So much bronze was taken from the Pantheon that there was enough to complete the columns of the Baldacchino and make eighty pieces of artillery for the papal guards.
In 1629, while Bernini was stripping the bronze from the Pantheon, Carlo Maderno, the magister operae of the Vatican, died. Urban chose Bernini to replace him. The pope gave Bernini the title architect of St. Peter’s and superintendent of public works in Rome. “Bernini was made for Rome,” Urban said, “and Rome was made for him. He is a rare man, a sublime artist, born by Divine Disposition and for the glory of Rome to illuminate the century.”
Bernini would stay on the job for fifty-one years, until his death at the age of eighty-two. Like Michelangelo’s, his life was driven by his art. In his final years, he never climbed a scaffold without an apprentice beside him for fear that he would become so absorbed in his construction that he might lose his footing and fall. At the end, paralysis stopped him. Bernini must have been exhausted because instead of raging, he accepted his fate philosophically, saying that a hand that had worked so hard in life should rest a little before death. If he added up the days in his life that he did not work, he calculated, they would amount to less than a month.
Bernini dominated the century and the city more completely than any artist before or since. In the caprices and spectacle of his Baroque, in his rhapsodies in travertine, Rome found its ideal expression. He made the city his workshop and filled it with his creations—palaces, piazzas, fountains, churches, and sculptures. He gave Rome Piazza di Spagna with the Barcaccia fountain, Piazza Barberini with the Triton and Bees fountains, Piazza Navona with the Fountain of the Four Rivers, Piazza della Minerva with his whimsical Elephant and Obelisk, and the remodeled Ponte Sant’Angelo lined with stone angels. His monopoly was so secure, his talent so huge, and his capacity for work so prodigious that Francesco Borromini, his closest rival and a gifted artist, despaired of ever surpassing him.*
No one man could produce such a huge oeuvre alone, and Bernini operated a large, efficient workshop staffed by highly skilled artisans. Among his assistants were his father, Pietro; his younger brother, Luigi; his son, Paolo; Carlo Fontana, who would later chronicle the Basilica story; and Borromini. As the need arose, he also employed scores of marble cutters, goldsmiths, coppersmiths, carpenters, gilders, and woodworkers. While many aspiring artists who apprenticed under Bernini remained in his employ for years, he had just as many detractors.
Impulsive, ebullient, and worldly, he was described as “a merciless dragon,” quick to act and quick to anger. He once slapped the bursar of St. Peter’s across the face. Another time he chased his brother Luigi through the streets of Rome into the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, flourishing a sword and threatening to run him through for flirting with a mistress. Bernini, who had many mistresses, may have suffered what was called the morbo gallico. When he finally settled down at the age of forty, he married Caterina Tezio, the prettiest girl in Rome, and gave her eleven children.
There is the echo of Leonardo and Michelangelo in Bernini’s rule of thumb: “Chi non esce talvolta dalla regola, non la passa mai”—“He who doesn’t break the rules, achieves nothing.” Sometimes what he achieved was questionable—he cut niches in Bramante’s piers that, critics argue, weakened the structure and damaged the stability of the dome—and his Baldacchino has the unnerving ability to evoke extreme visceral responses.
Any two people will disagree about it: Is the Baldacchino architecture or sculpture, awesome or overwrought? You love it or loathe it, but it does not allow for neutrality. The workmen who forged it called the structure la macchina, and by any standards, it is extraordinary. Eight stories high, it is ninety-three tons of cast bronze formed by four spiraling columns entwined with laurel branches where tiny putti, lizards, and the bees of the Barberini coat of arms appear to have alighted. An angel tops each column and together they hold up a canopy, also cast of bronze. Crowning the whole are a gold orb and cross.
No one, with the possible exception of Shakespeare, has ever had a more intuitive understanding of theater than Bernini. He is a master of the scenic art, and his Baldacchino is the ultimate prop. It has no function except to set the Basilica stage.
Without the Baldacchino, St. Peter’s would be a fantasia of soaring space, mosaics, gilt, colored stone, columns, niches, statues, chapels, and sepulchres. Amid the sensory overload, the papal altar—the single element that gives meaning to the vast undertaking—would be lost.
The altar is the point where God and man are joined in communion. In striking contrast to the rest of the Basilica and to the Baldacchino itself, the papal altar is a simple table, a surface of ancient, unadorned marble, the true petra serena. It is one more brilliant stroke of Giacomo della Porta. Alone, in the immense, gaudy display of the Basilica, the altar would be too pure in line and substance to be noticed. But with the huge bronze canopy to frame it, the eye is drawn away from the kaleidoscopic whirl of colors and shapes to center stage.
