The Monsters

Few years in all history have proved to be more fateful than the year 1492. It began dramatically enough, with the completion on January 2 of the Spanish conquest of Granada, ending the Moorish kingdom and consolidating the rule of Ferdinand and Isabella; in March the Jews in Spain were given three months to accept Christianity or leave the country; April saw the death, in his family villa at Careggi, of Lorenzo the Magnificent; in late July Pope Innocent VIII died in Rome; and in early August Christopher Columbus sailed, all unwittingly, for the New World.

Innocent’s successor, Rodrigo Borgia, now sixty-one years old, took the name Alexander VI. His great-uncle Calixtus had given him a good start: a cardinal at twenty-five, already in possession of a whole clutch of bishoprics and abbeys, at twenty-six he had become vice chancellor of the Holy See, an office which guaranteed him the vast income he was to hold over the next four pontificates. There can be little doubt that he owed his election principally to the huge bribes he shamelessly distributed: it is said that four muleloads of bullion were carried from the Borgia palace to that of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza. His principal rival, Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, could not match his wealth and was obliged to contain his fury as best he could. His time would come.

The French remained for another ten days in Rome. Already, like all armies of occupation, they were becoming increasingly unpopular. They showed little respect for the local people; every day brought new stories of violence, robbery, and rape. Even the palace of Vannozza Catanei was ransacked. It was with unconcealed joy and relief that on January 27 the Romans watched them march away to Naples, accompanied by Cesare Borgia—ostensibly as papal legate but in fact as a hostage for his father’s good behavior. With them too went Prince Cem, the only man in the whole immense company whom they were sorry to see depart.

On February 22, 1495, Charles entered Naples. King Alfonso immediately abdicated and entered a monastery; his son Ferdinand II, also known as Ferrandino, fled for his life. The Neapolitans, on the other hand, who had never looked on the House of Aragon as anything other than usurping foreigners, gave the French king a hero’s welcome. On May 12 he was crowned for the second time. But, as he was all too soon to discover, there is all the difference in the world between a lightning offensive and a sustained program of occupation. The Neapolitans, delighted as they had been to get rid of the Aragonese, soon discovered that one foreign oppressor was very much like another. Unrest also grew among the inhabitants of many of the smaller towns, who found themselves having to support, for no good reason that they could understand, discontented and frequently licentious French garrisons.

When news of the League was brought to Charles in Naples, he flew into a fury, but he did not underestimate the danger with which he was now faced. To make matters worse, he had lost both his distinguished hostages. Cesare had simply slipped away; Cem had contracted a high fever at Capua and died a few days later. Thus it was that only a week after his Neapolitan coronation Charles left his new kingdom forever and headed, together with 20,000 mules loaded with loot from Naples, back to the North. Rome was panic-stricken at the thought of his return. Alexander and most of his Curia slipped away to Orvieto, leaving only one unfortunate cardinal to greet the king.

Gonzaga managed to present the Battle of Fornovo as a victory; few dispassionate observers would have agreed with him. The French admittedly forfeited their baggage train, which included Charles’s sword, helmet, gold seal, and a “black book” containing portraits of his female conquests, but their losses were negligible compared with those of the Italians, who had utterly failed to stop them. They continued their march that same night and reached Asti unmolested a few days later. There, however, bad news awaited them. Alfonso’s son Ferdinand II had landed in Calabria, where, supported by Spanish troops from Sicily, he was rapidly advancing on Naples. On July 7 he reoccupied the city. Suddenly, all the French successes of the past year evaporated. A week or two later Charles led his army back across the Alps, leaving the Duke of Orleans behind to maintain a French presence as best he could.

But the soldiers whom he disbanded at Lyons that November carried something deadlier far than any dream of conquest. Columbus’s three ships, returning to Spain from the Caribbean in 1493, had brought with them the first cases of syphilis known to the Old World; through the agency of the Spanish mercenaries sent by Ferdinand and Isabella to support King Alfonso, the disease had quickly spread to Naples, where it was rife by the time Charles arrived. After three months of dolce far niente, his men must in turn have been thoroughly infected, and it was almost certainly they who were responsible for introducing the disease north of the Alps.

