LITMIR.BIZ

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importance of his mildly amusing play lies in its tone. Sexual love is praised as the sweetest pleasure in the world, anyone who does not enjoy it is a fool, but it is constantly being thwarted as the man in question turns out to be a woman. The constant references to changes of sex and hermaphrodites point to a general truth which Bibbiena puts into the mouth of one of his characters: ‘Everyone knows that women are so highly valued today that there isn’t a man who does not imitate them, down to becoming a woman in body and soul.’ The classical revival had titillated appetites which because of the vow of celibacy could not be satisfied, and in a predominantly masculine city this could, and often did, lead to effeminacy. Tommaso Inghirami, Vatican Librarian and one of Rome’s leading orators, whose round face and upturned eyes with a cast are familiar from Raphael’s portrait, was actually known by the name Phaedra, after playing that role in Seneca’s Hippolytus.

      Another comedy, Ariosto’s I Suppositi, Leo staged in the palace of his nephew, Cardinal Cibo, in 1519. The Pope ‘took his place at the door and quietly, with his blessing, gave permission to enter, as he saw fit.’ Two thousand crowded in, causing such a crush that the Ferrarese ambassador almost had a leg broken. Leo took his place on a dais in the front row; his name was spelled out by candelabra on either side of the stage, and on the curtain, which Raphael had designed, Leo’s favourite buffoon was depicted sporting amid devils. Fifes, bagpipes, violas and comets provided gay music.

      Ariosto’s play is inspired by Terence’s Eunuch and Plautus’s Captives. A young couple much in love but too poor to marry contrive to thwart the advances of a rich old suitor; after much duplicity and deceit, the hero comes into money, casts off his servant’s disguise and marries the girl who for two years has secretly been his mistress. In one scene a parasite named Pasifilio reads the hand of the suitor, Cleando. Here is a snatch of their dialogue translated by Gascoigne in The Supposes of 1566, which is sometimes described as the first English comedy worthy of the name:

       Pasiphilo: O how straight and infracte is this line of life!

       You will live to the yeeres of Melchisedech.

       Cleando: Thou wouldst say, Methusalem.

       Pasiphilo: Why, is it not all one?

       Cleando: I perceive you are no very good Bibler, Pasiphilo.

       Pasiphilo: Yes, sir, an excellent good Bibbelere, specially in a bottle.

      At these and similar jokes Leo laughed heartily, which shocked Frenchmen in the audience. They thought it unseemly that a Pope should attend so frivolous a play.

      A third comedy to be staged in Rome, at Leo’s special request, was Machiavelli’s Mandragola. A Florentine youth named Callimaco falls in love with Lucrezia, the virtuous young wife of an impotent husband, Nicia. Callimaco poses as a doctor and persuades Nicia that a potion of mandrake can cure Lucrezia’s childlessness. There is, however, one snag. The first to sleep with a woman who has taken such a potion, dies. So a stranger must be introduced for the night to Lucrezia’s bed, and Callimaco firmly intends to be that stranger. For a fee the local priest, Fra Timoteo, persuades Lucrezia to accept the outrageous plan, and next morning, after the trick has been successfully perpetrated, takes them all to church in a general mood of self-congratulation.

      Once again the play turns on sexual inadequacy, which here appears to reflect a deeper inadequacy, Florence’s recent fiasco on the battlefield. For Callimaco, the potent: young lover, has just returned from Paris, and it is in Paris that he has learned the reckless insolence which enables him to seduce Lucrezia. Her name, too, is significant, for the patrician girl who committed suicide had, by Botticelli and others, been made a familiar symbol of Florence in defeat.

      As well as comedy, Leo also liked farce. He often summoned to Rome a famous Sienese troupe called I Rozzi—the Rough Ones—to perform dialect burlesques in which country bumpkins declare their love in boorish similes, play crude practical jokes and fall prey to a stereotyped villain. Sometimes pastoral and mythological elements were mixed in, and the coarse rustics would be joined by Arcadian shepherds: a happy combination which Shakespeare was later to use in As You Like It.

