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The Flowering of the Renaissance. Vincent Cronin
Читать онлайн.Название The Flowering of the Renaissance
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780008106171
Автор произведения Vincent Cronin
Издательство HarperCollins
The Papal States provided the Pope with political independence, but not with economic independence. The States were in fact as much of an economic burden as Rome, which produced nothing and consumed much. Around 1500 Rome, through customs and excise, and the Papal States, through taxes, which were kept low, provided the Pope with 144,400 gold ducats, at a time when the purchasing power of the ducat was approximately that of one pound sterling today.1 Out of this the Pope had to pay costs of administration, as well as troops required to defend the States against other Italian powers, and to coerce any feudal prince who declined to pay his taxes.
It was his need to achieve economic independence that turned the Pope to tax Church property outside Italy. This happened in the reign of John XXII, when the Popes were living in Avignon and the Papal States were in revolt. In 1318 John decreed that in future the holder of a benefice must pay to Rome annates—his first year’s revenue—in order to defray costs of the Church’s administration. Annates and similar taxes provided the Pope with a ‘spiritual revenue’ equal in amount to the ‘temporal revenue’ from Rome and the Papal States. So the Pope achieved his goal of economic independence.
But this independence was constantly jeopardized. The French King, by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1438, reduced annates from France by four-fifths, and then played on the Pope’s need to get the Sanction lifted. A famous example occurred when Louis XI asked Pius II to give the red hat to his favourite, Jouffroy Bishop of Arras. Arras was a tall, handsome, ruddy-cheeked courtier described by the women of Rome, who had good cause to know, as Venus’s Achilles. The sacred college informed Pius that Arras was quite unsuitable, a know-all and a boaster, yet ‘influenced as easily as a child’, while the holy German cardinal, Nicholas of Cusa, actually burst into tears at the proposal. Pius pointed out that Arras, who was Legate to France, had promised to get the Pragmatic Sanction lifted and, if rejected, ‘he will rage like a serpent and spit out all his venom on us.’ Pius was the most eloquent man of his day—eloquence he defined as saying the same thing three times over—and he finally convinced the sacred college. But not content with his red hat, Arras next asked for Besançon and Albi, two very rich sees. Pius said he could have one, but not both, for that would be a grave abuse. Arras flew into a rage, hurled insults and threats at the Pope and finally tried to bribe him, offering 12,000 ducats for both sees. Pius’s patience gave way. ‘Go to the devil,’ he said, and in a sense Arras did. He scandalized Rome with his debauchery and scenes of violence, hurling silver dishes at his servants and even overturning his dining-room table. The Pragmatic Sanction was, however, lifted. Such was the price Popes sometimes had to pay for economic independence. No wonder Pius’s dearest ambition was to see himself at the head of a crusading army, kings as his lieutenants, renewing papal authority with victories over the Turk. Pius’s crusade came to nothing but the economic problem for long continued to bedevil the Papacy.
In 1447 Tommaso Parentucelli, the son of a poor Tuscan physician, was elected Pope with the title Nicholas V. It is an important date because Nicholas was the first Pope for 150 years to spend his whole reign in Rome. During centuries of war with the Emperor and his Ghibelline allies, the Popes could seldom reside for long in so vulnerable a city, and since 1100 they had spent more time outside Rome than in it. But with Nicholas V there began that continual residence which was to make Rome and the Papacy almost interchangeable terms.
The physical return of the Popes coincided with the return to the past we call the classical revival. Nicholas, a modest, peaceable man, had spent much of his earlier life in Florence. He was a close friend of Cosimo de’ Medici, and had been commissioned by him to catalogue Niccolò Niccoli’s library for the Convent of S. Marco. In Florence Nicholas read the newly discovered classical authors. Many priests condemned this ‘pagan’ learning and said it was a mortal sin to read books by adorers of false gods. But Nicholas, like his Florentine friends, welcomed it and recognized at how many points the ancient Greeks and Romans had surpassed the Italians of his day. He saw Ghiberti and Donatello making sculpture according to classical models and Brunelleschi building the soaring dome of Florence cathedral.
