The Flowering of the Renaissance
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If Leo’s intentions in Rome were praiseworthy, and many of his achievements admirable, they were not without grave danger. The danger arose from the nature of the city and the nature of his court, the one inorganic and unproductive, the other without any real roots in Rome, an all-male society living away from family and place of origin, both therefore tending to artificiality and exaggeration in a way the Florentines would never have countenanced.
Let us take the matter of a pure Latin style. This demanded the use of words sanctioned by classical authors. When poets described SS. Peter and Paul as ‘Dii tutelares Romae’, when they translated ‘excommunicate’ by ‘forbid fire and water’, turned ‘to forgive the sins of a dying man’ into ‘to appease the powers of Hades and the Manes’, when faith became ‘persuasion’, a priest ‘a flamen’, the Vatican ‘the Capitol’ and Mary a ‘goddess’, or even ‘Diana’, they were blurring the distinctiveness of Revelation. Real misunderstanding crept in when Christ was referred to as ‘hero’ or ‘Apollo’, and the Christian message transformed into a ‘philosophy’ compatible with the humane ethic of classical Rome. In one of his sermons Tommaso Inghirami compares the death of Jesus to the oratorical power of Cicero because he filled his disciples first with sadness and consternation, then with triumphant joy. He then likens Jesus to Curtius, Cecrops, Aristides, Epamonidas and even Iphigenia, who were all devoted to the common good. The sermon would have horrified Savonarola, all the more since it was delivered on Good Friday, yet his audience considered that Inghirami had surpassed himself.
Closely linked with this danger was another, which Petrarch had been the first to spot. Against Cicero’s statement in the De Natura Deorum that men are quite willing to attribute their prosperity to the gods, but not their virtue—‘virtutem autem nemo deo acceptam rettulit,’ Petrarch had written ‘Cave male dicas: Be careful what you say.’ The poet’s warning went unheeded among the leading spirits of Leo’s Rome. Even the pious Sadoleto described wisdom as a human virtue naturally acquired, and declared that sages such as Socrates, Plato and Cicero were in every respect complete and perfect men, despite the fact that they had never received the Church’s grace-giving sacraments. Formerly man was deemed to have value only in so far as he partook of heavenly grace, but now it was man who had value in himself, and Vasari could write of Raphael after his death: ‘We can be sure that just as he embellished the world with his talent, so his soul now adorns heaven itself.’ This exaltation of man was of course a form of osmosis in a world flooded by classical values. If there was any betrayal of Christian truth, it was quite unconscious. It was none the less dangerous for that, especially if doings or phrases were to be interpreted out of context by men living far from Rome and unfamiliar with her new, rather peculiar conventions.
Exaltation of man led to exaltation of particular men, notably the Popes. It has to be remembered that fulsome language was a feature of the age: the satirist Pietro Aretino was variously addressed as ‘Precellentissimo’, ‘Unichissimo’, ‘Divino’, and ‘Omnipotente’, but in Rome adulation went beyond bounds. Orators and poets addressed the Pope as once their forbears had addressed those Emperors who believed themselves divine. Inghirami hailed Julius as a Jupiter making the universe tremble with his frown, a Dominican poet compared Leo to the sun-god Apollo, while Giovanni Capito addressed these lines to the elephant Annone:
If you think you are serving a Libyan Lion
You err: this Leo came down from the skies.
He is your master, the world’s highest glory,
Whose head is crowned with the tiara,
Holding among men a more than mortal rank:
With the right to close and open the world’s frontiers.
If to serve God is truly to reign, then you,
As Leo’s servant, truly reign, Leo being God on earth.
Like every great lord, Leo had his ‘taster’ to sample all food for possible poison, but against this particular kind of poisonous sugar he had no one to defend him, and the tragedy is that sometimes he succumbed. When his brother Giuliano died in 1516 it was expected that Leo would order the Court into mourning and take part in the solemn funeral ceremonies. But Leo decided otherwise. A Pope, he informed his master of ceremonies, should place himself above family griefs: he should consider himself ‘quia ipse jam non ut homo sed ut semi deus—not as a man, but as a demi-god.’