The Baldacchino frames the altar and forms a vertical axis with the dome above and the tomb of Peter below.
Once the Baldacchino was finished, Bernini began work on the first of two campanili. Maderno had planned twin bell towers above the arched openings at either end of the façade. Because the ground was marshy, he designed the towers with open arches and as little solid brickwork as possible. Bernini decided to redesign them, adding three stories to each bell tower—two rectangular sections and the third a pyramid.
Bernini presented a wooden model of his campanili to Urban. His bell towers were much heavier than Maderno’s, and the estimated cost was considerably heftier as well—more than twice Maderno’s projected price. Boats piled with travertine began arriving from Tivoli. In all, 192 loads, amounting to almost one thousand stone pieces, would reach the Vatican.
Bernini started with the southern campanile, to the left of the main entrance, because that site was the more open and accessible. Although his reasoning was sound, his actions were ill-considered. The heavy campanile structure that he designed required a much firmer foundation than the location provided. Because the area had been a valley once, the land was low-lying, the soil was marshy, and a sewer emptied there.
Like Bramante, Bernini was as rash as he was talented, and with the success of the Baldacchino and the boundless favor of the pope, he was turning into a prima donna, conceited and overconfident. His own mother told him that he was becoming insufferable, strutting around as if he were “lord of the world.”
Bernini began building the southern campanile in 1638 without bothering to check the site carefully. The first two stories took six years to construct, and almost immediately cracks began appearing not only in the tower but, more alarmingly, in the Basilica façade. Years later, Bernini would insist that the cracking had occurred earlier, during Paul V’s pontificate. But at the time, he was humiliated—and unprotected.
Urban VIII had died while the campanile was under construction, and Bernini did not enjoy the same close relationship with the new pope, Innocent X. Although a committee of Fabbrica officials met five times and proposed various solutions to repair the collapsing tower, Innocent worried that Bernini’s precarious structure would bring the whole Basilica tumbling down. He ordered the top-heavy campanile demolished, and deepening Bernini’s embarrassment, he threatened to seize the architect’s assets to pay for the demolition. Persona non grata in the Vatican and publicly humiliated, Bernini seemed finished at the age of forty-six.
Innocent X was much different in temperament from his urbane predecessor. Urban had been an ardent patron of art and science. The three bees of the Barberini coat of arms are a ubiquitous visual signature on the fountains and piazzas of Rome, on Castel Gandolfo, the lovely summer villa of the popes, and most conspicuously on Palazzo Barberini at the foot of Via Veneto. Considered the finest Baroque palace in the city, it had several art galleries; a beautiful library; a theater with seating for three thousand; and gardens that formed an exotic parkland planted
with rare flowers and stocked with ostriches, camels, and assorted strange creatures not typically found in a Roman backyard.
With his wealth and scholarship, Urban had been an influential voice in the intellectual circles that were beginning to challenge the verities of the Church. He was a friend and enthusiastic supporter of the scientist Galileo Galilei, who was reviving interest in the arcane theories of Copernicus. Was the earth the center of the universe as the Church taught or did it revolve around the sun as Copernicus had posited? As a monsignor, Urban had dedicated his poem “Dangerous Adulation” to Galileo and had urged the scientist to present his findings. As pope, he continued a spirited dialogue, welcoming Galileo to the Vatican for audiences that lasted for hours.
Palazzo Barberini became a center of inquiry and provocative thought, known as the Roman Academy. Poets and scholars came from all over Europe to study and debate, among them the author of Paradise Lost, John Milton.
Although the Council of Trent had successfully rooted out most of the glaring abuses of the Renaissance Church, nepotism persisted. Urban was a prime offender. On the third day of his pontificate, he named his nephew Francesco a cardinal, and he continued to promote his family to positions of power and wealth as long as he was pope. With each venal position and each benefice he conferred, the Barberini family wealth increased, Urban advanced his own with a sense of humor as well as entitlement. He liked to say that he had four relatives: one was a saint who performed no miracles; one was a friar who lacked patience. one was an orator who could not speak; and one was a general who did not know how to wield a sword.
Over the course of his long pontificate, Urban had time to examine his conscience. He twice appointed a committee of theologians to judge the state of his soul and the legality of his appointments. If he were guilty of nepotism, a practice forbidden by the Council of Trent, his nephews would have to relinquish their possessions and appointments. Both committees found the pope pure of heart and proclaimed his soul lily white. If the theologians thought better of finding the pope guilty of serious sin, their consciences were assuaged by the fact that the Barberini nephews enjoyed but never exploited their positions.
