Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel and the End of Republican Florence [i]
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
ConnecticutCollege
New London, CT06320
(This essay was written in 1993 and has been revised periodically.)
Historical Background
The Medici Chapel is attached to the family church of San Lorenzo, designed by Brunelleschi in the 1420s at the behest of Cosimo de’ Medici who was the first of many prominent Medici to be buried there. (By the early eighteenth century, San Lorenzo housed the tombs of fifteen Medici.)
Built over a fifteen year period under two Medici popes, Leo X (1513-21) and Clement VII (1523-34), the Medici Chapel addresses the larger history of Medici politics in Florence, Rome, and central Italy from 1494 to 1534. Not long after his election to the papacy, Leo X celebrated Medici power by organizing a grand classical festival in Rome on the Capitoline Hill (later redesigned by Michelangelo). Staged in a temporary theater fronted by a triumphal arch, this festival conferred Roman citizenship on the pope’s brother Giuliano and his nephew, Lorenzo. They were also elevated to generals in the papal army and proclaimed “Captains of Rome”. This was how they would later appear in the Medici Chapel.
The rise of Leo X also allowed the family to seize power in Florence and reverse the shame of their expulsion in 1494. With the help of Northern European forces, the family had already returned to their hometown in 1512. The election of Leo X the following year allowed the Medici to overthrow the republican regime which had ruled since their expulsion and which had placed Michelangelo’s David in front of the town hall as a warning to all would be tyrants. Leo X placed Florence under the control of his brother, Giuliano de' Medici, one of the two duke-generals commanding the papal army. It was these two generals whose tombs Michelangelo later designed for the Medici Chapel.
To inscribe Medici power permanently into the city’s architectural fabric, Leo X forced Michelangelo to abandon the Roman tomb project for Julius II (d. 1512) and design a facade for the unfinished church of San Lorenzo. Though Michelangelo designed the new facade, numerous problems and delays prevented its construction.
In 1515, Pope Leo X further dramatized Medici power in Florence by celebrating two triumphal festivities in the city during the annual celebration of Carnival, a Catholic festival of spring observed all over Europe. In this procession, costumed actors and decorated floats allegorized the return of Medicean power as the restoration or rebirth (renaissance) of a new Golden Age of political, commercial, moral, and cultural prosperity. In this way, they fused church culture, seasonal change, and the Renaissance humanist political rhetoric of the Golden Age.
By good fortune, a contemporary description of this festival survives in Vasari's biography of the artist entrusted with the pictorial decorations, Jacopo Pontormo. According to Vasari,
... At the carnival of that year, there were great rejoicings in Florence over the creation of Leo X, and, among other festivities, two were caried out at the expense of two companies of lords and nobles of the city. The head of one of these, called the Diamond, was Giuliano de' Medici, the Pope's brother ... that of the other ... had Lorenzo, son of Piero de' Medici, as its head, with a dried laurel branch, with new leaves springing forth, to show the revival of his great grandfather's name [an earlier Lorenzo de' Medici]. Andrea Dazzi, who was then professing Greek and Latin at the University of Florence, was charged by the Diamond company to devise something for a triumph. ...
After a brief description of Dazzi's triumphal procession of three elaborately painted and decorated Roman chariots symbolizing the three ages of man, Vasari turned to the other procession with its Golden Age imagery.
Signor Lorenzo, head of the Branch company, having seen these things and desiring to surpass them, gave the charge of all to Jacopo Nardi, a noble and learned man (to whom his native Florence was afterwards much bound). This Jacopo arranged six triumphs, double the number to those of the Diamond. The first, drawn by oxen draped with grass, represented the golden age of Saturn and Janus. At the top of the cart were Saturn with the scythe and two-headed Janus holding the keys of the temple of Peace, with Fury bound at his feet, and countless things pertaining to Saturn, beautifully coloured by Pontormo. Six pairs of shepherds accompanied this car, dressed in sable and martin's fur, wearing shoes of antique pattern and with garlands on their heads of many kinds of leaves. The horses on which they rode were without saddles, but covered with the skins of lions, tigers and wolves, the gilded claws of which hung gracefully at the sides. The cruppers had gold cord and the spurs bore the heads of sheep, dogs and other animals. The bridles were made of various kinds of verdure and silver cord. Each shepherd had four footmen dressed as shepherds of a simple kind in other skins, bearing torches made like dry branches and with pine-branches, very beautiful to see. The second car, drawn by two pairs of oxen draped with rich cloth, with garlands on their heads and large beads hanging from their gilt horns, carried Numa Pompilius, second king of the Romans, with the books of religion and all the priestly trappings and necessaries for sacrifice, as he was the first of the Romans to regulate religion and sacrifices. Six priests accompanied the car on handsome mules, their heads covered with cloth hoods embroidered with gold and