THE FAMILIES WHO MADE ROME: A History and a Guide
by Anthony MajanlahtiChatto £20 pp418
The Sistine Chapel is famous for its serene architecture and dramatic frescos, and even for its modest-looking but oracular chimney. Much less is generally known about the man who caused it to be built, and after whom it is named: Francesco di Leonardo della Rovere, or Pope Sixtus IV. This lacuna, and many others, can be filled by reading Anthony Majanlahti’s elegant and informative new book. Working on the sound principle that every building tells a story, especially in Rome, he offers an entertaining mix of travelogue and history as he pursues the great families of Renaissance Rome, whose history is entwined in the city’s palaces, churches, colonnades and fountains.
The della Rovere dynasty is one of seven which he treats in detail, and is typical enough in the velocity of its rise to power and wealth, and in the fact that the Church was the route of its upward mobility. Most of these families had one or more popes to their name. Fran-cesco, the future Sixtus IV, sprang from obscure origins in Savona, on the Ligurian coast near Genoa, though he was not the son of an illiterate fisherman: this disciple-like background was a piece of Vatican spin. Sixtus advanced via Padua university and the Franciscan order to a cardinalship, and in August 1471, in his late fifties, was elected pope — a compromise candidate. He crusaded against the Turks, and backed an assassination plot against Lorenzo de’ Medici. When the resulting war with Florence ended in 1480, he made diplomatic amends by inviting artists, including Botticelli and Ghirlandaio, to decorate his new chapel with frescos. He also built the Ponte Sesto across the Tiber, and founded the churches of Santa Maria del Popolo and Santa Maria della Pace.
After an interval which included the lurid Borgia papacy of Alexander VI, and the 34-day papacy of Pius III, Francesco’s nephew Giuliano della Rovere became Pope Julius II. (We hear much about the advancement of papal nephews or nipoti, whence the word “nepotism”, though sometimes nephew is a euphemism for an illegitimate son.) It was Julius who was the patron of Michelangelo, and of his ceiling frescos in the Sistine Chapel, though their relationship was famously stormy. After much wrangling, the artist finally completed the pope’s funeral monument in 1544; it can be seen at San Pietro in Vincoli, high on the Oppian Hill.
There is plenty of intrigue and not a little blood in the mortar of these buildings. The book begins with one of the remnants of medieval Rome, the Cenci Palace, a gloomy-looking place made notorious by its later incumbents, the incestuous Count Francesco Cenci, and his daughter Beatrice, who murdered him in 1598 and was beheaded the following year. Her guilt is not in doubt, but the exculpating circumstances (and her alleged beauty) have made her a Roman cause célèbre ever since.
Beatrice died at the Castel Sant’Angelo, not far from her family home — that “colossal pile of masonry”, as Majanlahti calls it, whose lowest stratum is an imperial burial-site constructed by Hadrian around AD123. It was completed by the Farnese pope, Paul III, who introduced a period of unfettered urban development. The main destruction of the Forum, notes Majanlahti, occured not in the Dark Ages but in the early 16th century: “What is left are the ruins of ruins.”
The Farnese, originally from the Orvieto region, were one of the most cultivated of these families. The hall of the immense Palazzo Farnese is profuse with pagan frescos by the early 17th-century Bolognese maestro, Annibale Caracci. Majanlahti whets one’s appetite, but alas the palace now houses the French embassy, and the frescos are not on public view. One of the Farnese nipoti was the 16th-century Duke of Parma, Alessandro Farnese, who presses close to English history as governor of the Spanish Netherlands. Had the Armada of 1588 succeeded in its objectives, Parma would have led his army across the Channel to complete the Catholic occupation of Elizabethan England.
Other dynasties and their landmarks explored here are the Colonna, Borghese, Barberini, Chigi and Pamphilj families (the latter with that archaic “j” still in place, like a little orthographic family crest on the facade of their name). The book has street maps, family trees and historic engravings of the buildings, and ends with a useful checklist of popes from 1191 to 1878. The latter date marks the death of Pius IX, during whose papacy Rome fell to the forces of Italian unification. Pius retreated to the Vatican, where he and his successors were sequestered until the Conciliazione of 1929, which formally recognized the Vatican City as an independent state.
We flit agreeably through the chequered history of the papacy. Back in the bad old days a pope might find himself kidnapped while saying Mass, as Gregory VII was in 1075. During the chaos of the Great Schism, there was a brief period with no fewer than three rival popes in power. The Renaissance popes organised things better, though there were among them some avaricious bigots who make the latest successor to St Peter’s Chair, for all his “hardline” reputation, seem more puppy-dog than rottweiler. But such excesses are part of history’s fascination, as are the dark stories that lie behind beautiful old buildings.
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