The final evil of Leo’s reign stems jointly from the peculiar nature of Rome and from the Pope’s character. Rome was not only unproductive, it had no native traditions of craftsmanship or art. So that in civilizing Rome, Leo had to bring everything from outside. The poets came from outside, so did the musicians, the painters, the architects. Of 267 artists who worked in Rome between 1503 and 1605 only seventeen were Romans, and only one—Giulio Romano—became famous. They had to be lured to Rome by high fees, they had to be well housed, and this meant that the cost of civilization was enormously increased. And the man who was paying for all this was open-handed to a fault. ‘Liberalitas Pontificia’ proclaimed one of Leo’s medals—and the medal, like everything else commissioned by the Pope, from tiara to silver stirrups—was a beautiful object, designed at great expense. After a game of chess, win or lose, Leo would hand his opponent several gold ducats before blessing the board and leaving. He increased the papal household to 683 and spent on it twice as much as Julius. He would give 50 ducats for one bottle of amber, 500 at a time for sables and ermines, 900 for three gold chains. He gave Guido Postumo 300 ducats and a new house for versifying his hunts, 33 ducats a quarter to a favourite trombonist, a castle and the title of count to a lutenist named Giammaria Leo. He could not possibly afford to be so open-handed, even though papal revenue had risen to 420,000 ducats. As early as 1515 he was in arrears with the pay of his 88 university professors, some of whom began to seek more stable positions elsewhere. And so the scramble for money began.
First thing when he woke, before prayers, before Mass, the datary Gianmatteo Giberti entered the Pope’s bedroom—Leo liked to lie in—and there discussed who should get what benefice and for how much. Bishoprics, abbeys, even quite small parishes—all had their price, and if an applicant held one already, so much the better, because to hold a second he would have to pay. Then there were the saleable offices in the Curia and in the municipality. Leo doubled these to a total of 2150, thus raising 1,200,000 ducats, on which, however, an annual interest of 328,000 ducats had to be paid, since holders received more than 10% return on what was in effect a State investment. But the most profitable item of all was the creation of cardinals, forty-two in all, of whom at least thirty owed their red hats to money or political influence, which in the last resort also meant money: so the Church was no more independent as a result of returning to Rome, only it was now subject to money rather than to the threat of force. Ponzetti, who finally secured the cardinalate at the age of eighty, is said to have stopped a soldier in the street, and removing the soldier’s cap to have measured it thoughtfully. ‘Your hat is two inches bigger than mine, but yours cost one ducat, whereas mine cost 60,000.’ He was not exaggerating.
Even so, income failed to match expenditure, and Leo had to borrow: 32,000 ducats from the Gaddi, with the proviso that one of the family would receive the red hat; from the Ricasoli 10,000; from the father of Cardinal Salviati 150,000. In 1521, when his overdraft reached 156,000 ducats, Leo accorded the Bini brothers, Florentine bankers, the right to sell to the highest bidder offices in the Curia, and as surety gave them Paul II’s jewelled mitre, Julius II’s tiara, and ‘the sacred pontifical silver vessels, including those used for the celebration of divine service’.
It was under these conditions that Leo grappled with the immense task bequeathed him by Julius, the building of St Peter’s. When Bramante died in 1514 he placed Raphael in charge and allocated him 60,000 ducats, whereupon Raphael remarked that the basilica would cost a million—as it eventually did. At least 10,000 ducats a year would be required, probably much more in these early stages, and Leo looked around for ways of raising such a sum. His predecessor had issued a bull, Liquet omnibus, granting Christians remission of punishment due to past sins, on condition that they went to confession and contributed according to their means to the fund for building St Peter’s. Living well within his income, Julius had been able to raise sufficient money by publishing the bull only in Italy. Although there were signs that indulgences were abused and resented abroad, Leo decided to extend the bull. He spoke of a basilica ‘which is first among all the churches of the world and, as it were, the fixed home of Christianity’; ‘since the income of the Apostolic Chamber is insufficient to meet the cost of such an incredibly vast work, the help of Christians is urgently needed.’ In the fateful month of December 1514 Pope Leo X appointed commissioners—who, incidentally, were scrupulously honest—to administer the St Peter’s indulgence in Avignon and the surrounding Comtat; also in Cologne, Trier, Salzburg, Bremen and other provinces of Germany.
CHAPTER 4
The Challenge from Germany
IN 1515 Giangiorgio Trissino, a highly cultivated patrician of Vicenza, visited Germany as the Pope’s nuncio and was deeply struck ‘by the horror of huge forests, deep marshes and barren plains. Winds and snow whip that unhappy land; the soil is like iron and encrusted with ice…. A barbarous people shut themselves up in warm houses and laugh at the Arctic blasts, gaming and drinking far into the night.’
