by Will Durant
Classical art had sought to reveal the objective, the impersonal, the perfect; baroque allowed the individual artist, even his passing humor, to find embodiment in work that represented not so much an object realistically portrayed (as in Dutch painting), but an impression or feeling objectified through partly imaginary forms. So El Greco’s elongations were not Spain’s men but his own memories or moods; the tender Madonnas of Murillo and Guido Reni were not the harassed mothers whom they knew but the exemplary piety they had been asked to represent. Moreover, an Italy that had felt the seismic shock of the Reformation, and that had been stirred to fresh intensities of religious emotion by Loyola, Teresa, Xavier, and Charles Borromeo—this post-Luther Italy could no longer rest in the calm, proud peace of the classic ideal. It reaffirmed its faith, displayed its symbols defiantly, adorned its shrines, and poured into art a new warmth of color and sensibility, a fresh diversity and incalculable freedom of structure and movement, released from classic rule, restraint, and line. Art became the expression of feeling through ornament, not the compression of thought into form.
Architecture was no longer Greek mathematics or Roman engineering, it was music, sometimes opera, like the Opéra in Paris. Designers and builders turned from stability to fluidity and rhythm; they rejected a static symmetry for deliberate disbalance and disunity; they willfully carved or twisted columns and architraves; they were weary of plain surfaces and heavy masses; they interrupted cornices, broke pediments in two, and scattered sculpture at every turn. The sculptors themselves were tired of perfect limbs, immobile features, the stiff frontal pose; they placed their figures in unexpected attitudes, inviting the eye to take diverse views; they introduced the effects of painting into statuary, carving light and shade into the stone, movement into the body, thought and feeling into the face. Painters left pure line, clear light, and an innocuous serenity to Perugino, Correggio, and Raphael; they bathed the world in color like Rubens, shaded it with mysticism like Rembrandt, roused it into sensuality like Reni, or troubled it with suffering and ecstasy like El Greco. The woodworkers littered furniture with decoration, the metalworkers turned their material into bizarre or humorous forms. When, in 1568, the Jesuits engaged Vignola to design their church, Il Gesù, in Rome, they saw to it that it should gather all the arts into a profusion of columns, statues, pictures, and precious metal, designed not to illustrate geometry, but to inspire and irradiate faith.
Because in art Italy still led Europe, the new style of ornament, sentiment, and expression passed not only into Catholic Spain, Flanders, and France, but even into Protestant Germany, where it achieved some of its gayest forms. Literature felt the baroque influence in the extravagant word play of Marini, Góngora, and Lyly, in the high-flown language of Shakespeare, in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Goethe’s Faust. Opera is music baroquefied. The new style won no general victory. The Dutch preferred a quiet realism to the excitements of baroque. Velázquez at his best was classical or realist, and Cervantes, after a romantic life, wrote Don Quixote with classic poise and calm. Corneille, Racine, and Poussin were devotedly classical. But were the classics always classical? Could anything be more baroque than the ugly struggling Laocoö n? History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks all our rules. History is baroque.
One powerful factor remained constant in Italian art: the Church was still the most active and formative patron. There were, of course, other patrons and influences: princely houses and cultured cardinals built private palaces, and in ornament carried on some pagan themes; so Odoardo Farnese had the Carracci paint for him The Triumph of Bacchus and The Rule of Love. But the Council of Trent and the Catholic Reformation that followed it had set a sterner tone; nudes retired from Italian art, and pious subjects no longer served as sensual vehicles. Only the supplications of Roman artists dissuaded Pope Clement VIII from completely covering Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, Daniele da Volterra’s breeches and all. The Council had defended religious images against the attacks of Huguenots and Puritans, but it had insisted that such symbols should inspire worship rather than stir the blood. Whereas the reformers had discountenanced the adoration of Mary and the invocation of saints, the painters and sculptors of Counter-Reformation Italy told again, sometimes with crude realism, the sufferings of the martyrs, and, with conscious sentiment, the story of the Virgin Mother of God. The anxiety of the Church to depaganize art and to inculcate doctrine and piety co-operated with the political and economic reverses of Italy to make this age the last echo of the Renaissance.
