Pope Sixtus IV

Pope Sixtus IV (July 21, 1414 – August 12, 1484), born Francesco della Rovere, was Pope from 1471 to 1484. He founded the Sistine Chapel where the team of artists he brought together introduced the Early Renaissance to Rome with the first masterpiece of the city's new artistic age (Michelangelo's frescoes were added in a later phase).

Biography

He was born to a modest family near Savona, Liguria: the precise town is variously stated to be Albisola or, more often, Celle Ligure, a town near Savona in the Republic of Genoa. He joined the Franciscan Order, an unlikely choice for a political career, and his intellectual qualities were revealed while he was studying philosophy and theology at the University of Pavia. He went on to lecture at many eminent Italian universities. He was elected Minister General of the Franciscan order in 1464. In 1467, he was made a Cardinal by Pope Paul II (1464–71).

With his election, and after some ineffective sorties against the Ottoman Turks in Smyrna, where fund-raising energy was more successful than half-hearted attempts to storm Smyrna and some attempts at unification with the Greek Church, he turned to temporal issues and dynastic considerations. Sixtus IV continued the dispute with Louis XI of France (1461–83), who upheld the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438), according to which papal decrees needed royal assent before they could be promulgated in France. This was a cornerstone of the privileges claimed for the Gallican Church and could never be shifted as long as Louis XI maneuvered to replace Ferdinand I of Naples with a French prince, thus being in conflict with the papacy, which as a princely strategist could not permit it.

Like a number of Popes, Sixtus IV adhered to the system of nepotism. In the fresco by Melozzo da Forlì he is accompanied by his Della Rovere and Riario nephews, not all of whom were made cardinals: the protonotary apostolic Raffaele Riario (on his right), the future Pope Julius II (1503–13) standing before him, and Girolamo Riario and Giovanni della Rovere behind the kneeling Platina, author of the first humanist history of the Popes.

The secular fortunes of the Della Rovere began when Sixtus invested his nephew Giovanni (1457-1501) with the signoria of Senigallia and arranged his marriage to the daughter of Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino; from the union came a line of Della Rovere dukes of Urbino that lasted until the line expired, in 1631.On his premature death (1501), Giovanni entrusted his son Francesco Maria to Federico's successor Guidobaldo (Duke of Urbino 1482-1508) who, without an heir, devised the duchy on the boy.

In his territorial aggrandizement of the Papal States Sixtus IV's nephew Cardinal Raffaele Riario, for whom the Palazzo della Cancelleria was constructed, was a leader in the 1478 failed "Pazzi conspiracy" to assassinate both Lorenzo de' Medici and his brother and replace them in Florence with Sixtus IV's other nephew, Girolamo Riario. The archbishop of Pisa, a main organizer of the plot, was hanged on the walls of the Florentine Palazzo della Signoria. To this Sixtus IV replied with an interdict and two years' of war with Florence. He also encouraged the Venetians to attack Ferrara, which he wished to obtain for another nephew. The angered Italian princes allied to force Sixtus IV to make peace, to his great annoyance.

As a temporal prince who constructed stout fortresses in the Papal States, Sixtus IV committed himself to Venice's aggression against the duchy of Ferrara, inciting the Venetians to attack in 1482. Their combined assault was opposed by an alliance of Sforza Milan, Medici Florence, along with the King of Naples, normally a hereditary ally and champion of the Papacy. For refusing to desist from the very hostilities that he himself had instigated (and for being a dangerous rival to Della Rovere dynastic ambitions in the Marche), Sixtus IV placed Venice under interdict in 1483.

Sixtus IV consented to the Spanish Inquisition and issued a bull in 1478 that established an Inquisitor in Seville, under political pressure from Ferdinand of Aragon, who threatened to withhold military support from his kingdom of Sicily. Nevertheless, Sixtus IV quarrelled over protocol and prerogatives of jurisdiction, was unhappy with the excesses of the Inquisition and took measures to condemn the most flagrant abuses in 1482, though he is said to have fathered his sister's son. In ecclesiastical affairs, Sixtus IV instituted the feast (December 8) of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. He formally annulled (1478) the confusedly reformist decrees of the Council of Constance.