Trissino is stating, rather unsympathetically perhaps, the basic truth that Italy and Germany are profoundly different lands. Wittenberg, in central Germany, lies nine degrees north of Rome, and here nature is not a friend but a wolf to be kept at bay. The people of such a region are physically robust, steeled by hard occupations like mining and forestry. They make brave soldiers. It was Germans who inflicted their most serious defeat on Augustus’s legions and, first in tribes and now in innumerable principalities, they had waged war often and bitterly. They were familiar with suffering, took it indeed for granted. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century German art abounds in Pietàs and St Sebastians dripping with blood, teeth bared in agony. But there was genuine piety as well as horror. German artists emphasized the unjust suffering of Christ because, in their harsh world of violence and torture, this allied him with them.
Where Italians suppressed or embellished the dark side of life, Germans fixed attention on it. When depicting the Trinity, Raphael showed Christ standing in triumph, but Dürer placed him agonizing on the Cross. Dürer was the first artist to depict a syphilitic. His portraits of himself and of Oswald Krell reveal men who are disturbed. Their eyes are burning, their hands, one senses, are restless. They are subject to nightmarish dreams such as one which left Dürer ‘trembling all over’. They look inward, finding themselves ‘fools’, experiencing doubts as terrible as that described by Ulrich von Hutten in a youthful poem with the significant title of ‘Nobody’. They find the world not tidily terraced, but craggy and baffling. In Melencolia I Dürer depicted a new archetype of human inadequacy: a winged female figure, hand on chin, brooding darkly amid unsolved problems. But the problems demanded solution, because over this awesome world stood a God even more awesome, severe as their climate, a God who was a Judge. This God was represented in The Last Judgment—a subject much commoner in Germany than in Italy—towering over the damned, who suffer torments terrible as those being inflicted in real life on German witches: whip, thumbscrew, rack and studded chair slowly heated from below.
These people were deeply religious. But they could never feel at one with nature in quite the same way as the Italians. And so their piety took a different direction. John of Wesel in Erfurt and Conrad Summenhardt in Tübingen had tended, often excessively, to depreciate the value of works and to emphasize inwardness, faith in the suffering Christ. Inwardness was fostered by the reading of spiritual books, for the Germans, leading a largely indoor life, read much more than did Italians. They were particularly devoted to the Bible: it is no accident that this was the first considerable work to issue from Gutenberg’s press. The first Bible to appear in the vernacular was also a German publication, and no fewer than fourteen German Bibles appeared before 1522. In his inaugural address at Wittenberg Philip Melanchthon described his joy in the text of Scripture: how its true meaning lights up ‘like the midday sun’, adding ominously, ‘All the countless dry glossaries, concordances, discordances and the like are only hindrances for the Spirit.’
Study of the Bible, especially of the early Church, brought into relief existing evils and intensified a desire for reform. Between 1450 and 1515 Germans held four provincial councils and no less than a hundred diocesan synods in order to try and correct abuses such as simony and appointment of unsuitable bishops, without, however, any noticeable effect. Yet there remained a thirst for reform, for a pure religion like that of the early Christians.
Differences of land and climate, of physiology and psychology, of language and aesthetics, as well as different individual and collective experiences had created if not a radically different soul, at least radically different spiritual needs and forms from the ones obtaining in Italy. This in itself was no bad thing. The one Gospel is recorded in very different ways by the four Evangelists, and Christendom had gained not lost from being polyphonic. But such a situation clearly called for understanding, and this in turn for communication. Now, communication had seldom been worse. Fighting in Lombardy had reduced trans-Alpine travel to a trickle. Of fifty-four cardinals under Julius II and Leo X, only two were Germans, and of these the interests of one were exclusively political. Roman Legates in Germany were merely diplomats, and they seldom spoke German. If German reform plans ever reached Rome, too often they were ignored because the officials concerned had only a sketchy knowledge of actual conditions.
