R. A. Scotti

by Basilica: The Splendor;the Scandal: Building St. Peter's

  Instead of the thirty months allowed by Sixtus, della Porta and Fontana had achieved the impossible with time to spare. They had raised the highest dome ever built in just twenty-two months. Dwarfing every other construction, it soared 438 feet and spanned a 138-foot diameter. The dome of St. Peter’s is three times the height of the Pantheon dome, more than twice the height of the Hagia Sophia dome, and 100 feet higher than the Duomo in Florence.*

  Three months later, Sixtus V died. True to his name, he was a happy man, his deepest desire fulfilled. Inscribed around the eye of the cupola that he pressed to completion is the legend: “This dome was built for the glory of St. Peter by Sixtus V.”

  Over the course of his five-year pontificate, Sixtus spent one million ducats on building. Unlike other popes who were big spenders, he left a city and a church to show for it.

  Sixtus was so formidable that perhaps no one could fill his shoes. The three popes who followed him—Urban VII, Gregory XIV, and Innocent IX—each died within a few months of their election. Unaffected by their presence or their passing, della Porta persevered.

  He faced the cupola with thin slabs of travertine, coated it with a protective lead covering, and bronzed the ribs. In 1591, he completed the lantern. Although it carried through the pattern of windows and buttresses from the dome, in concept and proportion it was very different from Michelangelo’s design. Della Porta’s lantern was low, to conform to the elevated cupola, and surrounded with a row of candles, or finials. A copper ball and bronze cross were added in successive years.

  Forged in the Vatican foundry, each is immense. The ball, or palla, is eight feet in diameter and weighs 5,493 pounds—sixteen people can stand inside it. The cross is sixteen feet high and holds two lead caskets within its arms, one filled with relics, the other with Agnus Deis, wax medallions made after Easter from the paschal candles and imprinted with the image of the Lamb of God.

  Palla and cross were hoisted to the acme of the Basilica by a series of pulleys and positioned on top of the lantern. The cross was raised in a single day—November 18, 1593. Including the cross, ball, and lantern, more than 616,000 tons rest on Michelangelo’s drum, and the height from the ground to the tip of the cross is 452 feet.

  When each element of the dome was finished, della Porta redesigned the two minor domes to correspond with the central cupola. By then, he was working for his sixth pope—Clement VIII. In his first years as capomaestro, della Porta had built the large northeast corner chapel for Gregory XIII. Now, in his final years, he built the corresponding southeast corner chapel for Clement. At the same time, work began on the interior decoration of his dome.

  Given its extraordinary height, every element had to be enormous to be visible. A frieze of purple-blue letters, each six feet high, circles the lower rim of the cupola on a broad band of gold, spelling out the words: Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam et tibi dabo claves regni caelorum—“Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church and I will give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” To fill the interior of the dome, Giuseppe Ce-sari, an extraordinary mosaic artist known as Cavaliere d’Arpino, began a series of cartoons. His mosaics are so huge that the pen that St. Luke holds in one of the panels is eight feet long.

  Although it would take many more years for d’Arpino to complete the mosaics than it had taken della Porta to raise the dome, the tumultuous century of construction was over. Giacomo della Porta died in 1602, believing that he had brought the new Basilica of St. Peter to the point of completion.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  A NEW CENTURY

  Battered but unbowed, cleansed of the brilliant, scandalous excesses of the Renaissance, the Church of Rome entered its sixteen hundredth year sanitized and set on a straight and narrow road. Its housecleaning complete, the edifice buffed and gleaming, the Church recast itself. What it had lost in political power, it gained in moral authority.

  The Counter-Reformation Church had slowed the momentum of Protestantism and reaffirmed its mission, creating a new Church for a new century. Three million pilgrims thronged Rome for the Jubilee of 1600. A reorganized and reformed Curia set the standard for efficient government. Moral and ethical standards were demanded of the clergy, and missionaries brought the faith to Asia and the Americas.