Princely patronage

As a civic patron in Rome, even the anti-papal chronicler Stefano Infessura agreed that Sixtus IV should be admired. The dedicatory inscription in the fresco by Melozzo da Forli in the Vatican Palace records: "You gave your city temples, streets, squares, fortifications, bridges and restored the Acqua Vergine as far as the Trevi..." In addition to restoring the aqueduct that provided Rome an alternative to the river water that had made the city famously unhealthy, he restored or rebuilt over 30 of Rome's dilapidated churches, among them San Vitale (1475) and Santa Maria del Popolo, and added seven new ones. The Sistine Chapel was sponsored by Sixtus IV, as was the Ponte Sisto, the Sistine Bridge – the first new bridge across the Tiber since antiquity – and the building of Via Sistina (later named Borgo Sant'Angelo), a road leading from Castel Sant'Angelo to Saint Peter. All this was done to facilitate the integration of the Vatican Hill and Borgo with the heart of old Rome. This was part of a broader scheme of urbanization carried out under Sixtus IV, who swept the long-established markets from the Campidoglio in 1477 and decreed in a bull of 1480 the widening of streets and the first post-Roman paving, the removal of porticoes and other post-classical impediments to free public passage.

At the beginning of his papacy in 1471, Sixtus IV donated several historically important Roman sculptures that founded a papal collection of art that would eventually develop into the collections of the Capitoline Museums. He also refounded, enriched and enlarged the Vatican Library. He had Regiomontanus attempt the first sanctioned reorganization of the Julian calendar and called Josquin des Prez to Rome for his music. His bronze funerary monument in St. Peter's Basilica, like a giant casket of goldsmith's work, is by Antonio Pollaiuolo.

The cardinals of Sixtus IV

At the death of Sixtus IV, the conclave of cardinals that met to elect his successor numbered thirty-two surviving cardinals, a greater number than at any time since the close of the twelfth century, excepting perhaps for the multiplied rival cardinalatial colleges of the Great Schism (1378–1417). Of the thirty-two, only three cardinals survived from before Pope Paul II (1464–71): the two nephews of Pope Calixtus III (1455–58), Rodrigo and Luis Borgia, and the nephew of Pope Pius II (1458–64), Francesco di Nanni Todeschini de' Piccolomini. Six further cardinals survived from the pontificate of Paul II: Thomas Bourchier, Oliviero Caraffa, Marco Barbo, Jean Balue, Giovanni Battista Zeno, and Giovanni Michiel. The remaining twenty-three had been made cardinals by Sixtus IV, and the roster of the princely houses of Italy, France and Spain echoes the chronicles of Renaissance history: Giuliano della Rovere, Stefano Nardini, Pedro Gonsalvez de Mendoza, Giovanni Battista Cibo, soon to be Pope Innocent VIII (1484–92), Giovanni Arcimboldi, Philibert Hugonet, Giorgio da Costa, Charles de Bourbon l'ancien, Pierre de Foix le jeune, Girolamo Basso della Rovere, Gabriele Rangoni, Pietro Foscari, Juan of Aragon, Raffaele Sansoni Riario, Domenico della Rovere, Paolo Fregoso, Giovanni Battista Savelli, Giovanni Colonna, Giovanni Conti, Juan Moles de Margarit, Giangiacomo Sclafenati, Giovanni Battista Orsini, and Ascanio Maria Sforza-Visconti.

References

Short Biography
Catholic Encyclopedia: "Pope Sixtus IV"
Genealogy of Leonardo della Rovere, father of Francesco della Rovere, Pope Sixtus IV

1414 births | 1484 deaths | Popes | Natives of Liguria | Franciscans

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Pope Sixtus IV

Biography

Princely patronage

The cardinals of Sixtus IV

References