Desire for reform crystallized therefore in a growing antipathy to Rome. Germans disliked the fact that Alexander VI had kept a mistress, that Julius took part in battles, and that Leo attended comedies and banquets. They disliked the Pope’s claim to be heir of the Roman Emperors, and the seizure of Piacenza and Parma, which since the eleventh century had owed allegiance, albeit formal, to the German Emperor. They disliked the Italian domination of the Church which followed on the Popes’ return to Rome. They disliked papal domination of the Fifth Lateran Council, the petty reforms it proposed, and the loopholes therein: a cardinal’s funeral must cost no more than 1500 crowns ‘unless there is just cause’. Above all, they disliked the ‘spiritual’ taxes and dispensations, whereby, they believed, they footed the bill for Leo’s poets and artists, musicians and goldsmiths—all the expensive business of this new Christian humanism. The taxes were constantly increasing—the one on briefs had risen fivefold in sixty years—and on this whole matter several diets during the fifteenth century had gone so far as to break with Rome.
Into this world and sharing many of its values Martin Luther was born on 10 November 1483. He was the son of a peasant who had risen to be a well-off mining operator in Eisleben, a town, incidentally, which lies 770 miles from Rome but only 100 miles from heretical Bohemia. Physically strong, his craggy face marked by high cheekbones and a firm jaw, Luther described himself as ‘rough, boisterous, stormy and altogether warlike, I am born to fight against innumerable monsters and devils.’
The Devil loomed large for Luther and, when he came to write his Greater Catechism, he was to cite the name of the Devil sixty-seven times, compared to sixty-three citations for the Saviour. As a law student he was one day caught in a thunderstorm and almost struck by lightning. This near escape from death impressed him deeply, and he vowed to enter religion. In 1505 he joined the Augustinians, two years later receiving the priesthood.
Luther attended the recently founded university in Wittenberg, a town of 2000 inhabitants, mainly brewers. Here degree requirements were lenient, and Luther took his doctorate in theology in five years instead of the usual twelve. He therefore skipped scholastic niceties and stuck to what he calls ‘the kernel of the grain and the marrow of the bones’, by which he meant Scripture. In 1512 he became Professor of Scripture at Wittenberg.
Luther was a deeply religious man who sought perfection in his chosen life: ‘I would have martyred myself to death with fasting, prayer, reading and other good works.’ But try as he might he could never attain his own ideal of goodness. This puzzled and troubled him deeply, for the whole trend of the age was to emphasize man’s will, his powers of achievement. But always Luther felt his complete unworthiness before God, whom he had been brought up to believe was above all a Judge. ‘We grew pale at the mention of Christ, for he was always represented to us as a severe judge, angry with us.’ ‘When will you do enough,’ Luther asked himself, ‘to win God’s clemency?’ And it became clear that the answer was, Never.
How then could he be saved? As a Professor of Scripture, Luther sought an answer in the New Testament, and as an Augustinian, in the commentaries of the founder of his Order. Now it so happened that a complete edition of St Augustine’s works, in nine volumes, had for the first time become available in 1506. Augustine had started life as a Manichaean, and the Manichaean battle between matter which is bad and the spirit which is good marks nearly all his writings. Moreover, in a fight to the death with the heresy of Pelagius, who denied original sin, Augustine had laid a sometimes excessive emphasis on man’s need for grace, and his incapacity to do good unaided. Both characteristics appealed to something deep in the German character, and notably in Luther’s. To the question, How then could he be saved? Luther found an answer in the 17th verse of the first chapter of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans as interpreted by St Augustine. Not efforts of will, but faith alone could justify man before God, and this faith was not something to be toiled for, not a result of virtus, but a free gift from above, a grace. Grace, moreover, was granted to man irrespective of his merit, and God’s decision to grant or withhold it lay completely beyond the range of human understanding. This discovery comforted Luther, who believed that formerly he had been on the wrong track.
In 1510 Luther visited Rome on business for his Order. ‘I fell on my knees,’ he says, ‘held up my hands to heaven and cried “Hail, holy Rome, sanctified by the holy martyrs and by the blood they shed here.”’ Luther was not a humanist save in so far as he valued sound texts of Scripture and the Fathers, and he took no interest in the Sistine ceiling or the Laocoön. He was annoyed by the speed at which Roman priests said Mass: ‘By the time I reached the Gospel the priest next to me had already ended and was shouting “Come on, finish, hurry up.”’ But this was hardly a scandal to Luther, whose own life had become so hectic by 1516 that he wrote: ‘Rarely do I have time for the prayers of the breviary or for saying Mass.’