  In the new century, the Holy Father emerged as the exemplar of the new and improved Church. No more mistresses in the papal apartments, illegitimate children showered with benefices, or families made wealthy. No more war parties or papal bulls discharged like cannon fire. The pope became the model of the blameless Christian life. It was quite a change from the Renaissance popes and even from Peter, the flawed Everyman.

  A mere fifty years after its unity fractured, the Catholic Church was reborn, more confident than ever, but increasingly closed. The resurgent Church became cautious, not humble. Orthodoxy became paramount. What was lost was not munificence but magnanimity—that largeness of spirit that made anything possible, that allowed every voice and every cockamamie idea to be aired. The church that had invented the term devil’s advocate to raise intellectual challenges became leery of open debate. That is, perhaps, one of the lasting legacies of Protestantism.

  Still, the Church flourished, and the city flourished with it. By 1600, Rome was the third-largest city in Europe, surpassed only by Paris and London, and the Church of Christ was more distinctly than ever the Church of Rome. Although its embrace was universal, its soul was Latin, and it was expressed in an exultant new art. The resurgent Church gave Rome the Baroque. It was a heavenly marriage.

  Like the city and its people, the new art was emotional, sensual, and unrestrained. Renaissance art was intellectual, intended to be appreciated by the ennobled few and instructive to the rest. It taught but it didn’t touch the illiterate masses of faithful Christians. The romance of the Baroque was an unabashed appeal to the emotions. In its graphic displays, the agonies and ecstasies of saints and martyrs and the sorrow and sweet solace of the Virgin Mother, deplored by Luther, became potent visual narratives that everyone could read.

  Where the Protestants rejected Mary, the Church of Rome made devotion to her a cult. Where the Protestants attacked miracles as hogwash and black magic, the Roman Church enshrined relics in the four piers of the new Basilica. The Protestants had denied the authority of the pope and chastised Rome for its ostentatious wealth, and the Church had countered by forging ahead with the most audacious statement of its supremacy, the new Basilica of St. Peter. In the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, the Fabbrica reconstituted itself. Once Sixtus made it a congregation, it accrued greater authority and greater accountability. Vastly different from the committee that Michelangelo had deplored and steamrolled, the Fabbrica now established offices in many cities to collect and handle contributions and legacies earmarked for the Basilica. It arbitrated disputes relating to the building—settled legal issues, probated wills, and the like—and supervised the final phase of construction.

  Today, the Fabbrica is housed in the upper realms of the Basilica, far above the tomb of Peter, in two spacious octagonal offices, each with a graceful cupola. Known as the ottagoni, they were probably the workrooms of the last great architect of St. Peter’s, Gianlorenzo Bernini. Equipped with recessed lighting, climate control, and computer banks, the ottagoni are lined with more than 2,400 feet of glass-fronted metal cabinets containing the full archival history of the Basilica.

  Stored in bound volumes, boxes, folders, and packs of documents are a day-to-day record of the gradual destruction of Constantine’s basilica and the often agonizingly slow progress of the new construction. Registers and receipts detail expenditures for material. Account books, contracts, and bills of authorization spell out the payments to architects, artists, and workmen. Other files contain reports and legal documents pertaining to wills, disputes, gifts, and the like. There are lead and wax seals used to stamp papal bulls, edicts, decrees, parchments, and letters from the architects.

  The Fabbrica
not only preserves the history of the Basilica, it maintains the physical building with all its art and treasure, and oversees a unique corps of maintenance workers. Known as the Sampietrini, the corps was conceived as the Basilica neared completion. At the start of the new century, realizing that maintaining such an immense construction could not be left in the hands of casual laborers, an illiterate mason recruited thirty workers skilled in the various building trades and decorative arts. They made St. Peter’s their lifework, and in turn, trained their sons.

  Over time, the Sampietrini became a unique hereditary force with particular rules and customs. Still operating today from shops concealed in the depths of St. Peter’s, they travel through the cavernous chambers and narrow twisting stairways within the walls to reach the most dizzying heights. Like circus acrobats, they balance on cornices and capitals, run along the dome and lantern, squat on the heads of the giant statues, and hang from the soaring vaults.