silver ivy leaves, worked with mastery. They wore ancient sacerdotal vestments, with rich gold borders and fringes, some carrying a censer and some a gold vase or something similar. Their footmen were like Levites, whose torches resembled ancient candelabra. The third car represented the consulship of Titus Manlius Torquatus, consul after the end of the first Carthagenian war, and who governed so that Rome flourished in virtue and prosperity. This car, decorated with many fine ornaments by Pontormo, was drawn by eight fine horses, preceded by six pairs of senators on horseback in togas covered with a gold web, accompanied by lictors with the fasces, axes and other instruments of justice. The fourth car, drawn by buffaloes dressed as elephants, represented Julius Caesar triumphing for his victory over Cleopatra, on a car painted with his most famous deeds by Pontormo. Six pairs of men-at-arms in rich and shining armour accompanied him, having gold fringes, and with their lances at their sides. Their half-armored footmen carried torches in the form of trophies of different kinds. The fifth car, drawn by winged horses like griffins, had Augustus, the ruler of the universe, accompanied by six pairs of poets on horseback, crowned like Caesar with laurel and dressed according to their provinces. Each poet bore a scroll inscribed with his name. On the sixth car, drawn by six pairs of heifers richly caparisoned, was the Emperor Trajan, before whose car, richly painted by Pontormo, rode six pairs of doctors of law, with togas down to their feet and cloaks of ermine, such as they anciently wore. The footment carrying torches were scribes, copyists and notaries, with books and writings in their hands. After them came the car of the Golden Age, richly made, with many figures in relief by Baccio Bandinelli and beautiful paintings by Pontormo, among which the four cardinal Virtues were much admired. In the midst of the car was a great globe, upon which lay a man, as if dead, his arms all rusted, his back open and emerging therefrom a naked gilded child, representing the Golden Age revived by the creation of the Pope and the end of the Iron Age from which it issued. The dried branch putting forth new leaves had the same signification, although some said that it was an allusion to Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino. The gilt boy, the child of a baker, who had been paid ten crowns, died soon after of the effects. The canzone sung at the masquerade was composed by Jacopo Nardi; the first stanza ran thus:
He who makes Nature's laws
And disposes of principalities and the ages
Is the source of all good,
And when He allows it evil oppresses the world.
Hence, in contemplating this figure you may see
How surely one age follows another
And how the good changes to ill and the ill to good.
In 1517-19, Pope Leo X Medici continued to strengthen Medici power in central Italy by spending much of his budget waging war against the rich territory of Urbino. When Urbino finally fell to the Medici army, Leo X elevated his nephew, Lorenzo de' Medici, to Duke of Urbino. (A strategic marriage into the French nobility allowed Leo to make his brother, Giuliano, into a duke as well.) Thus Leo's two generals or "Capitani" were now dukes. A banker family had bought, negotiated, and fought its way into the papacy and into the highest aristocracy.
In 1516, Giuliano de' Medici died. When Lorenzo de' Medici also died in 1519, Leo X decided to build a tomb to celebrate the dream of a Medici dynasty in central Italy and to erect a permanent monument in Florence to Medici power and control. He ordered Michelangelo to begin designing a large private burial chapel attached to the family church of San Lorenzo.
After Leo X died in 1521, the project collapsed. But two years later, it revived with the election of a second Medici pope, Clement VII (Giulio de' Medici). Clement VII had his own political axe to grind in Florence. He was the illegitimate son of Giuliano de' Medici, assassinated in 1478 during the Pazzi Conspiracy. By 1527, two related events made it essential for Clement VII to reassert Medicean strength in Florence and in Rome. One was the humiliating Sack of Rome (1527) when pope was forced to hide out in the Castel St Angelo until he could collect a large ransom to buy his freedom. The other was the successful revolt in Florence of anti-Medicean forces soon after the Sack and the establishment of a new republic with Michelangelo as one of its prominent supporters. Fearing a papal counteroffensive, Florence immediately began strengthening the city's fortifications and put Michelangelo in charge of the project.
Two years later, Clement VII had recovered enough to assemble an army. In 1529, he launched a siege of Florence which consumed the pope's attention and much of the church budget for two years while devastating the city. When the city finally fell in late 1530, papal agents put a price on Michelangelo's head. In the end, more opportunistic heads prevailed. For his part, Clement VII needed Michelangelo to complete the Medici Chapel which had languished since 1527. With his "treachery" pardoned and his life spared by the all-forgiving pope, Michelangelo had little choice but to return to work glorifying the family he despised.
The project included a brand new building designed by Michelangelo, two tomb monuments, statues of the Madonna flanked by two patron saints, and a large fresco of the Resurrection on the wall behind the Madonna. (The chapel was dedicated to the Resurrection.) Michelangelo finished the building and eight of the seventeen statues. The Resurrection was never painted.
