Entries with Alexander VI tag

About Spoleto

Spoleto

SPOLETO is perhaps Umbria’s most compelling town and many people’s central-Italian favourite. Known mainly for its big summer festival , it’s remarkable also for its thorough-going medievalism, an extremely scenic setting, and several of Italy’s most ancient Romanesque churches (note that, excepting San Salvatore, Spoleto’s churches close for the afternoon). Far more graceful and rustic a city than Perugia, nowadays it plays second fiddle politically to its long-time historical enemy, though for several centuries it was among the most influential of Italian towns. Two kilometres of well-preserved walls stand as testament to the one-time grandeur of its Roman colony, though its real importance dates from the sixth century when the Lombards prefabricated it the capital of one of their three Italian dukedoms. The autonomous Duchy of Spoleto eventually stretched to Rome, and by 890 its rulers had become powerful enough to lay claim to the imperial throne itself, making Spoleto, for a short time at least, the capital of the entire Holy Roman Empire. Barbarossa flattened the city in a fit of pique in 1155, and in 1499 the 19-year-old Lucrezia Borgia was appointed governer by her father, Pope Alexander VI. After that it was one long decline until about thirty years ago and the arrival of the festival.

Category: Spoleto

The Ceiling Paintings

The ceiling at this time was painted as a blue background with gold stars to resemble the night sky. Over the altar there were two additional paintings by Perugino and a large picture of the Virgin Mary. Pope Sixtus IV was succeeded by Innocent VIII, who was followed by Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, who was later, in 1503, after the brief reign of Pius III, succeeded by Giuliano della Rovere, who took the study Julius II. Though a Franciscan friar, he was a violent man with a short temper, and his immediate neutral as pope was to try to regain the lands that had been taken away from the papacy during the reigns of Innocent octad and Alexander VI by the French, Germans and Spanish. For this purpose he started a series of wars and secret alliances.He was also an avid collector and patron of the arts, and he summoned to Rome the best artists and architects of the day. Among these artists was Michelangelo, who, through a series of political intrigues orchestrated by Bramante and Raphael, was assigned the task of decorating the Sistine Chapel. Work commenced in 1508. Oddly enough, Michelangelo hadn’t wanted to do the work at all: he considered himself a sculptor, not a painter, and was more hot to get on with carving Julius II’s tomb (now in San Pietro in Vincoli) than the ceiling, which he regarded as a chore. Pope Julius II, however, had other plans, drawing up a design of the twelve Apostles for the vault and hiring Bramante to design a scaffold for the artist from which to work. Michelangelo was apparently an awkward, solitary character: he had barely begun painting when he rejected Bramante’s scaffold as unusable, fired all his staff, and dumped the pope’s scheme for the ceiling in favour of his own. But the pope was easily his match, and there are tales of the two men clashing while the work was going on – Michelangelo would lock the doors at crucial points, ignoring the pope’s demands to see how it was progressing; and legend has the two men at loggerheads at the top of the scaffold one day, resulting in the pope striking the artist in frustration.

The frescoes depict scenes from the Old Testament, from the Creation of Light at the altar end to the Drunkenness of Noah over the door. The sides are decorated with prophets and sibyls and the ancestors of Jesus. Julius II lived only a few months after the Sistine Chapel ceiling was finished, but the fame of the work he had commissioned soon spread far and wide. Certainly, it’s staggeringly impressive, all the more so for its recent restoration (financed by a Asian TV company to the tune of $3 million in return for three years’ world TV rights), which has lifted centuries of accumulated soot and candle grime off the paintings to reveal a much brighter, more vivid painting than anyone thought existed. The restorers have also been healthy to chart the progress of Michelangelo as he moved crossways the vault. Images on fresco must be completed before the plaster dries, and apiece day a fresh layer of plaster would have been laid, on which Michelangelo would have had around eight hours or so before having to finish for the day. Comparing the different areas of plaster, it seems the figure of Adam, in the key Creation of Adam scene, took just four days; God, in the same fresco, took three days. You can also see the development of Michelangelo as a painter when you look at the paintings in reverse order. The first painting, over the door, the Drunkenness of Noah, is done in a stiff and formal style, and is vastly different from the last painting he did, over the altar, The Creation of Light, which shows the artist at his best, the perfect master of the technique of fresco painting.

