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

exaggeration. But what sounds incredible now was the norm in the Cinquecento. Most Renaissance artists were polymaths. Bramante, Raphael, and Baldassare Peruzzi were painters. Filippo Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, and Gianlorenzo Bernini were sculptors.
    Renaissance artists were traveling salesmen, brushes and chisels for hire, traveling from city-state to city-state, competing for commissions. No longer bound to a specific guild as they had been in the Middle Ages, artists became independent contractors. Packing their pigments and saddling their horses, they shuttled from prince to prelate. Painting on canvas was just coming into vogue. (Michelangelo dismissed it as a pastime for dilettantes.) Since most paintings were murals of one kind or another, artists had to go wherever the work was, moving from town to town, from Florence to Pescara, Perugia to Milan, Urbino to Rome, and beyond.
    The best were sought after and liberally paid. Their reputation was spread by envoys, ambassadors, and warring princes who came to Italy for conquest and found culture and the new art.
    Among the seasoned artists who came from the north to work in the Vatican were Pietro Perugino and Bernardino “Pinturicchio” di Betto from Perugia and Luca Signorelli from Cortona. As long as Bramante was the unchallenged numero uno , he was magnanimous. He was genial and generous to his circle of artists, supporting them, not only for their talents, which were considerable, but also as a counterforce to the Florentines.
    Bramante was equally generous and wily with the young artists whom he hired to work on the Basilica. He advanced the Sienese architect Baldassare Peruzzi, at least in part because he was the protégé of Julius’s favorite banker, Agostino Chigi, and he employed at least three of Giuliano da Sangallo’s nephews, possibly as a wedge to further divide the Florentine clique. Although his motives were not always pure, Bramante was such a fine teacher that his pupils became the leading architects of the next generation.
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    While Bramante consolidated his position, Michelangelo sulked in Florence, protected by the Signoria and comforted by his aggrieved friend Sangallo.
    Michelangelo believed that he had escaped from the imputations of an incorrigible patron, from the press of his own reputation, and from the architect-assassin scheming against him. Even as an old man, he never forgave or forgot. Some forty years later, he was still blaming Bramante to justify his flight from Rome: “If I fly into a passion, it is sometimes necessary, as you know, when defending yourself against evil people.”
    Julius bombarded the Signoria with missives, demanding the return of the sculptor “by force or favor.” But urged on by Sangallo, Michelangelo rejected every overture, even the gentler ones.
    Although the pope enticed Sangallo back to Rome in May, the two Florentines continued to seethe and commiserate in an exchange of letters. While Sangallo certainly fed his friend’s fears, Michelangelo was not without guile. Knowing that Sangallo would show the letter to Julius, he wrote to Sangallo in Rome:
    Giuliano—I have heard from one of your people how the Pope took my departure badly…and that I should return and not worry about anything…. I was sent away, or rather driven out, and the person who sent me packing said that he knew me but that he was under orders. So, when I heard those words that Saturday, and then saw what followed, I fell into deep despair. But by itself, that was not entirely the reason for my departure; there was something else again, but I don’t want to write about it. Enough then that it made me wonder whether if I stayed in Rome my own tomb would not be finished and ready before the Pope’s. And that was the reason for my sudden departure.
    Julius certainly read Michelangelo’s letter, because he renewed his efforts at conciliation. He sent the Signoria another brief