Michelangelo showed the Medici dukes looking toward the nursing Madonna flanked by two Medici patron saints. Dressed as “Captains of Rome,” the Medici dukes are each flanked by two of the “Four Times of Day”. This was an unusual way to allegorize time on a grander scale. Cosmic time was usually depicted with the four seasons, the twelve months, or the ages of human life. The ages were usually allegorized as three, four (to match the seasons) or seven (to match the planets). Below the Times of Day, Michelangelo planned pairs of River Gods, a conventional ancient Roman motif to allegorize empire in geographic terms. These rivers included the Arno and the Tiber.
Interpretation
Like the Pieta, the Nursing Madonna was another theme which stressed the close ties between Christ and Mary and was popular in funeral monuments where the deceased hoped to gain salvation through the help of Mary/Ecclesia. By the same token, the Medici dukes willed enough money to hire priests to conduct masses for their salvation ten times a day for three hundred years. If we see Christ's resurrection as the basis for the duke's own eventual resurrection, the whole chapel becomes one large material prayer for salvation, a monumental votive offering. Indeed, by showing the dukes triumphantly enthroned above both their sarcophagi and above the four times of day and four rivers (worldly time and space) not far from a fresco of Christ gloriously rising above his own tomb, Michelangelo went well beyond monumentalizing Medici hopes for salvation. Here, as elsewhere in princely funeral monuments, the artist all but depicted the deceased enjoying an eternal Christian triumph into heavenly glory.
Since the Medici dukes were dressed in antique Roman military apparel and the Chapel built during a period of political turmoil for the Medici in Florence and Rome, it cannot be understood simply in aesthetic or Christian terms. At a time when two members of the Medici family were elected pope and squandered enormous church revenues to finance private armies to take over wealthy and powerful Italian city states such as Florence and Urbino, the spiritual dimension of the Medici Chapel can only be fully understood within a larger historical and political dynamic.
Seen within this larger political history of Medici fortunes in Florence and Rome, the religious imagery of the Medici Chapel takes on an overlapping political significance as well. This was made explicit to any Florentine viewer by dressing the dukes as "Captains of Rome" to recall their earlier triumph in Rome and their position as head of the papal army at a time when Leo X had seized power in Florence. Their military appearance also heralded the later triumph of Clement VII over Florence in 1529-30. In many ways, the primary context for the chapel’s imagery of cosmic time and space was not the cosmic realm of Christian salvation but the Roman imperial rhetoric of universal conquest, triumph, rule, and eternal, humanist fame. After all, the two Medici dukes rose above time and space as ennobled dukes and as Captains of Rome, their youthful beauty repudiating age and death. Thus the chapel achieves another Medicean triumph over time and space by immortalizing their glory in a monumental work of art. [ii]
To see the sea change in Medicean political thinking from the earlier days when Cosimo de’ Medici hired Donatello to make republican statues (David, Judith and Holofernes), compare the proud, self-aggrandizing, anti-republican rhetoric of the Medici Chapel with the earlier republican rhetoric of heroic citizenship in Donatello's David. In that work of the 1440s, the Medici extolled themselves as brave citizens in a republican Florence triumphant over foreign tyrants and proud nobles, the latter imaged in the defeated Goliath. Remember the anti-courtly inscription at the base of Donatello's David.
A century later, Michelangelo's Medici Chapel now aggressively displayed the Medici as high nobles and grand Roman captains crushing all burgher republican sentiment in Florence. They mystified that political victory by comparing it to Christ's resurrectional triumph, by blessing it with the supervision of the loving Virgin (who here represents a Roman Ecclesia flanked by Medicean saints), and by cloaking brutal military victory in a glorious and heroic Roman costume and imperial Roman sculptural and architectural rhetoric (Times of Day and Night).
In this sense, the entire Medici Chapel proclaimed the triumphal return of the Medici and gave that triumph a permanent, conspicuous monument imbedded into the city's urban fabric. That the duke's military and political triumphs were piously couched in the salvational terms of a Christian funeral monument and compared to the spiritual triumph of Christ over death only added to their legitimacy by softening and disguising the otherwise explicit political rhetoric. So too, the unusual choice of the Four Times of Day to allegorize cosmic time allowed Michelangelo to introduce a more traditional Christian element of Vanitas. Spurning the Ages of Mankind with its theme of human decline or the more familiar Four Seasons, Michelangelo chose the Four Times of Day. Here he could highlight the shortness of life which comes and goes like a single day and which leads all-too quickly to the sleep of death. Despite such pious Christian imagery, the thrust of the Medici Tombs was to glorify the dukes in the new, secular language of Italian Renaissance court humanism. Instead of showing the dukes lying as corpses or awakening from death in a reclining position as Michelangelo had depicted Julius II on his tomb monument, the dukes were grand enthroned, powerfully armored, and depicted in the full flower of youthful beauty, untouched by time and death.