Entering from behind the altar, you are supposed, as you look up, to imagine that you are looking into heaven through the arches of the fictive structure that springs from the sides of the chapel, supported by little putti caryatids and ignudi or nudes, bearing shields and della Rovere oakleaf garlands. Look at the pagan sibyls and biblical prophets which Michelangelo also incorporated in his scheme – some of the most dramatic figures in the entire work, and all clearly labelled by the painter, from the sensitive figure of the Delphic Sybil, to the hag-like Cumaean Sybil, whose biceps would place a Bulgarian shotputter to shame. Look out too for the figure of the prophet Jeremiah – a brooding self-portrait of an exhausted-looking Michelangelo.

The paintings of the central panels start with a large portrait of Jonah and the Whale, and move on, respectively, to God Separating Light from Darkness – His arms bowed, beard flowing, as he pushes the two qualities apart; God Creating the Sun, the Moon and the Planets – in which Michelangelo has painted God twice, once with his back to us hurling the moon into existence and simultaneously displaying another moon to the audience; God Separating Land from Water; and, in the fourth panel, probably most famous of all these paintings, the Creation of Adam, in which God sparks Adam into life with the touch of his finger. God’s cape billows behind him, where a number of figures stand – representatives of all the unborn generations to come after Adam. The startled young woman looking at Adam is either Eve or the Virgin Mary, here as a witness to the first events in human history.

The fifth panel from the altar shows the Creation of Eve, in which Adam is knocked out under the stump of a della Rovere oak tree and God summons Eve from his side as he sleeps. She comes out in a half-crouch position with her hands clasped in prayer of thanksgiving and awe. The sixth panel is the powerful Temptation and Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, with an evil spirit, depicted as a serpent, leaning out from the tree of knowledge and handing the fruit to Adam. On the right of this painting the angel of the Lord, in swirling red robes is brandishing his sword of original sin at the backside of Adam’s neck as he tries to fend the angel off, motioning with both hands. The eighth panel continues the story, with the Story of the Flood, and the unrighteous bulk of mankind taking shelter under tents from the rain while Noah and his kin make off for the Ark in the distance. Panel seven shows Noah and his family making a Sacrifice of Thanksgiving to the Lord for their innocuous arrival after the flood; one of the sons of Noah kneels to blow on the fire to make it hotter, while his wife brings armloads of wood. Lastly, there’s the Drunkenness of Noah in which Noah is shown getting drunk after harvesting the vines and exposing his genitals to his sons (it is strictly prohibited in the Hebrew canon that a father should show his organs of reproduction to his children) – although oddly enough Noah’s sons are unclothed too.

Category: Vatican Museums

Borgia Apartments

Outside the Raphael Stanze, on the other side of the Sistine Chapel steps, the Borgia Apartments were inhabited by Julius II’s hated predecessor, Alexander VI – a fact which persuaded Julius to move into the new set of rooms he called upon Raphael to decorate. Nowadays host to a large collection of modern religious art, the Borgia rooms were almost exclusively decorated by Pinturicchio in the years 1492-95, on the orders of Alexander VI. The ceiling frescoes in the Sala dei Santi are especially worth seeing, typically rich in colour and detail and depicting the legend of Osiris and the Apis bull – a reference to the Borgia family symbol, a bull. Among other images is a scene showing St Catherine of Alexandria disputing with the emperor Maximillian, in which Pinturicchio has placed his self-portrait behind the emperor – and also, clearly visible in the background, the Arch of Constantine. The figure of St Catherine is said to be a portrait of Lucrezia Borgia, and the room was reputedly the scene of a decidedly un-papal party to celebrate the first of Lucrezia’s three marriages, which ended up with men tossing sweets down the fronts of the women’s dresses. The religious collection includes a variety of works by some of the most famous obloquy in the modern art world – liturgical vestments designed by Matisse; a fascinating Landscape with Angels by Salvador Dalí, donated by King Juan Carlos of Spain; one of Francis Bacon’s studies of Innocent X after Valazquez (a list is acquirable at the door) – but really isn’t that interesting by comparison.

