The World полностью

In the chapel, Michelangelo built himself wooden scaffolding and lay upside down 140 feet above the floor, painting on to wet plaster nine scenes starting with the beginning of time, dominated by his portrait of God and his divine energy. It took four years, hanging upside down. ‘I lead a miserable existence,’ he told his father. ‘My stomach’s squashed under my chin, my beard’s pointing at heaven, my chest twists like a harpy. My brush above me all the time dribbles …’ For all his gifts, he had moments of doubt: ‘My painting is dead … I’m not a painter.’ Julius inspected the work, clambering up the ladders.

Julius’ artists watched each other jealously: Michelangelo, now thirty, rough and brawny, tormented, infuriated, homosexual; Raphael debonair, courtly, slim, handsome, lover of his model Margherita Luti known as La Fornarina, ‘the baker’s daughter’. While Raphael lived and dressed in style, Michelangelo looked like a peasant, despite earning huge sums that he spent to build up his family’s aristocratic holdings. Leonardo’s fame and Raphael’s rise exasperated the obstreperous and paranoid Michelangelo, who disdained both, particularly the smooth Raphael nine years his junior: ‘All the discords between Pope Julius and me were owing to the envy of Bramante and Raphael.’ When Bramante showed Raphael the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo sneered, ‘Raphael had good reason to be envious since what he knew of art, he learned from me.’

They tried to avoid each other but met once, Michelangelo brooding alone, Raphael with an entourage. Michelangelo cattily asked if this was the chief of police with his posse, at which Raphael wondered if he had encountered an executioner, cast out from society. Yet Michelangelo’s image as a loner is misleading: he lived amid his brigata – the brood – a household of assistants and artists whom he helped train and loved as family. He had a gift for friendship with women, his letters to them witty and loving; and when he fell in love with men, his love letters were vulnerable and passionate.

Julius’ wars started to go wrong. He lost Bologna and grew a beard to grieve – the one depicted by Raphael. In April 1512, he was defeated by Louis XII of France at Ravenna, where his friend Cardinal de’ Medici was captured and almost killed before escaping. Julius sent his daughter Felice – also painted by Raphael – to negotiate with the French, while Medici asked him to use their Spanish allies to retake Florence. Julius agreed. The Spanish stormed the city; Soderini and Machiavelli were overthrown. Cardinal de’ Medici and his brother Giuliano returned as the crowds shouted, ‘Balls! Balls! Palle! Palle!’, referring to the family’s heraldic emblem. The Medici were back.

The balls were spinning. When Julius died of syphilis, Giovanni de Medici was elected pope as Leo X and the cardinals burst out of the Sistine Chapel shouting ‘Balls! Balls!’

LUTHER AND LEO: THE DEVIL’S FAECES AND THE POPE’S ELEPHANT

‘God’s given us the papacy,’ said Leo. ‘Let’s enjoy it.’ And he did, presiding over feasts of ape meat, monkey brains and parrot tongues with sixty starters, naked boys jumping out of pies and a jester who gulped down forty eggs or twenty chickens. He was obese, short-sighted, red-faced and, though often tormented by an anal fistula, cheerful and playful. Yet he was careless with others: when huntsmen were killed on his hunting expeditions, he scarcely noticed: ‘What a day!’

He had known Michelangelo since they were boys in Lorenzo the Magnificent’s palazzo – ‘brothers, nurtured together’, he said – and commissioned him to design the Medici Chapel of Florence’s San Lorenzo. ‘He’s terrible,’ he complained of the artist. ‘One can’t deal with him.’ He preferred Raphael, now painting the Stanze di Raffaello and, after the death of Bramante, in charge of St Peter’s.

Leo, gleaming with jewels, wafting the scents of expensive spices and anal putrefaction, emulated the Borgias and della Roveres in promoting family, choosing his good-natured nephew, Lorenzo, son of Piero, to be ruler of Florence. For Lorenzo, Leo arranged a semi-royal marriage to a cousin of the French king, Madeleine de La Tour d’Auvergne, with whom he had a daughter, Catherine – future queen of France. Days after she was born, Lorenzo died, at which Leo appointed his cousin, Giulio, bastard son of the Giuliano killed by the Pazzi, as cardinal and lord of Florence. While living in Rome, Giulio had fathered a son, Alessandro, with a girl of colour, Simonetta, probably the daughter of African slaves. Medicis owned both white and black slaves.