WITH CHARLES SAFELY out of the way, Alexander was free to settle down to his principal task, the aggrandizement of his family. His eldest son, Giovanni, already Duke of Gandia, he had destined for the throne of Naples; this ambition, however, came to nothing when, in June 1497, the young man disappeared. Two days later his body was recovered from the Tiber. His throat had been cut, and there were no fewer than nine stab wounds. Who was the murderer? Giovanni was only twenty, but his violent, unstable character and his penchant for other men’s wives had already made him countless enemies.

For a time, it seemed that Alexander was a reformed character. Indeed, he said as much. “The blow that has fallen upon us,” he declared,

It certainly needed reforming. The cost of the wars required to maintain the Papal States and the ambitious building programs of successive popes meant that there was a constant search for new sources of income. The discovery in 1462 of an alum mine near Tolfa came to the papal treasury as a godsend. Alum was indispensable to both the cloth and leather trades. Heretofore it had had to be imported at considerable expense from Asia Minor; henceforth the popes could declare a ban on supplies from the Muslim world and establish their own monopoly. But alum alone was nowhere near enough. Indulgences were another invaluable source of income, as was the sale of offices. More and more sinecures were invented; these were bought for large sums and guaranteed an income for life. The result was a vast increase in the membership of the Curia, many of whose members had absolutely nothing to do.

Who, however, was expected to enforce these new rules? Only those who stood to lose by them. And so the draft bull remained precisely that, and Pope Alexander soon slipped back into his old ways. Cesare, who had never renounced his, gradually replaced Giovanni in his father’s affections and in 1498 persuaded Alexander to release him from the cardinalate and his religious vows and allow him to return to the outside world. As a layman once again—he was the first man in history to lay down the red hat—he soon became the pope’s éminence grise. It was largely thanks to his influence that by the end of that same year Alexander had abandoned his anti-French policies and had willingly given his consent to the annulment of the marriage of the new French king, Louis XII, assuring him at the same time that he would not oppose Louis’s claims to Milan and Naples. In doing so, he opened the way to new French adventures in Italy, but such considerations were of minimal interest to Cesare, who traveled in magnificent state as papal envoy to France, where he was made Duke of Valentinois and given as a bride Charlotte d’Albret, sister of the King of Navarre. On his return to Italy he directed his energies to the Papal States, eliminating one by one—by expulsion or poisoning—the feudal lords of Umbria and Lazio, Romagna, and the Marches until the whole area had become a personal fief of the Borgia family.

The year 1498 also saw the solution of a problem that had plagued Pope Alexander since the beginning of his pontificate. It was personified by the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola. Originally from Ferrara, since 1490 Savonarola had lived in Florence, preaching fierce and fiery sermons, delivering apocalyptic prophecies, and claiming direct communication with God. The chief objects of his wrath were the Medici, the Duke of Milan, and—particularly after Alexander’s accession—the Papacy; and he did not mince his words:

The overthrow of the Medici and their expulsion from Florence in 1494 was, as we know, the simple result of the French invasion; but to the Florentines it was Savonarola’s doing, and he emerged as the new leader of the city, setting up a “Christian and religious republic” and ordering regular “bonfires of the vanities”: of mirrors, cosmetics, fine clothes, secular books and pictures (including paintings by Michelangelo and Botticelli), musical instruments, gaming tables, even chessmen. While it lasted, the general atmosphere must have been more like that of Puritan England in the seventeenth century than that of Renaissance Florence in the fifteenth.

Already by 1497 the pope had had enough. He excommunicated the turbulent friar and, when Savonarola took no notice, called for his arrest and execution. By that time the Florentines were sick of him too. On April 8, 1498, a mob attacked the Convent of San Marco, of which he was prior; in the ensuing struggle several of his supporters were killed, and, along with his two closest associates, he finally surrendered. All three were tortured to exact their confessions; and on May 23 they were led out into the Piazza della Signoria, where they were stripped of their friar’s robes and hanged in chains from a single cross. A huge fire was lit beneath them, so that Savonarola should burn just as the vanities had burned before him. The ashes of all three were then flung into the Arno River, to ensure that no relics would be rescued for future veneration.

THE LAST FOUR years of Alexander’s pontificate were taken up largely with his and Cesare’s ambition to appropriate the Papal States and to turn them into a Borgia family fief. The program was mapped out and put into execution by Cesare, who by now utterly dominated his father. It involved the crushing of many of the great Roman families, above all the Orsini; it necessitated several assassinations, which were normally followed by seizures of property; and it was further financed by the open sale of the highest offices of the Church, including that of cardinal. Cesare Borgia was hated and feared for his violence and cruelty. “Every night,” the Venetian ambassador reported to his government, “four or five men are discovered assassinated, bishops, prelates and others, so that all Rome trembles for fear of being murdered by the duke.”