      Leo’s patronage of the theatre was criticized by some, and his biographer, Bishop Paolo Giovio, felt it necessary to defend the Pope’s attendance at comedies such as Mandragola: it is significant that he pointed as a precedent to Trajan. But Leo knew what he was about. It was proper that the head of the Church should be in touch with the body, proper that he should understand what was being said and thought by the writers of his day. And it doubtless did not escape his notice that the line, ‘Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto’ occurs in a play by Terence. By his tolerant attitude Leo showed that the Church had nothing to fear from the theatre; by his patronage he played an important part in encouraging Italian comedy and farce during their formative years.

      Leo also continued his predecessor’s patronage of Raphael. The young painter from Urbino had now become the idol of Rome and would walk the streets attended by fifty admiring artist friends. One day Michelangelo in his grim way called out: ‘Where are you going, surrounded like a provost?’ to which Raphael replied: ‘And you, all alone like an executioner?’ But despite their different temperaments, Raphael admired Michelangelo and added his portrait to The School of Athens, an almost Sistine figure pondering on the lowest step beside a block of stone. As commissions poured in, Raphael employed a large workshop to do the rough work and quickly amassed a fortune of 16,000 ducats, twice as much as Michelangelo would earn in a life more than twice as long. But he retained his modest amiable manner, even when he moved into a splendid new house designed by Bramante and adorned on the outside with classical columns.

      Leo’s most important commission to Raphael are the cartoons for ten tapestries to hang on the lower walls of the Sistine Chapel. The subject Leo chose is the very one rejected by Michelangelo, namely humble incidents in the lives of the Apostles. These include Peter’s healing of the lame man and Paul’s imprisonment. In his choice of two of the other subjects Leo shows the same interest as Julius and Michelangelo in the close link between early Christian and pagan thought. The first depicts the scene in Lystra when certain citizens, impressed by the Apostles’ miracles, called Barnabas Jupiter, and Paul Mercury, because he was the chief speaker; ‘and the priest of Jupiter, Defender of the City, brought out bulls and wreaths to the gates, eager, like the multitude, to do sacrifice,’ a folly from which the Apostles dissuaded them. The second scene shows Paul preaching in Athens, seeking to convince the Athenians by quoting not the Old Testament but their own poets—Aratus, Cleanthes and Epimenides—in support of his claim that we are all the children of God. Taken together, the two scenes amounted to a clear statement that Christianity was a fulfilment of pagan insights. This of course chimed in with the view that Christian Rome was a fulfilment of the imperial city.

      The tapestries cost 16,000 ducats, of which Raphael received one thousand, and seldom has a fee been better earned. In contrast to, and complementing, Michelangelo’s vault, Raphael’s seven surviving cartoons are imbued with the New Testament spirit, in particular with what may be termed the grandeur of simplicity. Perhaps the best of them, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, shows the apostles divided between two boats. In one John and James raise a net, their bent straining bodies clearly inspired by a figure in Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina. In the other Andrew recognizes the miracle with outstretched arms, while Peter kneels humbly before the seated figure of Christ, and although placed at the extreme left edge it is Christ who dominates the whole scene, partly by virtue of his calm attitude, partly because he partakes of the open sea and sky above him. Since a classical note was de rigueur, Raphael introduces to the foreground three cranes, a symbol of filial obedience. For all its drama, the main impression of this great drawing is one of serenity and Christian trustfulness.

      As a counterpart to the tapestries Leo, who loved music, engaged the best choristers from Flanders, France, Greece and Mantua to sing divine Office in the Sistine Chapel, thus making it an artistic as well as liturgical holy of holies. Their voices must surely have gained in jubilation under Michelangelo’s newly painted vault and amid Raphael’s newly woven tapestries, hung at Christmas 1519. After a good performance Leo would sit enraptured, head sunk

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