They dragged down a colossal bronze statue of the Pope, hauled it around the piazza, shouted abuse at it, mocked and scorned it. This is when we get a glimpse of what ordinary Italians thought of Julius. Although by any logical criteria this was a liberation, it was resented, and as soon as they got an opportunity, in 1511, the Bolognese rose up and chucked the Church's garrison out. In 1506 the new Pope seized Bologna, which he claimed was a papal property, from its oppressive, gangsterish ruling family, the Bentivogli. To the Bolognese, he just seemed a bully. The period we call the High Renaissance - the age of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian and Raphael - was a tragic age to live through. He was one of the princes whose self-delusion and folly destroyed Italy, according to its greatest historian, the 16th-century statesman Francesco Guicciardini. But he soon became more ambitious and saw himself - as a Venetian ambassador reported in 1510 - as "lord and master of the world's game". Julius started with the aim of winning back the Papal states, northeastern and central Italian territories to which the papacy claimed title. Michelangelo once asked him if, in the bronze statue he commissioned the Florentine sculptor to make of him in Bologna, Julius would like to be shown with a book in his left hand, to signify scholarship. ![]() He had less faith in the power of prayer than in power, pure and simple. It was just that he believed in the Church militant rather than pious. Giuliano della Rovere was a man dedicated to the Church. The Papacy was a landowner, a political state, a diplomatic office - too important to be left to the clergy. ![]() The cardinal was a known troublemaker, "notoriously difficult by nature and formidable with everyone", in an age when no one expected Popes to be exactly holier than thou. There was amazement when he was elected Pope 60 years later, in 1503. When they offered to surrender, he quibbled over the clause that he should spare their lives. The defenders ended up putting their last efforts into trying to kill the Pope as he egged on his men. His headquarters was so close to the walls of Mirandola that a cannon shot killed two staff in his kitchen. A white-haired fury was riding up and down the attacking army, barking orders, abusing slackers, praising where praise was due, filling his army with heart and rage. The French and Italian defenders of the besieged fortress of Mirandola in the Duchy of Ferrara, which Julius was attacking as part of his campaign to drive France out of Italy, looked down from their battlements in 1511 and saw a vision out of a nightmare. ![]() It was a scene that a few years later would make wonderful Reformation propaganda, something out of a German woodcut of the Apocalypse in which the anti-Pope rides over the land bringing death, pestilence, famine and war. But to understand why it is so unique, you have to begin at a siege 500 years ago. Raphael's portrait of Pope Julius II was a masterpiece acquired, as it were, by accident in 1970, when what was thought to be a copy was recognised as the original, and therefore as one of the most precious creations of the Renaissance.
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