  Their ancestors, the original Sampietrini, were the masons, carpenters, painters, stuccoists, glaziers, and gilders who worked with the master of the Baroque to transform the very stones and mortar that had sparked the Reformation into the transcendent symbol of the Roman Church.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE KNAVES OF ST. PETER’S

  In the first decade of the new century, near the gentle slope of the Pincio, Rome’s eighth hill, twenty-seven-year-old Scipione Caffarelli Borghese, newly elevated to cardinal, was breaking ground for a beautiful park and charming palazzetto. Strolling through the gardens today or visiting the villa, now a museum, you might assume that Borghese is an old and noble name. By Roman standards anyway, the Borgheses were parvenus—an undistinguished family as recently as the Cinquecento. In those free-and-easy, pre-reform days, the Borgheses sought to better their lot by purchasing a venal office in the Curia.

  Investing in Curial positions was a lucrative business. Families of modest means hoping to improve their status often begged, borrowed, and gambled their future to secure a post for an eldest son. If a young man was smart and shrewd, it was the first rung up the Curial ladder. After working in a venal office, he could sell it, often for a higher price than was paid, and with the profit, buy a better job.

  For all its faults, the Church was a leveler. No special pedigree or piety was required to be pope, and the same was true for the men who worked under him. Curial jobs were open to all. Money might buy your way in the door, but brains and talent assured advancement. Church patronage served a variety of purposes, some of which, at first glance, seem incompatible. It was a means for powerful families to further entrench themselves. It was also a way for families of modest means to move up in the world.

  The Borgheses scrimped, mortgaged their meager worldly goods, and bought the office of auditor of the Apostolic Chamber for the eldest son, Oratorio. No sooner was the transaction completed and Oratorio ensconced in the Curia than the family was threatened with ruin. Before any rewards could accrue to the Borgheses, Oratorio died.

  Faced with financial collapse, the family appealed to the cardinal-chamberlain, who gave the position, bought so dearly, to the second son, Oratorio’s brother Camillo. Few employment opportunities have had more lasting repercussions for St. Peter’s Basilica, and few family gambles ever paid off as handsomely.

  Camillo Borghese rose through the Curial ranks to become Pope Paul V. A stocky man, with a closely trimmed triangular beard and the stolidness of a prosperous burgher, Paul was a model of propriety. He was prudent, practical, and a paragon of most of the virtues that the Counter-Reformation deemed essential for advancement in the Church, but he had one conspicuous sin: nepotism. Perhaps because his family had risked so much, he could not resist lending a helping hand. His generosity made the Borgheses one of the most illustrious families in Rome.

  While construction proceeded flawlessly on his nephew’s villa, construction of St. Peter’s halted abruptly. Except for the eastern apse and façade, the exterior of the Basilica was virtually finished, and anticipation was high throughout the city. Romans expected the new pope to consecrate St. Peter’s at last. Instead of setting a date for the long-awaited ceremony, though, Paul called in the cardinals of the Fabbrica and sent them back to the drawing board.

  He had several reservations about the Bramante-Michelangelo-della Porta design nearing completion—most notably its shape and its size. Paul dismissed the aesthetic and metaphorical concerns that had impelled the architects and their patrons. The Greek cross was Byzantine, he said—too obvious a reminder of the Orthodox schism at a time when the Holy See was recovering from the Protestant defection and redefining itself as the Church of Rome. Paul had practical concerns as well. The four equal arms would not accommodate the large crowds that attended the liturgical services, canonizations, and feasts; reduced in size by Michelangelo, the new Basilica did not even cover all the hallowed ground of the original.

  In 1607, after much deliberation, Fabbrica officials proposed a competition to redraw the plans. The challenge was huge. The winner had to redesign a building that had already taken one hundred years, cost many fortunes, and was virtually complete. Even more daunting, he would be tampering with Michelangelo’s final creation.

  Five popes had given Michelangelo carte blanche and had refused to alter a stone in his plan. It was shocking enough that della Porta had redesigned the dome of “the divine Michelangelo.” Now the Basilica beneath it was about to change, as well.

