The Sack of Rome and the Theme of Cultural Discontinuity

CHAPTER ONE THE SACK OF ROME AND THE THEME OF CULTURAL DISCONTINUITY i. Introduction The Sack of Rome had unmatched significance for contemporaries, and it triggered momentous cultural and intellectual transformations. It stands apart from the many other brutal conquests of the time, such as the sack of Prato fifteen years earlier, because Rome held a place of special prominence in the Renaissance imagination.1 This prominence was owed in part to the city's geographical position on the ruins of the ancient city of Rome, which provided an ever-pres ent visual reminder of its classical role sis caput mundi.2 Just as impor tant for contemporary observers, it stood at the center of Western Christendom: a position to which it had been restored in 1443, when Pope Eugenius IV returned the papacy to the Eternal City.3 In the ensuing decades, the Renaissance popes strove to rebuild the physical city and to enhance both the theoretical claim of the papacy to uni versal impenum and its actual political and ecclesiastical sway, which the recent schism had eroded. Modern historians, who have tended to confirm contemporaries' assessment of Rome's centrality in Renaissance European culture, have similarly viewed the events of 1527 as marking a critical turning point. The nineteenth-century German scholar Ferdinand Gregoro- vius chose the Imperial conquest of 1527 as the terminus ad quern for his monumental eight-volume history of Rome in the Middle Ages, 1 Eric Cochrane, Italy, 1530-1630 (London and New York, 1988), 9-10, also draws attention to this contrast. 2 On Renaissance Roman antiquarianism and archaeology, see the sources cited in Philip Jacks, The Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity: The Origins of Rome in Renaissance Thought (Cambridge, 1993); and idem, "The Simulachrum of Fabio Calvo: A View of Roman Architecture aWantka in 1527," Art Bulletin 72 (1990): 453-81. 3 Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington, 1985), 5-6, chose this date, rather than Martin V's return to Rome in 1420, as the beginning of the Roman Renaissance. Not until 1443, Stinger argued, did Roman humanism begin to develop a distinct identity centered on the theme of the instauratio Ecclesiae Romanae. 2 CHAPTER ONE claiming that in this year the decadent "feminine" [sic] culture of the papal court finally collapsed from exhaustion and was forced to begin serious reform.4 More tellingly, in his classic History of the Popes, Lud wig von Pastor detailed the scholarly and artistic diaspora that the Sack caused. While offering a more sanguine assessment of Roman culture before 1527 than had Gregorovius, he too concluded that the Sack "marked, in fact, the end of the Renaissance, the end of the Rome of Julius II and Leo X."5 Subsequent scholarship on Julian and Leonine Rome has only reinforced the assumption that the dec ades before 1527 merit special attention. The persistence of "High Renaissance" Rome in the collective memory attests not just to the indisputable splendor of its cultural production, but also to the success of the papacy's own efforts at self- promotion. In particular, curial humanists—professional rhetoricians whom the papal court employed—systematically dignified and mag nified the papal image with their literary praises. Using the idioms of Ciceronian and Vergilian Latin, these humanists constructed a shared narrative that emphasized the papacy's role as heir both to the classical imperium of ancient Rome and to the Church's ecclesias tical prerogatives and history.6 In so doing, they helped to invent the construct of Renaissance Rome as the cultural exemplar of Europe, a construct so vivid that it has captured the imaginations of nearly all subsequent generations. Although elements of this narrative appeared in Roman human ists' discourse as early as the 1440s, they did not fully articulate it until the early sixteenth century. The cornucopian patronage of car dinals and of several popes—most notably Alexander VI (1492- 1503), Julius II (1503-13) and Leo X (1513-21)—brought to Rome leading artists, musicians, and intellectuals from throughout Italy and Europe.7 For example, at various points in those three decades, Ra- 4 Ferdinand Gregorovius, History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages, trans. Annie Hamilton, vol. 8, pt. 2 (London, 1902). For Gregorovius' profoundly unsympathetic view of pre-1527 Renaissance Roman culture, see vol. 8, pt. 1, chap. 4. 5 Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Francis Kerr, vol. 10, third ed. (London, 1923), 332-63; 442-47. Quotation from 443. 6 John F. D'Amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome: Humanists and Churchmen on the Eue of the Reformation (Baltimore, 1983), chap. 5 (115-43), provides the best treat ment of Ciceronianism in Renaissance Rome. 7 On the development of Roman humanism under Julius II and Leo X, see, inter alia, the above studies by D'Amico and Stinger; John W. O'Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, .

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