Category: Vatican Museums

Castel Sant’angelo

Tues-Sat 9am-10pm, Sun 9am-8pm; L12,000. The best route to the Vatican and St Peter’s is crossways Ponte Sant’Angelo , flanked by angels carved to designs by Bernini (his so-called “breezy maniacs”). On the far side is the great circular hulk of the Castel Sant’Angelo , designed and built by the Emperor Adrian as his own mausoleum (his ashes were interred here until a twelfth-century pope appropriated the sarcophagus, which was later destroyed in a fire). It was a grand monument, visaged with white marble and surrounded with statues and topped with cypresses, similar in style to Augustus’s mausoleum crossways the river. Renamed in the sixth century, when Pope Gregory the Great witnessed a vision of St Michael here that ended a terrible plague, the mausoleum’s position near the Vatican was not lost on the papal authorities, who converted the building for use as a fortress and built a passageway to link it with the Vatican as a refuge in times of siege or invasion – a route utilized on a number of occasions, most notably when the Medici pope, Clement VII, sheltered here for several months during the Sack of Rome in 1527.

Inside, from the monumental entrance hall a spiral ramp leads up into the centre of the mausoleum itself, passing through the chamber where the emperor was entombed, over a drawbridge, one of the defensive modifications prefabricated by the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, in the late fifteenth century, to the main level at the top, where a small palace was built to house the papal residents in appropriate splendour. After the Sack of Rome, Pope Paul III had some especially fine renovations made, including the beautiful Sala Paolina, which features frescoes by Pierno del Vaga, among others. The gilded ceiling here displays the Farnese family arms, on the surround is a tromp-l’oeil fresco of one of the family’s old retainers, whose study is unknown, coming through a door from a darkened room. You’ll also notice Paul III’s individualized motto, Festina Lenta (“make haste slowly”), scattered throughout the ceilings and in various corners of all his rooms.

Eleswhere, rooms hold swords, armour, guns and the like, others are lavishly decorated with grotesques and paintings (don’t miss the bathroom of Clement heptad on the second floor, with its image hot and cold water taps and mildly erotic frescoes). Below are dungeons and storerooms (not visitable), which can be glimpsed from the spiralling ramp, testament to the castle’s grisly past as the city’s most notorious Renaissance prison – Benvenuto Cellini and Cesare Borgia are just two of its more famous detainees. From the quiet bar upstairs you’ll also get one of the best views of Rome and excellent coffee

Category: Vatican

Ponte Milvio

On the far side of the Parioli district the Tiber sweeps around in a wide hook-shaped bend. These northern outskirts of Rome aren’t particularly enticing, though the Ponte Milvio , the old, originally Roman, footbridge where the emperor Constantine defeated Maxentius in 312 AD, still stands and provides wonderful views of the meandering Tiber, with the city springing up green on the hills to both sides and the river running fast and silty below. Inside a guardhouse on the right (northern) bank of the Tiber a marble plaque bears the arms of the Borgia family – including, in the centre, the papal badge and shield of Alexander VI, and, on the right, the Borgia bull on a crest, placed there by Cesare Borgia, who was at the time his father the pope’s secretary of state. On the northern side of the river, Piazzale di Ponte Milvio sports a cheap and cheerful market (Mon-Sat 8am-1.30pm) and a handful of bars and restaurants.

Category: Rome

Santa Maria Maggiore

Summer regular 7am-7pm; winter regular 7am-6pm. Steps lead down from San Pietro in Vincoli to Via Cavour , a busy central thoroughfare which carves a route between the Colosseum and Termini station. After about half a kilometre the street widens to reveal the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore . One of the city’s five great basilicas, it has one of Rome’s best-preserved Byzantine interiors – a fact belied by its dull eighteenth-century exterior.