What did profoundly shock Luther in Rome was the Renaissance itself. Aristotle’s Ethics was a prime text in Rome and it figures in Raphael’s Stanze; Luther abhorred the book, declaring it ‘grace’s most dangerous enemy’. Italians, particularly since the revival of Platonism around 1460, held the created world to be both good and beautiful. Luther did not find the world either good or beautiful. He was shocked by the way clergy and laity alike had reconciled the spiritual with the physical, the pursuit of salvation with the pursuit of happiness here and now. While remaining spiritual beings directed towards the life beyond, they had completely adjusted themselves to the world below. Hence Luther’s complaint that the Italians were ‘Epicureans’. ‘If, they say, we had to believe the word of God in entirety, we should be the most miserable of men, and could never know a moment’s gaiety.’
Luther returned to Wittenberg in 1511 to resume teaching and his study of St Augustine. Presently one of the great German princes, Albert of Hohenzollern, decided to acquire the archbishopric of Mainz. Since he was only twenty-four and thus well below the prescribed age, and furthermore was already Bishop of Magdeburg and Halberstadt, he applied to Rome for a costly dispensation. In order to help Albert, Pope Leo agreed that the St Peter’s indulgence should be preached in North Germany on special terms. The great banking family of the Fuggers would advance the dispensation payment in return for administering the indulgence, half the proceeds of which would go to Albert, half to building St Peter’s. As part of the ensuing campaign in 1517 a Dominican named Johann Tetzel began preaching near Wittenberg. He was somewhat imprudent in his methods, especially regarding indulgences for the dead, and a famous verse was attributed to him:
As soon as the coin in the coffer rings,
The soul into heaven springs.
Luther watched in dismay as the brewers of Wittenberg trooped across the Elbe to buy Tetzel’s indulgence: those earning 500 gold guilders a year paid six guilders, those earning 200, three, and so on. For one who believed that man was justified by faith alone, the notion of achieving forgiveness by works, still more by work in the form of money, was utterly repugnant. Luther decided to protest. By nature conservative in his attitude to society, he did so in the approved manner, by writing letters describing the abuse to four local bishops. The result proved disappointing. Some scoffed at his scruples, others pointed out that this indulgence was the Pope’s and outside their control.
Luther then drafted 95 theses stating his views on indulgences and other matters, and posted them on the door of the university church: a usual way of inviting discussion and in no sense a gesture of defiance. The first four theses are related and evidently express what was then uppermost in Luther’s mind:
1. Our Lord and Master Christ, in saying ‘Do penance’, intended the whole life of every man to be penance.
2. This word cannot be understood as referring to penance as a sacrament (that is, confession and satisfaction, as administered by the ministry of priests).
3. This word also does not refer solely to inner penitence; indeed there is no penitence unless it produces various outward mortifications of the flesh.
4. Therefore punishment [of sin] remains as long as the hatred of self (that is, true inward penitence), namely until entering the kingdom of heaven.
The key words in the 95 theses—‘tribulations’, ‘fear’, ‘punishment’, ‘despair’, ‘horror’—would have puzzled an Italian. Indeed, they are conspicuous by their absence from Italian writings of the day. Partly they reflect the national temperament, but to a larger degree they reflect Luther’s own spiritual crisis and the solution to it he had found in St Augustine. Luther makes plain in the 95 theses that what counts in Christianity is inner disposition, not rites and sacraments. In February 1518 he made the point more forcefully still by addressing to Rome a highly critical Resolution concerning the Virtue of Indulgences.
Rome was now directly involved. At this time the city had only one topic of conversation: whether or not Roman citizenship should be conferred on Christophe Longueil, a French resident who had changed his name to Longolius and made stirringly Ciceronian speeches in praise of the city. Longolius had once compared Augustus unfavourably with Charlemagne: Leo thought this youthful indiscretion should be overlooked, but others held that it marked Longolius as an irredeemable barbarian. It is one of the tragedies of history that the large-minded Leo, who knew Germany at first hand from his years of exile, had never studied theology, and was therefore incompetent to treat with Luther, as he did with Longolius. The Luther affair passed to the Master of the Sacred Palace, a highly intransigent Dominican named Sebastiano Prierias, who once stated that ‘anyone who denies that the doctrine of the Roman Church and of the Roman Pontiff is virtually infallible, so that even Holy Scripture draws its force and authority therefrom, is a heretic.’ Shocked by Luther’s Resolution Prierias dashed off a reply, abusing the German roundly, calling him a son of a bitch, and centring his arguments less on Luther’s statements than on the fact that a humble friar had dared to question the teaching of the Pope.