Yet, although he was hideously disfigured by syphilis—toward the end of his life he never showed himself in public without a mask—few who came in contact with Cesare failed to be impressed. His energy was boundless, his courage absolute. He appeared to need no sleep, and his speed of movement was astonishing: he was said to arrive at one city before he had left the last. At the same time he shared to the full his father’s love of women. In his short life—he was to die in battle in Navarre, at the age of thirty-one—he left at least eleven bastards; and the diary of the papal master of ceremonies, Johannes Burchard, leaves us in no doubt of how he spent his leisure:

At this point it might be useful to say a word about Donna Lucrezia. She has been cast as the femme fatale of the Borgia dynasty; but to what extent she deserved the role remains uncertain. She was certainly not just a pretty face; on two occasions her father handed over to her the complete control of the Vatican Palace, with authority to deal with his correspondence. As for her reputation, there is absolutely no evidence for the rumors of incest with one or more of her brothers—or indeed with her father—apart from that given by her first husband, Giovanni Sforza, during the divorce proceedings, during which several other baseless accusations were leveled in both directions. She seems to have been very largely the hapless instrument of her father’s and brother’s political ambitions. Her marriage to Sforza in 1493 at the age of thirteen—after two earlier betrothals—was due to Alexander’s eagerness to establish an alliance with Milan; before long, however, the Sforza were no longer necessary and the pope’s son-in-law became an inconvenience. In 1497 there seems to have been a plot to assassinate him—though which of the three Borgias was implicated we shall never know—but he escaped from Rome just in time, and it was then decided that a divorce would be sufficient. Giovanni, who stood to lose not only his wife but also her dowry and the city of Pesaro, which he held in fief from the pope, fought hard but was eventually forced to agree on the humiliating grounds of impotence, despite his testimony that the marriage had been consummated more than a thousand times. There was the additional embarrassment that at the time of the divorce Lucrezia was actually pregnant; but the paternity of the child, Giovanni, who was born in secret, has never been established.

THE MONTH OF August 1503 saw Rome at its hottest and most unhealthy. The nearby Pontine marshes had not yet been drained; malaria was rife, and several cases of plague had also been reported. It was the time of year when all those who could afford to do so left the city, but these were critical times—a French army was on the march to Naples—and the pope had remained in the Vatican. On the twelfth, both Alexander and Cesare were stricken with fever. Cesare recovered, but the seventy-two-year-old pope could not fight the infection, and six days later he was dead.

The fact that father and son had collapsed on the same day inevitably aroused suspicions of foul play. It was pointed out that on the third the two of them had dined with the recently appointed Cardinal Adriano Castellesi in his nearby villa; the rumor rapidly spread around Rome that they had intended to poison their host but had inadvertently drunk the poisoned wine themselves. For some reason this mildly ridiculous story has survived and found its way into a number of serious histories; it ignores the fact that although by this time the Borgia father and son had a good many murders to their credit, they had no ascertainable motive to kill Castellesi. Nor are there any known poisons which take over a week to have their effect. The likelihood is that Alexander and Cesare were simple victims of the epidemic and that the pope—improbable as it may have seemed—died a perfectly natural death.

In short, the Papacy had real or potential enemies on every side and no firm friends. To survive with its independence intact, it desperately needed adequate finance, firm administration, and astute diplomacy, and these Alexander was able to provide in full measure, however questionable his means of doing so. He proved it in only the second year of his pontificate, when he persuaded Charles VIII to leave Rome, thus saving himself and his successors from being nothing more than satraps of the French. For this alone, he deserves the gratitude of posterity. The fact that he has not received it is due largely to his private life and to the incessant vilification to which he was subjected both during his lifetime and after his death and which he tolerated with extraordinary equanimity. On more than one occasion he chided Cesare for not showing the same tolerance; it could be argued, however, that he might have done better to follow his son’s example. Many of the accusations leveled against him he could easily have disproved, had he bothered to do so; by leaving them unanswered, he contributed to his own unspeakable reputation.

