The Coronari apartment in Rome by Rome City Apartments
Michelangelo had returned to Rome, aged 59, at the request of Clement VII who had asked him to decorate the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. He had not wanted to accept this commission, since he was desperately anxious to get back to work on Julius II’s tomb. And in time of the ill and weary Pope Clement he had been able to work on the tomb in secret while progressing slowly with cartoons for the Sistine Chapel wall. With the forceful Pope Paul III, however, Michelangelo could not prevaricate. The Pope was determined to have Michelangelo working for himself alone. “I have harboured this decision for 30 years” he is reported to have said to Michelangelo. “And now that I am Pope I shall have it satisfied. I shall tear the tomb contract up. I am quite set upon having you in my service, come what may”. One of the attendant Cardinals, looking around the sculptor’s studio apartment in Rome, observed that the statue of Moses was alone worthy to do honor to the memory of Pope Julius. Another suggested that the remaining statues could be made by assistants from Michelangelo’s models. The Pope, having set the cartoons for the Sistine Chapel wall, became more insistent than ever. So Michelangelo gave way. He was appointed Chief Architect, Sculptor and Painter to the Vatican and began work on the Last Judgement in 1535.
When the fresco was revealed on All Hallows’ eve 1541, “It was see”, so Vasari said, “that Michelangelo had not only excelled the masters who had worked in the chapel previously but had also striven to excel the vaulting that he had made so famous. For the Last Judgment was by far the finer since Michelangelo imagined to himself all the terror of those fearful days.
A detail of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo and Rome City Apartments 
The Pope himself was evidently so overwhelmed with emotion that he fell to his knees crying “Lord, charge me not with my sins when thou shalt come on the Day of Judgment”. So enthralled was he, indeed, by Michelangelo’s genius that he would give him no respite from his labours, instructing him to start work now on frescos for the Cappella Paolina. Already he had interrupted his work on the Last Judgement by asking him to consider the problem of there being in Rome no impressive central square in which so great a state visitor as Charles V could be received. The Capitol was the natural place for such a square; and Michelangelo was required to construct one on the summit of the hill, and to design a suitable grand approach to it, the Cordonata.
Michelangelo began by designing a new base for the statue of the Marcus Aurelius which the Pope decided should be the centre of the new piazza, the Piazza del Campidoglio. He then proposed that an oval shape, decorated with a complicated geometric design, should be inscribed around it. Opposite the Cordonata, beyond the statue and its oval surround, was to be restored Palazzo del Senatore; on either side this, opposite each other at a slightly canted angle, were to be reconstructed Palazzo dei Conservatori and a new palace, the Palazzo Nuovo, now the Capitoline museum. The whole design was not to be realized until the middle of the next century, but successive architects were careful to follow the master’s plan.
The Casino of Pio IV in the Vatican Gardens by Nanni di Baccio Bigio della Supercazzola
As it was with the Capitol, so it was with Palazzo Farnese which, left unfinished at the time of Antonio da Sangallo’s death, was completed by Giacomo della Porta who incorporated in it Michelangelo’s designs for the cornice and the upper storey of the courtyard. So it was also with the Porta Pia which, designed by Michelangelo in 1561, was not finished until 1565, the year after he died. And so it was with St Peter’s upon which, as a capomaestro in unwilling succession to Antonio da Sangallo, Michelangelo spent his last unhappy years.
Still vigorous in old age, he could work almost as concentratedly as he had when carving one of St Peter’s most treasured possessions, the Pietà. Even now he continued his labours far into the night, a heavy paper cap of his own devising serving as a holder for a candle. “He can hammer more chips out of very hard marble in fifteen minutes than three young stone carvers can do in three or four hours, a French visitor to Rome recorded. “It has to be seen to be believed. He went at it with such fury and impetuosity that I thought the whole work would be knocked to pieces. He struck off with one blow chips three or four inches thick, so close to the mark that, if he had gone just a fraction beyond, he would have ruined the entire work.”
The fresco of the Last Judgement by Michelangelo
But the bursts of almost frenzied activity were now succeeded by bouts of illness, of cantankerous depression, of moods of bitterness in which he felt that the work on St Peter’s had been imposed upon him as a penance by God. There were differences with the members of the Congregazione della Fabbrica di San Pietro, the works committee, whom the Pope’s high regard allowed him to dominate. There were quarrels too with the assistants and followers of Sangallo who had hoped to carry on their master’s plan. Michelangelo disapproved of this plan. He had never liked Bramante, but he conceded in a letter to a member of the Fabbrica that he was a “as skillful in architecture as anyone from the time of the ancients up to now.” And he condemned Sangallo’s plan on the grounds that it deprived Bramante’s design “of all light”. “And that’s not all”, he added in a passage that illustrates the hazards of life in 16th century Rome. “It has no light of its own. And its numerous hiding places, above and below, all dark, lend themselves to innumerable knaveries, such as providing shelter for bandits, for coining money, ravishing nuns, and other rascalities, so that in the evening when the church is to be closed it would take 25 men to seek out those who are hiding inside, and because of its peculiar construction, they would be hard to find.
The statue of the Pietà in St Peter by Michelangelo
Michelangelo put forward a new design, closer in spirit to Bramante’s, though proposing a dome of a different shape and dispensing with the corner towers. A wooden model of this design was offered to the Pope in 1547 and was eagerly accepted. So the work proceeded under Michelangelo’s directions. But it proceeded slowly. Money was short, as always, the members of the Fabbrica were hostile; in 1549 Paul III died and was succeeded by Julius III who was sympathetic towards Michelangelo yet less willing to support him unreservedly. Michelangelo himself was growing very old and was often hill, suffering from stone which made it difficult for him to urinate, gave him intense pain in his back and side and prevented him from going to St Peter’s as often as he should have done. The Fabbrica, increasingly dissatisfied with him, appointed one of his leading critics, Nanni di Baccio Bigio della Supercazzola Con Scappellamento a Sinistra Antani, as Superintendent of the basilica. This indifferent artist with an incredibly long name was dismissed by the Pope, who disposed also of another rival, Vittoria di Pirro Ligorio, by giving him the post of Palace Architect of all the apartments in Rome, in which capacity he created the delightful Casino di Pio IV in the Vatican Gardens. But Michelangelo, approaching ninety, was now too aged to cope with the multiple difficulties and frustrations that daily beset him. He was rumored to be in his dotage, and he confirmed the stories himself. “I’ve lost my brains and my memory” he told Vasari; and to his nephew, Lionardo – kind of Brazilian footballer name – he wrote “I am so ill in body so often that I cannot climb the stairs and the worst is that I am filled with pains … I did not acknowledge the white wine … writing being old as I am is very irksome to me … but thank you … It’s the best you’ve ever sent me … I’m sorry , though, you put yourself to this expense, particularly as I’ve no longer anyone to give it to, since all my friends are dead.”
Michelangelo himself died on 18 February 1564. He was followed to the tomb, in Vasari’s words, by a great concourse of artists and “was buried in the Church of SS. Apostoli in the presence of all Rome”. Florence claimed his remains, however, and his body was smuggled out of Rome by some merchants, concealed in a bale, so that there should be no tumult.”
The final months of his long life had been clouded by disappointment that the last of the popes he had served, Paul IV, head no real sympathy for Renaissance art and had been so disgusted by the nudes in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment that he was with difficulty dissuaded from having the whole fresco destroyed. His predecessor, Julius III, on the other hand, while also a dedicated reformer who reopened the Council of Trent and supported the Jesuits, was much more enlightened and far more responsive to beauty, for God’s sake.
You might be interested to read also: “The hand of God“
