for auguries and make prophecies (vaticinia) from this spot. Hence the name “Vatican” for the general area. The Apollo was installed on the Belvedere as an act of naming, not so much the sculpture as its site. Having Raphael’s fresco of Apollo and the Muses right at the spot from which one observed the distant sculpture of Apollo confirmed the mantic tradition of the place, and this was enriched by the further myth that Saint Peter had been crucified there.
The Belvedere, with its size and levels, could almost be a town in itself, and certainly Bramante’s town-planning ambitions, though never fulfilled, were part of his reputation in Rome. Two years after his death, a writer named Andrea Guarna put Bramante in a comedy titled Scimmia (The Monkey). He dies and arrives at the gates of Paradise, telling Saint Peter—the original pope, one should remember, the prototype of Julius II—that he will not come in unless he is employed to rebuild the whole place:
I want to get rid of this hard and difficult road that leads from earth to Heaven; I shall build another, in a spiral, so wide that the souls of the old and the weak can ride up it on horseback. Then I think I will demolish this Paradise and make a new one that will provide more elegant and comfortable dwellings for the blessed. If you agree, then I shall stay; otherwise I shall go straight to Pluto’s house, where I shall have a better chance of carrying out my ideas.… I shall make an entirely new Hell and overturn the old one.
Neither Bramante nor Julius hesitated to get rid of old buildings, however venerable, if these got in the way of their plans. It is no surprise that one of the architect’s nicknames was “Bramante Ruinante,” Bramante the Wrecker. This was used a lot as he prepared to undertake the biggest project of his life, perhaps the biggest project of any architect’s life (unless you count later mile-high skyscrapers in Arab sheikhdoms or mega-airports in China): the design and building of the new Saint Peter’s Basilica.
Both the pope and the architect believed, with good reason, that the old building, erected in the fourth century by Constantine, would no longer do. In the reign of Nicholas V (1447–55), a survey had shown its walls were tottering out of plumb, and there was a real danger that an earthquake tremor (to which Rome, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was more prone than it is today) would bring the whole thousand-year-old fabric down. Both men were conscious of their own mortality, and in fact would die within a year of each other, Julius in 1513 and Bramante in 1514. If history were to remember them as the authors of this colossal enterprise, they would have to hurry. Moreover, they needed to move the project as far along as possible, so that the next architect and the next pope would be stuck with their conception, unable to make radical changes.
Unfortunately, since Bramante did not run an architectural office in the modern sense, there are practically no written or drafted records of how ideas might have passed to and fro between him and Julius, and the only firsthand record of Bramante’s intentions is a drawing known as the “parchment plan,” now in the Uffizi. It shows a central dome and two domed chapels, forming a Greek cross, though of course with no indications of size. But there were strong motives for making the basilica enormous, and one can imagine Julius and his architect discussing how, now that Constantinople had fallen (in 1453) to the Turkish infidel and Hagia Sophia had become a mosque, the largest dome should be the center of Christendom. The questions raised by the demolition of a building as venerated as old Saint Peter’s would be silenced by the phrase inscribed on a medal depicting its intended elevation: TEMPLI PETRI INSTAURACIO. Instaurare meant “to restore,” “to make new”; the pope and the architect could say that they were only “restoring” the ancient fabric, though of course they were replacing it altogether.