—

He failed. Della Rovere arrived unscathed, together with Cardinal Georges d’Amboise, Louis XII’s chief counselor, who was as ambitious for the tiara as he was. A third determined candidate was Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, who had broken with Alexander over his pro-French policies; now released from prison by d’Amboise in order to cast his vote for the Frenchman, he found himself unexpectedly popular and began lobbying on his own account. In fact, d’Amboise was soon effectively eliminated: a French pope at such a moment seemed almost as bad an idea as another Spanish one, particularly after della Rovere had spread the word that it would mean the second removal of the Papacy to France. The struggle seemed to be between della Rovere and Sforza; neither, however, could accumulate the votes necessary to carry the day, and the choice of the cardinals finally fell on a compromise candidate, Francesco Todeschini-Piccolomini, Archbishop of Siena, who took the name of Pius III as a tribute to his uncle Pius II. He was already sixty-four but looked and acted a good deal older and was crippled by gout. There was a general feeling that he would not last long.

One of the shortest pontificates was followed by the shortest conclave. It lasted for a few hours on November 1. Giuliano della Rovere had done his work well and had spread his money astutely; he had even managed to secure the vote of Ascanio Sforza, the only other serious potential contender. And it was plain to all that he was born to command. In the words of the Venetian envoy:

It might have been thought that the election of this terrifying figure as Pope Julius II—he had scarcely bothered to change his name—would spell the end for Cesare Borgia. It did not. Just two weeks before, the Orsini had stormed Cesare’s palace in the Borgo, and he, by now fully restored to health, had taken refuge in the Castel Sant’Angelo. He was still there when messengers arrived from della Rovere assuring him of his protection in the event of their master’s being elected. Accordingly, the moment he heard of the election, Cesare had returned to his old quarters in the Vatican. But, as he well knew, he was there only on sufferance. It was in Julius’s interest to string him along, simply because his power base was the Romagna, where Venice was helping herself to more and more cities; Julius for the moment had no army and consequently needed Cesare’s. When he had no more use for the Duke of Valentinois, he would unquestionably ditch him.

As of course he did. Cesare Borgia still retained much of his old fire, but without his father’s protection and support the days of power and glory were gone and he fades out of our story. Exiled to Spain in 1504, he died in 1507, fighting for his brother-in-law King John of Navarre at the siege of Viana. He was thirty-one years old.

The states of Europe could not be expected to feel much sympathy for such a policy. Their motive for joining the proposed league was neither to support the Papacy nor to destroy Venice but to help themselves. However much they might try to present their action as a blow struck for righteousness against iniquity, they knew perfectly well that their own conduct was more blameworthy than ever Venice’s had been. But the temptation was too great, and the territories promised them were irresistible. They accepted. So it was that what appeared to be the death warrant of the Venetian Empire was signed at Cambrai on December 10, 1508, by Margaret of Austria on behalf of her father, Maximilian, and by Cardinal d’Amboise for the King of France. Julius himself, though his legate was present at Cambrai, did not formally join the League until the following spring; he seems to have been uncertain whether the other signatories were in earnest. But when in March 1509 King Ferdinand II of Aragon announced his formal adherence, he hesitated no longer. On April 5 he openly associated himself with the rest and placed Venice under an interdict, and on the fifteenth the first French soldiers marched into Venetian territory. A month later, on May 14, the French met the Venetians just outside the village of Agnadello. For Venice, it was catastrophe. Her casualties were about 4,000, and her entire mainland empire was as good as lost. Before the end of the month the pope’s official legate received back the fateful lands in the Romagna with which the whole tragedy had begun.

When Pope Julius was told of the reconquest of Padua, he flew into a towering rage, and when, after Maximilian’s failure to recover it, he heard that Verona too was likely to declare for Venice, he is said to have hurled his cap to the ground and blasphemed St. Peter. His hatred of Venice was as vindictive as ever, and although he had agreed to accept a six-man Venetian embassy in Rome, it was soon clear that he had done so only in order to inflict still more humilation on the republic. On their arrival in early July, the envoys had been forbidden, as excommunicates, to enter the city until after dark, to lodge in the same house, and even to go out together on official business. One only was granted an audience, which rapidly deteriorated into a furious diatribe by Julius himself. Not, he maintained, until the provisions of the League of Cambrai had been carried out to the letter and the Venetians had knelt before him with halters around their necks would he consider giving them absolution.

