The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [64]
From then on extravagance only increased. The Pope’s plans for St. Peter’s, exuberantly designed by Raphael as successor to Bramante, were estimated to cost over a million ducats. For the celebration of a French royal marriage arranged for his brother Giuliano, the Pope spent 150,000 ducats, fifty percent more than the papal household’s annual expenses and three times what these had been under Julius. Tapestries of gold and silk for the upper halls of the Vatican, woven to order in Brussels from cartoons by Raphael, cost half as much as his brother’s wedding. To keep up with his expenditures, his chancery created over 2000 saleable offices during his Papacy, including an order of 400 papal Knights of St. Peter, who paid 1000 ducats each for the title and privileges plus an annual interest of ten percent on the purchase price. The total realized from all the offices sold has been estimated at 3 million ducats, six times the Papacy’s annual revenue—and still proved insufficient.
To glorify his family and native city by a monument in recognition of himself and the “divine craftsman” who was his fellow Florentine, Leo initiated what was to be an unsurpassed work of art of his time, Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel in the Church of San Lorenzo, where three generations of Medici were already buried. Having heard that the most beautiful marble was to be had from the Pietrasanta range 120 miles away in Tuscany, which Michelangelo said would be too costly to bring out, Leo would consent to nothing less. He had a road built through untrodden country for the marble alone and succeeded in bringing out enough for five incomparable columns. At this stage, he ran out of funds, besides finding Michelangelo “impossible to deal with.” He preferred the genial courtliness of Raphael and the easy-beauties of his art. Work on the Chapel stopped, to be resumed and completed in the Papacy of Leo’s cousin Giulio, the future Clement VII.
For the University of Rome, Leo recruited more than a hundred scholars and professors for courses in law, letters, philosophy, mediciné, astrology, botany, Greek and Hebrew, but owing to corrupt appointments and dwindling funds, the program, like many of his projects, faded rapidly from brilliant beginnings. An avid collector of books and manuscripts, whose contents he would often quote from memory, he founded a press for the printing of Greek classics to indulge his enthusiasm. He dispensed privileges and purses like confetti, showered endless favors on Raphael, employed brigades of assistant artists to execute his designs for ornaments, scenes and figures, decorative floors and carved embellishments for the Papal Palace. He would have made Raphael a Cardinal if the artist had not forestalled him by dying at 37, allegedly of amorous excess, before he could wear the red robes.
Conspicuous and useless expenditure by potentates for the sake of effect was a habitual gesture of the age. At a never-forgotten banquet given by the plutocrat Agostino Chigi, the gold dishes, after serving tongues of parrots and fish brought from Byzantium, were thrown out the window into the Tiber—a little short of the ultimate gesture, in that a net was laid below the surface for retrieval. In Florence, money was perfumed. The apogee of display was the Field of the Cloth of Gold prepared for the meeting of Francis I and Henry VIII in 1520. It left France with a deficit of four million livres, which took nearly a decade to liquidate. As a Medici born to conspicuous expenditure, Leo, had he been a layman, could not have been faulted for reflecting his times, even to the point of neurotic excess. But it was pure folly not to perceive any contradiction of his role in a display of ultra materialism, or ever seriously to consider that because of his position as head of the Church the effect on the public