  In 1607 when the contest was announced, Constantine’s church was still being used, protected from the construction site by Sangallo’s dividing wall. More than 160 years after Alberti warned that its condition was dangerous and 100 years after Bramante began to raze it, about a fourth of the old church remained standing—the atrium, porch, and part of the nave. The hazard it posed was acute. The walls of the nave had cracked and were leaning in some three and a half feet from top to bottom. The wooden rafters and roof were on the verge of collapse. The situation had become urgent in 1605, when a large chunk of marble dislodged from a column and nearly crushed pilgrims at prayer, who ran screaming into the piazza.

  Paul signed a final decree ordering the last of Constantine’s church torn down immediately. Protesters, as vociferous as those who had denounced Bramante as il Ruinante, filled St. Peter’s Square. The final demolition proceeded slowly and with great care over three years. On November 15, 1608, the last mass in Constantine’s basilica was celebrated, then workmen brought down the huge wooden beams, three feet thick and as long as seventy-seven feet. Still discernible on one massive truss, rotted by age and gnawed through by rats, were the letters CON.

  While the old basilica was disappearing, nine artists submitted plans to redraw the new Basilica, a third of them from the same family: Domenico Fontana, his brother Giovanni, and their nephew Carlo Maderno.

  Maderno had started working on the Basilica as a stonecutter and learned various trades. Now at fifty-one, he beat his elderly uncles and won the competition to reinvent St. Peter’s one last time. A carpenter named Giuseppe Biancho made a wooden model of Maderno’s extension. It was last seen in 1667, in a storeroom with older models made by Bramante and Michelangelo. All have disappeared.

  To convert the Basilica to a Latin cross, Maderno added three bays to the eastern arm, extending it by almost two hundred feet. Maderno respected Michelangelo’s plan and diverged from it so seamlessly that the three additional bays don’t feel grafted. They seem to extend organically from Michelangelo’s cruciform and draw attention to it. When you stand in the nave, the Basilica spreads out before you.

  For his new bays, Maderno retained the same titanic internal order of Corinthian pilasters, the arches, barrel vaults, and coffered ceilings. Thirty-two marble columns formed a path leading to the transept crossing. The appearance of the long nave was simple and dramatic. Granite aisles rose from a brick wall. Stucco pilasters stood on travertine bases. The elaborate marble and mosaic were added much later.

  Because of the length
of the nave and its distance from the outer walls, lighting posed a challenge. Maderno opened lower windows and perforated vaulting to allow more light into the nave, and sloped the portico roof to allow light from the upper windows to enter.

  While the nave was taking shape, construction started on the façade. On November 21, 1610, thirteen horses drew the first column into place at the main doorjamb. Because of its huge size, ninety feet tall with a nine-foot diameter, the haulers probably used the same oak winches that had raised the obelisk to lift the first column into place. Satisfied with the job done, Maderno gave the men a deposit for the remaining seven columns.

  Maderno’s redesign was strikingly similar to Raphael’s plan a century before. Both artists proposed a Latin cross with a wide façade flanked by bell towers. Higher, showier, and more ornamental than Michelangelo’s portico, Maderno’s façade is wide and columned—three stories high plus an attic. The imposing façade is 375 feet wide by 167 feet high from the ground to the attic and balustrade. In the center of the portico, directly above the new nave and equal to it in width, is the Benediction Balcony, a dramatic loggia from which the pope blesses the city and the world—urbs et orbis—the purview claimed by the Roman empire and the Roman Church. Christ and his apostles, each nineteen feet tall, stand in heroic proportions over the five entrances.

  On May 16, 1612, Maderno closed the last vault of the portico. Fireworks lit up the skies over Rome, and word went out to every bishopric across Europe. Church bells pealed and Catholics offered prayers of thanksgiving. Although construction of the bell towers would not begin until autumn and the interior embellishment would go on much longer, after 165 years of planning, a century of construction, and too many false starts to count, the body of the Basilica appeared finished at last.