IX. THE ARTS IN ROME
Rome was still the art capital of the world. The great age of Roman painting was over, and no Italian painter now could rival Rubens or Rembrandt, but Roman architecture prospered, and Bernini was for a generation the most famous artist in Europe. Though Bologna had stolen the lead in painting, the stars of that school came to Rome for their final flourishing, and Vasari arrived in 1572 to fresco the Sala Regia of the Vatican. Painters whom fond minorities still reverence peopled the botteghe of Rome: Taddeo and Federigo Zuccaro, Girolamo Muziano, Francesco de’ Salviati, Giovanni Lanfranco, Bartolommeo Manfredi, Domenico Fetti, Andrea Sacchi. Most of these are usually classed as “mannerists”—artists who imitated the manner of one or another of the masters of the High Renaissance. We may include “mannerism” (1550–1600) as the first stage of baroque.
Federigo Zuccaro unfurled his colors in four nations. In Florence he completed the frescoes that Vasari had begun in the cathedral dome; in Rome he painted the Capella Paolina of the Vatican; in Flanders he designed a series of cartoons; in England he made famous portraits of Queen Elizabeth and Mary Stuart; in Spain he shared in decorating the Escorial; and back in Rome he founded the Academy of St. Luke, whose organization suggested to Reynolds the English Royal Academy of Arts. Of all Italian painters in that generation Zuccaro was in greatest demand, but posterity has preferred Pietro Berrettini da Cortona. With Renaissance versatility Pietro designed the Barberini and Pamfili palaces in Rome, and painted, in the Pitti Palace at Florence, frescoes crowded with fantastic figures in the full profusion of baroque.
The real master of Roman painting in this age was Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. He was a man of Cellinian spirit. Son of a Lombard stonemason, he studied in Milan, moved to Rome, enjoyed a dozen quarrels, killed a friend in a duel, escaped from prison, fled to Malta, Catania, and Syracuse, and died of sunstroke on a Sicilian shore at the age of forty-four (1609). In the intervals he effected a near-revolution in the mood and the technique of Italian painting. He liked violent contrasts of light and shade, played such tricks as illuminating a scene from a hidden hearth, modeled his figures with light, brought them out from a dark background, and began the reign of the tenebrosi—Guercino, Ribera, and Salvator Rosa—in Italy. Scorning the idealistic sentimentality of the Bolognese painters, he startled the age with his almost brutal realism. When he took religious subjects he made the Apostles and the saints look like burly workers borrowed from the docks. His Card Players (now in the Rothschild Collection in Paris) won him international fame. His Musicians—three singers and a lovely lutanist—gathered dirt for three centuries before it was found in a north-of-England antique shop about 1935; it was sold to a surgeon for £ 100 and was bought for $50,000 by the Metropolitan Museum of New York (1952). The Church usually rejected Caravaggio’s religious pictures as too plebeian and lacking in sublimity; today they are the prizes of connoisseurs. Rubens so admired the Italian’s Madonna del Rosario that he collected 1,800 gulden among the artists of Antwerp to buy it and present it to the Church of St. Paul.85 The Supper at Emmaus (London) is not as profound as Rembrandt’s, but it is a powerful rendering of peasant figures. The Death of the Virgin (Louvre)—again a peasant scene—was one of the pictures that established the school of naturalisti in Italy and realists in Spain and the Netherlands. Too often Caravaggio stressed the melodrama of violence and crudity; but history, like
oratory, seldom makes a point without exaggeration. An age that had exhausted the themes of sentiment shuddered at these brawny longshoremen, and then accepted them as an invigorating entry of forgotten men into art. Ribera took up Caravaggio’s darkened brush and equaled him; Rembrandt captured the chiaroscuro of the Italian and bettered it; and even the painters of the nineteenth century felt that stormy influence.
Architecture now saw both the advent and the zenith of baroque. Pope after pope transmuted the sweat and pennies of the willing faithful into the glory of Rome. Pius IV completed the Belvedere and other rooms in the Vatican. Gregory XIII built the Collegio Romano and began the Quirinal Palace—which in 1870 became the residence of the King. Domenico Fontana, favorite architect of Sixtus V, designed the new Lateran Palace, the Sistine Chapel in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, and, in that chapel, the very baroque tomb of Pius V. Meanwhile cardinals and nobles added new palaces to Rome (Giustiniani, Lancelotti, Borghese, Barberini, Rospigliosi) and new villas (Pamfili, Borghese, Medici). Destruction went on, too; in this period Paul V demolished the Baths of Constantine, which had survived, almost intact, since the first Christian Emperor.
