But the resounding fanfares, combined with the shouts and cheers of the spectators, so frightened the elephant that he stood trumpeting loudly before the bridge of Sant’ Angelo, refusing to cross it. Baraballo had to climb down from his ornately decorated saddle and the joke was over, much to the evident mortification of Leo who had been sitting on a nearby balcony happily watching the proceedings through his spy-glass.
Although this kind of display could not often be arranged, the Pope was able to indulge himself more frequently in his palace with a succession of those dramatic performances, plays, masques, ballets, mummings and moresche, in which he took a far deeper delight. Two of the earliest blank verse historical tragedies, Giovanni Rucellai’s Rosmunda and Gian-Giorgio Trissino’s Sophonisba, were both performed in his presence. But apparently he preferred the broad comedies and more or less indecent farces of Ariosto, Machiavelli and Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena. He witnessed with evident pleasure the performances of Ariosto’s Cassaria and Suppositi; Machiavelli’s Mandragola was performed for him in 1519; and his favourite piece of all appears to have been Dovizi’s Calandria, whose plot, involving a stupid young man in love with a girl who changes clothes with her twin brother to play a trick upon her paramour, presented the kind of situation which made a strong appeal to Pope Leo’s taste.
He would happily spend hour after hour watching these performances, or sitting at the gambling table playing primiero – an undemanding card game rather like beggar-my-neighbour – losing money without complaint or throwing his winnings over his shoulder. Whole days at the time of the Carnival were spent attending bull-fights, sitting through endless banquets, watching cardinals and their ladies dancing at masked balls, or contemplating the Romans enjoying their favourite sports, their regattas and processions, their orange-throwing contests, and the violent, dangerous game of rolling barrels down the grass slopes of Monte Testaccio, at the bottom of which crowds of peasants risked broken limbs to seize the pigs inside.
Yet Leo’s life was not entirely given over to frivolity. If he spent vast sums on entertainments, on French hounds and Cretan falcons, on furs and gold chains, and on his ever growing household, he lavished money, too, on the improvement and development of Rome. He built the Via Ripetta so as to provide a new outlet from the congested old town up towards the Piazza del Popolo; he restored the church of Santa Maria in Domnica and provided it with its splendid porticoed façade; above all, he enthusiastically continued the reconstruction of the Vatican Palace and the rebuilding of St Peter’s, retaining Julius II’s architect, Donato d’Angelo Lazzari, known as Bramante, who had begun work on the new church in 1505. Pope Leo also conceived an ambitious plan to drain the Pontine Marshes and asked Leonardo da Vinci to devise an appropriate method.
Determined to make Rome the most cultured city in Europe, he offered numerous inducements to attract the most accomplished artists, writers and scholars to live there, making freely available to them his extensive library to which he was constantly adding valuable new manuscripts. He loved books himself, both the reading and possessing of them, and could quote long passages from his favourite authors. Even when his finances were peculiarly strained he always contrived in some way – often selling benefices or cardinals’ hats – to help those writers and scholars, poets and dramatists, who came to him for help. He gave his support to the Roman Academy; he helped to reorganize the University, increasing the range of facilities and the number of professors; he encouraged the use and study of the Latin language and made money available to Latin prose writers and poets; he brought Lascaris to Rome and suggested that he should edit and print the Greek manuscripts in his possession.
It had to be admitted, though, that his own taste was far from impeccable. Those few of his writings that have survived display none of his father’s talent. His attempts at musical composition were even less successful; and, although he engaged the best European choristers for the Sistine Chapel, the music that he liked to listen to best, humming to himself and waving his plump, white hands in the air, was considered trivial. So, too, was his taste in the literature of his own times. Apart from their comedies, he did not esteem Machiavelli or Ariosto highly; nor did he admire Guicciardini. Indeed, those who profited most from his lavish patronage were far inferior writers such as Bernardo Accolti, whose work Leo professed to admire almost as highly as did Accolti himself.
The Pope’s neglect of Michelangelo, however, seems to have been due less to his failure to appreciate his greatness than to his lack of patience with the artist’s abrasive temperament. Michelangelo, who had been encouraged to come to Rome by Julius II, was gloomy, touchy, independent and self-absorbed, choosing to work in a locked room, quite unwilling to follow unquestioningly any patron’s brief or to undertake to finish a work in any given period. The Pope professed to feel a deep affection for him and would relate ‘almost with tears in his eyes’ how they had been brought up together as boys; but they never really got on well together. The Pope encouraged Michelangelo to become an architect and urged him to leave Rome and return to Florence in order to provide a new façade for Brunelleschi’s San Lorenzo.4 Leo far preferred to deal with the younger, more complaisant, unobtrusive and polite Raffaello Sanzio.
Raphael, a native of Urbino, had already been set to work on the decoration of the official apartments of the apostolic palace by Julius II to whose notice he had been recommended by Bramante. Pope Leo asked Raphael to continue with the work; and under their combined direction the Loggie di Raffaello and the lovely halls known as the Stanze di Raffaello were completed.5
XVIII
THE MARCH ON ROME
‘To teach the Pope a lesson he would never forget’
AS OFTEN as he could Pope Leo rode out of Rome to the Villa Magliana, his country house on the road to Porto. Here, continuing to use the advice of the court physicians as his excuse for a flagrant breach of canon law, he indulged to the full his passion for hunting, hawking and ferreting. Huge tracts of land around the villa were reserved for his use. In the grounds an immense netted enclosure was filled with the doves, jays and herons which provided the hawks with their prey, and there was also a conigliare well stocked with rabbits for the ferrets.
At the Villa Magliana, where the Pope would remain for six weeks at a time, he abandoned his stole and rochet, and to the consternation of the papal master of ceremonies actually put on ‘long riding boots, which is most improper, seeing that the people consequently cannot kiss the Pope’s feet’. His poor eyesight did not permit him to participate in the early stages of the hunt, so he rode out on his favourite white horse to watch the killing through his spy-glass from a high mound or specially constructed platform.