At first Venice rejected the pope’s terms outright; she even appealed to the Turkish sultan for support, requesting as many troops as he could spare and a loan of not less than 100,000 ducats. But the sultan remained silent, and by the end of the year the Venetians saw that they must capitulate. And so, on February 24, 1510, Pope Julius II took his seat on a specially constructed throne outside the central doors of St. Peter’s, twelve of his cardinals around him. The five Venetian envoys, dressed in scarlet—the sixth had died a few days before—advanced toward him and kissed his foot, then knelt on the steps while their spokesman made a formal request on behalf of the republic for absolution and the Bishop of Ancona read out the full text of the agreement. This must have made painful listening for the envoys—not least because it lasted for a full hour, during which time they were forced to remain on their knees. Rising with difficulty, they received twelve scourging rods from the twelve cardinals—the actual scourging was mercifully omitted—swore to observe the terms of the agreement, kissed the pope’s feet again, and were at last granted absolution. Only then were the doors of the basilica opened, and the assembled company proceeded in state for prayers at the high altar before going on to Mass in the Sistine Chapel—all except the pope, who, as one of the Venetians explained in his report, “never attended these long services.”

By all objective standards, Pope Julius’s action was contemptible. Having encouraged the French to take up arms against Venice, he now refused to allow them the rewards which he himself had promised, turning against them with all the violence and venom that he had previously displayed toward the Venetians. He also opened new negotiations with the emperor in an attempt to turn him, too, against his former ally. His claim, regularly resurrected in his defense by later apologists, that his ultimate objective was to free Italy from foreign invaders, would have been more convincing if he had not invited those particular invaders in in the first place.

There was, in any case, another motive for the pope’s sudden change of policy. Having for the first time properly consolidated the Papal States, he was now bent on increasing them by the annexation of the Duchy of Ferrara. Duke Alfonso II, during the past year, had become little more than an agent of the French king; his saltworks at Comaccio were in direct competition with the papal ones at Cervia; finally, as husband of Lucrezia Borgia, he was the son-in-law of Alexander VI—a fact which, in the pope’s eyes, was alone more than enough to condemn him. In a bull circulated throughout Christendom, couched in language that St. Peter Martyr said made his hair stand on end, the luckless duke was anathematized and excommunicated.

But by this time the Duke of Ferrara, on whom the ban of the Church weighed rather less heavily, had scored a brilliant victory over a papal army which was advancing toward his city along the lower reaches of the Po, and Julius was once again on the defensive. In mid-May Chaumont’s successor, Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, led a second march on Bologna, and on his approach the inhabitants, seeing their chance of ridding themselves once and for all of the detested Cardinal Alidosi, rose in rebellion. The cardinal panicked and fled for his life without even troubling to warn either the Duke of Urbino, who was encamped with the papal troops in the western approaches, or the Venetians, a mile or two away to the south; and on May 23 Trivulzio entered Bologna at the head of his army and restored the Bentivoglio to their old authority.

Cardinal Alidosi, who in default of other virtues seems at least to have possessed a decent sense of shame, barricaded himself in his hometown, Castel del Rio, to escape the papal wrath, but he need not have bothered. Julius, who had prudently retired a few days earlier to Ravenna, bore him no grudge. Even now, in his eyes, his beloved friend could do no wrong: he unhesitatingly laid the entire blame for the disaster on the Duke of Urbino, whom he summoned at once to his presence. The interview that followed is unlikely to have diminished the duke’s long-standing contempt for Alidosi, for whose cowardice he was now being made the scapegoat. When, therefore, on emerging into the street he found himself face to face with his old enemy, who had just reached Ravenna to give the pope his own version of recent events, his pent-up anger became too much for him. Dragging the cardinal from his mule, he attacked him with his sword; Alidosi’s retinue, believing that he might be acting under papal orders, hesitated to intervene and moved forward only when the duke remounted his horse and rode off to Urbino, leaving their master dead in the dust.

AS BOTH A POPE and a man, Julius had many faults. He was impetuous—“so impetuous,” wrote the contemporary historian Francesco Guicciardini, “that he would have been brought to ruin had he not been helped by the reverence felt for the Church, the discord of the princes and the condition of the times”—mercurial, vindictive, a poor organizer, and a deplorable judge of character. Though an adept diplomatic tactician, he had little sense of long-term strategy. Eaten up by worldly ambition, he was utterly unscrupulous in the pursuit of his ends. Certain qualities, however, he possessed in full measure. One was courage; another was indomitability of spirit. On his journey back to Rome, at the age of nearly seventy, he was already contemplating a new league, headed by himself and comprising Venice, Spain, England, and if possible the empire, whose combined forces would drive the French once and for all from the Italian Peninsula; and by the beginning of July negotiations had begun.