Good architects were plentiful. There was Giacomo della Porta, who ably completed several buildings left unfinished by his master, Vignola, like the façade of Il Gesù and the cupola of St. Peter’s; in that same immensity he designed the majestic Cappella Gregoriana; he gave the final touches to the Palazzo Farnese, which Michelangelo had begun; and to him are due two of the magnificent fountains that give Rome the freshness of eternal youth. The loveliest of the fountains is the Fontana delle Tartarughe (tortoises), which Taddeo Lundini set up before the Palazzo Mattei. Martino Lunghi the Elder shared with della Porta in raising from Michelangelo’s sketches the Palazzo de’ Conservatori, and himself began the Borghese Palace, which Flaminio Ponzio completed for Paul V. Domenico Fontana contributed the Fontanone dell’ Acqua Felice and the Fontana dell’ Acqua Paolina, and erected the beautiful Loggia of the Benediction on the north portico of St. John Lateran. His nephew Carlo Maderna succeeded him as architect of St. Peter’s, changed its basic plan from the Greek cross of Michelangelo to the Latin cross, designed the façade of the great shrine, and found in the baths of Caracalla and Diocletian the inspiration for its immense nave. Maderna’s disciple Francesco Borromini rebuilt magnificently the interior of St. John Lateran, and began, as his masterpiece, the sumptuous Church of Sant’ Agnese, which rivals ll Gesù as illustrating Roman baroque.
The Church of Jesus—Il Gesù—was planned (1568) by Giacomo da Vignola to meet the desire of the Jesuits for an architecture whose magnificence would awe, inspire, and uplift the worshiper. The architect and his successors designed a spacious nave without aisles, with ornate pillars, spandrels, capitals, and cornices; an imposing altar, a luminous cupola, and brilliant decoration with pictures, statuary, marble, silver, and gold; and in 1700 Andrea del Pozzo, himself a Jesuit, added the noble tomb and altar of St. Ignatius. The Jesuit attitude to life differed from that of some other Catholic churchmen, and was at opposite pole to the Puritan view; art was to be chastened of secular sensuality, but it was to be welcomed in the adornment of life and faith. However, there was no specific “Jesuit style.” Il Gesù was baroque petrified, and many Jesuit churches, especially in Germany, were baroque, but each church followed local and current forms and moods.
The final achievement of Roman art was the completion of St. Peter’s. Michelangelo had left a model of the dome, but the drum alone had been laid when Sixtus V came to the papacy. The drum was 138 feet in diameter. Only Brunelleschi, at Florence, had dared to cover so great an area without intervening supports. Architects and engineers quailed before the task proposed by Buonarotti; financiers moaned that it would take a million ducats and ten years’ time. Sixtus ordered the work to proceed, hoping to celebrate Mass under the new dome before he died. Giacomo della Porta took charge, with Domenico Fontana as his aide. Eight hundred men labored night or day, Sundays excepted, from March 1589 till, on May 21, 1590, three months before the doughty pontiff’s death, Rome was informed that “to his everlasting glory, and the shame of his predecessors, our holy Pope Sixtus V has completed the vaulting of the dome of St. Peter’s.”86
The effect of the dome, except from a distance, was diminished by the baroque façade that Maderna set up in 1607–14. The church itself was finally consecrated in 1626, 174 years after its first planning. In 1633 Bernini cast in bronze the gaudy baldacchino, or canopy, over the “tomb of St. Peter” and the high altar. The great sculptor redeemed himself by enclosing the approach to the shrine in a massive elliptical colonnade (1655–67) that helps to make St. Peter’s the most sublime building on earth, as its dome is the crowning achievement of modern art.
X. BERNINI
Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini summed up in one dominating life (1598–1680) the art of seventeenth-century Rome. From his Florentine father, a sculptor, he learned his art; from his Neapolitan mother he may have derived his emotional intensity and ardent faith. In 1605 the father was summoned to Rome to work on the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore. There “Gian” grew up in an atmosphere of classic statuary and Jesuit piety. He was thrilled by the Vatican Antinoü s and the Apollo Belvedere; but he was more deeply moved by the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, which he practiced till he felt the terror and devotion of one who had experienced the pains of hell and the love of Christ. Every day he heard Mass; twice a week he took the Sacrament.