Nicholas was the first Pope to patronize the new learning. He invited scholars to Rome to translate into Latin such newly discovered Greek authors as Herodotus, Xenophon, Polybius, Diodorus and Appian. Though Lorenzo Valla had written a treatise discrediting the Donation of Constantine, Nicholas tolerantly made him a papal secretary and commissioned him to translate Thucydides at the handsome fee of 500 ducats. He paid 1000 ducats for the first ten books of Strabo and offered 10,000 for a translation of Homer. If an author showed scruples, the Pope would say kindly, ‘Don’t refuse: you may not find another Nicholas.’ He realized that he was breaking new ground and that later Popes might be less large-minded.
The city of Rome imposed a heavy burden on Nicholas, as on his predecessors. He had to patch up its seemingly endless wall, its old bridges and dozens of medieval churches. So it took an act of courage to decide to stretch already slender resources by beautifying the city. Nicholas called Fra Angelico from Florence to fresco his private chapel in rose and blue with scenes from the lives of St Stephen and St Laurence. He brought Renaud de Maincourt from Paris to found Rome’s first tapestry workshop. He planned to place the Egyptian obelisk near St Peter’s on four colossal figures of the Evangelists, as a spectacular symbol of the harmony between Christian and pagan thought. But his most ambitious plan concerned St Peter’s. The basilica was then 1100 years old, and its southern wall leaned outward to the extent of 3 braccia—4 feet 9 inches. After discussing the matter with the Florentine architect Leon Battista Alberti, Nicholas decided completely to rebuild St Peter’s as a domed basilica with nave and double aisles. He got work started at once on foundations for a new choir, using 2500 cartloads of stone from the Colosseum, and although the foundations rose only six feet in his pontificate, a beginning had been made to a new conception of Rome. As Nicholas explained on his deathbed: If the faith of ordinary men is to be strong, ‘they must have something that appeals to the eye … majestic buildings, imperishable memorials and witnesses seemingly planted by the hand of God.’
Sixtus IV continued Nicholas’s work with all the determination of a Ligurian. He opened, straightened or paved many streets between the new papal residence in the Vatican and the civic centre on the Capitoline Hill. He built the bridge across the Tiber that still bears his name. He built the Sistine Chapel and decorated it with frescoes, notably Perugino’s Giving of the Keys to Peter, and Botticelli’s Old Testament scenes, chosen to show that the Pope was the successor of the priest-kings of Israel. He re-established the Sapienza, as the university of Rome was called, though the professors’ pay several times had to go to soldiers defending the Papal States. One of the professors was Pomponius Laetus, who had learned from Lorenzo Valla the importance of philology in reconstructing history; he made a large collection of Roman inscriptions—only a single Christian example was considered polished enough for inclusion.
Sixtus added 1000 manuscripts to the collection begun by Nicholas, mostly works of theology, philosophy and patristic literature. To house them he also built a splendid library in the new classical style, with round-headed arches on Corinthian columns; its walls were marble, and decorations included Sixtus’s family device, the oak-leaf and acorn. The library was heated in winter—an innovation at that time—and anyone might borrow books on deposit of a small sum. Sixtus got Melozzo da Forlì to paint a commemorative picture of himself in the new library, attended by the first librarian, Platina, and his nephew, Giuliano della Rovere, the future Julius II. Its inscription states that before Sixtus built the library, books had been stacked away ‘in squalor’.
The forty-odd cardinals whose role it was to help the Pope govern the Church also began to build. Raffaello Riario, another of Sixtus’s nephews, was lucky enough to win, in a single night’s gambling, the huge sum of 60,000 ducats, and sensible enough to spend it on what is perhaps the most beautiful of all Roman houses, later to be known as the Palazzo della Cancelleria. Though sparsely furnished, the cardinals’ new dwellings were hung with brocade draperies and their tables gleamed with heavy silver. Profiting from the recent improvement in textiles, the cardinals dressed in fine robes of red watered silk, adding for the street