One reason, apart from his natural temperament, for the emperor’s ambivalent attitude was the proposed Church Council at Pisa which he and King Louis had jointly sponsored. Already Louis was beginning to regret the idea, and support for it was rapidly falling away. After two short sessions, local hostility was to force its removal to Milan; and there, although under French protection, it was openly ridiculed to the point where a local chronicler forbore to record its proceedings because, he claimed, they could not be taken seriously and anyway he was short of ink.

The campaign, however, was not. Nemours, determined to give his enemies no rest, returned to Milan to gather fresh troops and then immediately took the field again. With an army that now amounted to some 25,000, he marched on Ravenna and laid siege to the town. As a means of drawing out the papal army, the move was bound to succeed. Its commander, the Spanish viceroy in Naples, Ramón de Cardona, could not allow a city of such importance to be captured under his nose without lifting a finger to save it. And so on Easter Sunday, April 11, 1512, on the flat, marshy plain below the city, the battle was joined.

Of all the encounters recorded in Italy since Charles VIII had taken his first, fateful decision to establish a French presence in the peninsula nearly twenty years before, the Battle of Ravenna was the bloodiest. When at last the papalists fled from the field they left behind them nearly 10,000 Spanish and Italian dead. Several of the leading Spanish captains, some of them seriously wounded, were in French hands, as was the papal legate, Cardinal de’ Medici. Ramón de Cardona himself, who had taken flight rather earlier in the day—he is said not to have drawn rein until he reached Ancona—was one of the few to survive unharmed. But it had been a Pyrrhic victory. The French losses had also been considerable, and, worst of all, Nemours himself had fallen at the moment of triumph, in a characteristically impetuous attempt to head off the Spanish retreat. His place was taken by the elderly Seigneur Jacques de La Palice, who was possessed of none of his speed or panache. Had the young man lived, he would probably have rallied what was left of the army and marched on Rome and Naples, forcing Julius to come to terms; but La Palice was cast in a more cautious mold. He contented himself with occupying Ravenna, where he was unable to prevent an orgy of butchery and rape which surpassed even that suffered by the Brescians a few weeks before.

At once Julius took new courage. Overpowered, at least temporarily, in the military field, he flung all his energies into the Church Council that he had summoned for May 1512. This had now become more necessary than ever, since King Louis’s renegade Council of Milan had taken advantage of the victory of Ravenna to declare the pope contumacious and suspend him from office. It was true that even in Milan itself few people took the findings of so transparently political a body very seriously; nonetheless, this open split in the Church could not be allowed to go unchecked or unanswered. On May 2, with all the state ceremonial of which the papal court was capable, the Supreme Pontiff was borne in his litter to the Lateran, followed by fifteen cardinals, twelve patriarchs, ten archbishops, fifty-seven bishops, and three heads of monastic orders: a hierarchical show of strength that made the handful of rebels in Milan seem almost beneath notice, precisely as it was intended to do. At its second session this Lateran Council formally declared the proceedings of the Council of Pisa/Milan null and void and all those who had taken part in it schismatics.

Pope Julius II died on February 21, 1513, of a fever, probably brought on by the syphilis from which he had suffered for many years. There had been little of the priest about him apart from his dress and his name. His pontificate had been dominated by politics and by war; his strictly ecclesiastical activities had been largely confined to routine matters, though it was he who had issued the fateful dispensation which authorized Henry VIII to marry Catherine of Aragon, the widow of his elder brother, Arthur.

Excessive modesty was never one of the failings of Pope Julius II, and as early as 1505 he also commissioned Michelangelo to design his tomb. This was originally intended to stand thirty-six feet high and to contain forty statues, all of them over life size; according to Vasari, the principal reason for his decision to rebuild St. Peter’s was in order to provide suitable accommodation for it. Unfortunately, the money ran out and the project had to be radically revised. A far more modest version can now be seen in San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome; but Julius was actually buried in what there was of his new St. Peter’s—as, doubtless, he would have wished.