He tried his hand at painting, even to producing a hundred pictures. Of these the Sts. Andrew and Thomas in the Barberini Collection at Rome has won most praise, though we might prefer the self-portrait in the Uffizi Gallery—a dark, handsome youth tending to melancholy meditation. He did better in architecture. For Maffeo Barberini he completed the Barberini Palace; and when this patron became Pope Urban VIII, Bernini, aged thirty-one, was appointed chief architect of St. Peter’s. There, besides the colonnade and the baldacchino, he built in the apse the ornate Cathedra Petri, enshrining the wooden chair which the faithful believed to have been used by the Apostle; around it he grouped four powerful figures of Church Fathers; and over the whole bizarre structure he scattered angelic statuary with the abandon of a man who had a mint of masterpieces in his brain. Near it he placed a massive tomb for his beloved Urban VIII. He designed the balconies, and many of the statues adorning the piers that support the dome. Under the dome he placed a monumental figure of St. Longinus, and in the right aisle he raised a lavish memorial to Countess Matilda of Tuscany. Outside the church, in a chaster style, he remodeled the Scala Regia, which leads up past stately columns to the Vatican Palace, and in an alcove of this Royal Stairway he set up an equestrian statue of Constantine seeing in the sky his summons to Christianity; the emotionalism of this figure set a pattern for the baroque age. Toward the end of his life he built in the Chapel of the Sacrament in St. Peter’s an altar whose brilliant marbles and crowning ciborium, temple, cupola, and angels rapt in adoration seemed to him not too gorgeous an embodiment for the Eucharistic mystery of the Mass. All this work in and around St. Peter’s impresses a modern artist as theatrical excess and a specious appeal to the senses; to Bernini it seemed the exuberant vehicle of an ecstatic and communicable faith.
Everywhere he mingled architecture and statuary. He dreamed of an art that would unite architecture, sculpture, and painting into one soulstirring ensemble. In the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria he brought together precious marbles—green, blue, and red—and loosed his decorative fancy to build the Cornaro Chapel, with fluted pillars and graceful Corinthian columns; there he placed one of his most arresting and emotional sculptures: St. Teresa, limp and unconscious in an ecstatic trance, with a delectable seraph preparing to pierce her heart with a flaming arrow, a symbol of the saint’s union with Christ. The seemingly lifeless figure of Teresa is one of the triumphs of Italian baroque, and the darting angel is a song in stone.
Bernini had some rivals. Montaigne was strongly impresse
d by Giacomo della Porta’s statue of Justice on the tomb of Paul III in St. Peter’s. Torrigiano cast a powerful and realistic bust of Sixtus V, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Borromini, like Bernini, mingled sculpture with architecture, as in the tomb of Cardinal Villamarino in the Church of Santi Apostoli in Naples. Alessandro Algardi equaled Bernini in carving three figures for the tomb of Leo XI in St. Peter’s, and surpassed him in sculptural relief with the alto relievo of The Meeting of Pope Leo I and Attila, also in St. Peter’s; and Algardi’s bust of Innocent X in the Palazzo Doria Pamfili is more satisfying than Bernini’s, and almost as powerful as Velázquez’ portrait. But no one in this age matched Bernini in artistic fertility, imagination, and total achievement.
He delighted Rome with bizarre fountains: the Fontana del Tritone, the Fontana dei Fiumi—where minor sculptors carved four figures representing the Danube, the Nile, the Ganges, and the Plata. From competitive plans submitted for this fountain, Innocent X chose Bernini’s, saying, “One must not look at his designs unless one is prepared to adopt them.”87 Bernini’s flair for sumptuous sepulchral monuments must have given his patrons some pleasant anticipations of death. Urban VIII lived long enough to see the tomb in St. Peter’s that was prepared for his remains.
Cardinal Scipione Borghese rivaled Urban in giving Bernini scudi and tasks. For him the sculptor made the vivid Rape of Proserpine, a dream of masculine muscles and feminine contours; David slinging his shot at Goliath; and Apollo and Daphne—too ideal a representation of male and female youth. These figures (now all in the Borghese Gallery) brought upon Bernini the charge of mannerism and theatrical exaggeration. The Cardinal himself was transmitted to us in two busts, the personification of good nature and good appetite. Naturally more attractive is the bust of the lovely Constanza Buonarelli in the Museo Nazionale at Florence; she was the wife of Bernini’s aide, but Bernini, said his son, made her into stone while hotly enamored of her flesh—fieramente innamorato.88