Free R. A. Scotti by Basilica: The Splendor, the Scandal: Building St. Peter's Page A

barred. Michelangelo did not doubt that the pope was occupied with the liturgies of Holy Week, and he paid the freight charges of 150 to 200 ducats himself. “I found myself very frustrated by lack of money,” he wrote later. But more than Holy Week had intervened.
    Michelangelo’s grandiose sculpture had impelled Julius to replace Constantine’s church. Now, building the new St. Peter’s was consuming his attention.
    On Saturday morning, April 17, a bishop from Lucca, who happened to be going into the palace, saw Michelangelo denied entry. “Don’t you know who this is?” he said to the man.
    â€œForgive me, sir,” the sentry replied, “but I have been ordered to do this.”
    Michelangelo was stunned. “No curtain had ever been drawn nor door bolted” against him before. “You tell the Pope,” he shouted at the sentry, “that from now on if he wants me, he can seek me elsewhere.”
    Michelangelo suspected that Bramante was behind his banishment, and he scribbled an angry note to Julius: “This morning I was turned out of the palace by your orders; therefore, I give you notice that from now on, if you want me, you will have to look for me elsewhere than in Rome.” In spite of his renown, he was still a naïf, and this was his first taste of treachery. With the lessons of Holy Week fresh in his mind, he saw it not as one artist outmaneuvering another but as a dark plot by the architect and a personal betrayal by the pope.
    By superior skill, duplicity, or an amalgam of the two, Bramante had displaced Sangallo. Now he had sidelined Michelangelo. The Basilica had eclipsed the tomb. Julius was pouring all his enthusiasm and funds into Bramante’s masterwork. There was nothing left for Michelangelo’s.
    In pique and paranoia, believing that Bramante had “deprived him of the pope’s favor” and “the glory and honor he deserved,” Michelangelo fled from Rome under cover of night, just hours before Julius would lay the first stone of the new Basilica.
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    The Renaissance art world was intimate, intensely suspicious, and covetous. To survive and thrive required craft as well as creative talent. Bramante possessed both. Free of provincial allegiances, open to new ideas, he reinvented himself in Rome. He was at the right place at the right time, and he was canny and congenial enough to exploit his good fortune. With the young sculptor back home in Florence, sulky and sore, the over-the-hill upstart installed himself in the Vatican.
    As chief architect of all Vatican projects, Bramante became, ipso facto, the preeminent architect of the High Renaissance. His strengths were his enthusiasm, his curious, open mind, and a willingness, even eagerness, to experiment. In the beginning, he may have felt unsure. He was the newcomer, and beneath the bravura, the quick, often cutting, wit, and the sudden enthusiasms, he was always on his own, always unsatisfied and second-guessing himself. But as Vasari suggests, when Bramante saw a chance to upstage the Florentine artists, he “threw everything into confusion to persuade the pope to accept his proposal for a total rebuilding of the church.” He won over Julius and consolidated his new position by controlling operations, dispensing assignments, and dividing the opposition. Undercutting the papal favorites Sangallo and Michelangelo, he formed his own circle of loyal artists.
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    Although Leonardo is the most celebrated Renaissance man, he wasn’t the only one. St. Peter’s was designed in an age when architects were more than engineers. They were artists, which explains why their works are so enduring, and to be an artist often meant being a painter, sculptor, poet, set designer, stonecutter, actor, musician, administrator, and bill collector.
    Today, when specialization has been cut so fine, the notion that someone might have so many talents may seem, at the least, an