R. A. Scotti Read Online Free PDF Page B

The Borgia pope died, and Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere returned to Rome to claim the throne of Peter. He had left a vital man in the prime of life. He returned white-haired, but still with the energy of someone half his age. For the third time, he entered a conclave of cardinals, anticipating the papacy, and for the third time, he was denied.
    A man of enormous passion for art and for the Church, della Rovere walked the streets of Rome furious to be passed over yet exhilarated to be back. After so many years, the city felt both familiar and fresh. Threading his way through the alleys of the Borgo Vaticano, each bend, the very paving stones beneath his feet, familiar, della Rovere approached Constantine’s basilica, hemmed in now by pilgrims’ hostels and convents. He crossed the square and approached the broad courtyard, avoiding the spray from the giant pinecone fountain that gushed in the center of the atrium and the hawkers peddling souvenirs and roasted ceci beans.
    Inside the church, allowing a moment for his eyes to adjust, he saw in the crumbling vastness a serene white marble sculpture like a shaft of pure light. A young girl cradled her murdered son, a man now, larger than she, full grown and bearded. He is a dead weight in her arms. The years dissolve for her, and the reality is, as it always was, mother and child. The Virgin Mary, in her unutterable grief, holds her only son for the last time, with the resurrection three days away and unknown to her. The Pietà * translated into marble the words that Dante wrote in the Paradiso, “Mary, daughter of your son.” The sculpture was the work of the young Florentine Michelangelo Buonarroti, and della Rovere must have come out of the church determined to have the services of the man who could fashion stone into such serenity.
    The cardinal’s exile had ended and with it, he believed, his quest for the papacy, but in the blue clarity of late October, the sun hot but not scorching and the Mediterranean still warm enough to swim, he had discovered the artist who would assure his own greatness.
    It was some consolation for his papal ambitions, thwarted for the third time by the shadow, if not the person, of his Borgia nemesis. After Alexander’s decadent pontificate, the Church needed a clean-living leader, and the new pope Pius III was true to his name. A man of unquestioned piety but little luck, he died after twenty-eight days.
    Inevitably, when a pope succumbs so quickly, there is talk of poison. No conclusive evidence turned up to confirm or quiet the gossip, and by prudence or advance knowledge, della Rovere entered his fourth conclave with his cardinals all in a row. There was no suspense this time. After three whisker-thin defeats, he had corrected the odds.
    On November 1, All Saints’ Day, Giuliano della Rovere was elected Julius II, supreme pontiff of the Church of Rome, in a single ballot. It had taken almost twenty years and involved bribery, war, assassination plots, and at least the suspicion of poisoning—all very much business as usual in the Renaissance Church.
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    When Constantine picked up the shovel in the Vatican field to build his shrine to Peter, he blurred the distinction between Caesar and God. In architecture, in art, even in liturgical ceremonies and spiritual symbols, pagan and Christian became jumbled. Classical myths and Christian themes became chapters in the same unending story. The confusion was incised on the bronze doors that Filarete made for Constantine’s basilica. There, pagan nymphs played while Christian saints prayed.
    The secular and the sacred borrowed so freely from each other that by the time the Renaissance reached Rome, the two were as inseparable as body and soul. Christ’s dictum “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” was moot. Caesar and God—or his human proxy, the Vicar of Christ—were now one and the