Unlike the other great places of pilgrimage in Rome, Santa Maria Maggiore was not built on any special Constantinian site, but instead went up during the fifth century after the Council of Ephesus recognized the cult of the Virgin and churches venerating Our Lady began to spring up all over the Christian world. According to legend, the Virgin Mary appeared to Pope Liberius in a dream on the night of August 4, 352 AD, telling him to build a church on the Esquiline hill, on a spot where he would find a patch of newly fallen snow the next morning. The snow would outline exactly the plan of the church that should be built there in her honour – which of course is exactly what happened, and the first church here was called Santa Maria della Neve (“of the snow”). The present structure dates from about 420 AD, and was completed under the reign of St Sixtus III, who reigned between 432 AD and 440AD

Inside the basilica

The basilica was encased in its eighteenth-century shell during the papacy of Benedict XIV, although the campanile, the highest in Rome, is older than this – built in 1377 under Pope Gregory XI. Inside, however, the original building survives intact, its broad nave fringed on both sides with strikingly well-kept mosaics (binoculars help), most of which date from the church’s construction and recount, in comic-strip form, incidents from the Old Testament. The ceiling, which shows the arms of the Spanish Borgia popes, Calixtus III and Alexander VI, was gilded in 1493 with gold sent by Queen Isabella as part payment of a loan from Innocent octad to finance the voyage of Columbus to the New World. The chapel in the right transept holds the elaborate tomb of Sixtus V – another, less famous, Sistine Chapel , decorated with marble taken from the Roman Septizodium, and with frescoes and stucco reliefs portraying events from his reign. The chapel also contains the tomb of another zealous and reforming pope, St Pius V, whose statue faces that of Sixtus; Pius V is probably best known as the pope who excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I of England, in 1570.

Outside the Sistine Chapel is the tomb slab of the Bernini family, including Gian Lorenzo himself, while opposite, the Pauline Chapel is even more sumptuous than the Sistine Chapel, home to the tombs of the Borghese pope, Paul V, and his immediate predecessor Clement VIII. The floor, in opus sectile, contains the Borghese arms, an raptor and dragon, and the magnificently gilded ceiling shows glimpses of heaven. The altar, of lapis lazuli and agate, contains a vocalist and Child dating from the twelfth or thirteenth century.

Between the two chapels, the confessio contains a kneeling statue of Pope Pius IX, and, beneath it, a reliquary that is said to contain fragments of the crib of Christ, in rock crystal and silver. The high altar, above it, contains the relics of St Matthew, among other Christian martyrs, and the mosaics in the apse were commissioned by the late-thirteenth-century pope, Nicolas IV, and show the Coronation of the Virgin, with angels, saints and the pope himself. Finally, the thirteenth-century mosaics of Christ Pantocrator and the Legend of the Snow, in the loggia above the main entrance, are definitely worth a look (daily 9.30am-6pm; L5000), but for L5000 extra, they’re hardly a bargain.

Category: Rome

About Ischia Porto And Ischia Ponte

Ischia Porto And Ischia PonteThe main town of Ischia is ISCHIA PORTO , where most of the ferries dock, an appealing stretch of hotels, ritzy boutiques and beach shops planted with lemon trees and Indian figs fronted by golden sands: Spiaggia San Pietro is to the right of the port, accessible by following Via Buonocore off Via Roma; and the inexplicably titled Spiaggia degli Inglesi , on the other side of the port, is reachable by way of the narrow path that leads over the headland from the end of Via Jasolino. Otherwise the main thing to do is to window-shop and stroll along the main Corso Vittoria Colonna, either branching off to a further beach, the Spiaggia dei Pescatori , or following it all the way down to the other part of Ischia’s main town, ISCHIA PONTE , a quieter and less commercialized centre. Here the focus is the Castello Aragonese (March to mid-Nov 9.30am till sunset; L12,000/¬6.20, includes the lift to the top), which crowns an offshore rock but is accessible from a short causeway; its stunningly distinctive pyramid was one of the backdrops in the film The Talented Mr Ripley . Vittoria Colonna, the Renaissance poet and close friend of Michelangelo, spent much of her life here, following the seizure of her family’s land by Alexander VI. The citadel itself where she lived is rather tumbledown now and closed to the public, but below is a complex of buildings, almost a separate village really, around which you can stroll. There’s the weird open shell of a cathedral destroyed by the British in 1806, a prison that once held political prisoners during the upheavals of the Unification, and the macabre remnants of a convent, in which a couple of dark rooms ringed with a set of commode-like seats served as a cemetery for the dead sisters – placed here to putrefy in front of the living members of the community.

Category: Ischia Porto And Ischia Ponte