In stark contrast to Urban, Innocent X belonged to the breed of stern Counter-Reformation popes who deplored the decadence of the Renaissance papacy. An extraordinarily realistic portrait by Velázquez depicts a singularly ugly man with bulbous nose and bulging eyes. When he saw his likeness, Innocent reportedly murmured, “Troppo vero”—“Too true.”
Although he gave up his efforts to seize Bernini’s assets, Innocent wanted no more work from the architect of the collapsing campanile. He was adamant on the subject, until his sister-in-law intervened. Donna Olimpia Maidalchini was the majordomo in the papal household, and she had a soft spot for the rakish artist. When Innocent announced a contest to sculpt a fountain in Piazza Navona, Bernini fashioned a prototype in silver and sent it to her as a present. Donna Olimpia displayed the gift where the pope was bound to notice it. Her gambit worked. Seeing the sterling model of the Fountain of the Four Rivers, Innocent reversed himself. “We must indeed employ Bernini,” he said. “The only way to resist executing his works is not to see them.”
Innocent died so unloved and unmourned that his body was left in a woodshed for three days. History remembers him as the prudish pope who added fig leaves to nude statues and the inspired patron who commissioned the flamboyant fountain in Piazza Navona. Years later, when Bernini was riding through the piazza in a carriage, he closed the curtain so that he wouldn’t have to see his creation. “How ashamed I am to have done so poorly,” he said.
History is no kinder to Urban VIII. He is not remembered as the humanist scholar who consecrated St. Peter’s Basilica, gave Bernini to Rome, or encouraged Galileo. Instead, he is dismissed as the narrow, closed-minded pope who censored the scientist. In the annals of history, a very human story of friends turning against each other has been retold as the quintessential clash of faith and reason, religion and science.
Whatever his role in the Galileo imbroglio, Urban VIII brought imagination and a glorious extravagance to the embellishment of St. Peter’s. However complex his friendship with Galileo, his relationship with the brilliant artist of the Baroque was true. Bernini would enjoy an equally close relationship with the last of the great Baroque builders, Alexander VII.
CHAPTER THIRTY
FULL CIRCLE
With the election of Alexander VII to the papacy, the Basilica story comes full circle. Born Fabio Chigi, he was the grandnephew of Agostino il Magnifico—in his heyday the wealthiest of all Romans, the banker who secured the papacy for Julius II and performed even more crucial, lifesaving tasks for the Medici popes, bankrolling their excesses and paying the enormous ransom that kept their papacies solvent for another day.
Although Agostino Chigi became the Croesus of the Church, he had desired more than money. The salon was more alluring than the countinghouse, and once he had lucre, he yearned for luster. In 1655, his descendants reaped the ultimate reward. With the family fortune greasing the way to his election, Fabio Chigi was consecrated Pope Alexander VII.
Beyond his personal fortune, there was nothing of the countinghouse about Alexander. He was a poet who published under the pen name Philomathus; a scholar who set aside time each day for stimulating discussions of literature, art, and history; a Romano di Roma—a true Roman—who continued to make the city one of the great capitals of the world. It was said that Alexander kept two reminders in his bedroom: a wooden model of Rome to keep him focused on his goal and a wooden coffin to keep him humble.
On the day of his election, Alexander summoned Bernini to an audience, and to the end of his pontificate, they worked together to complete the Basilica. Alexander was a patron-collaborator, as involved as Julius had been. Every detail interested him, from the technical to the artistic, and he frequently offered suggestions. He commissioned Bernini to build the Scala Regia, the broad staircase leading from the piazza to the papal palace; one of the two fountains in the square (Maderno designed the other), and the Cathedra Petri.
Rescued from Constantine’s basilica, the Cathedra, or Chair, of Peter was made of oak and embellished with a carved ivory frieze and precious metals. It was revered for centuries as the actual throne on which Peter sat. The legend was off by several hundred years. The chair had been a gift from Charlemagne’s grandson, Charles the Bald, to Pope John VIII in the ninth century, but it continued to be revered.
The preliminary models that Bernini made for the setting for the Cathedra are on display in Room Seventeen of the Pinacoteca in the Vatican Museums. The models are a mixture of clay and straw applied over an iron frame.
Bernini placed the Cathedra on a grandiose bronze throne, gilded and burnished with six different patinas and surrounded by angels. The chair is held up by the four Doctors of the Church and surmounted by a dove, representing the Holy Ghost. The whole is set in a glorious burst of light and clouds. Bernini located the Cathedra in front of the altar, so that as you enter the Basilica, it appears to be a picture framed by the Baldacchino. Although the Cathedra was a dazzling conjuring act, Bernini’s most brilliant illusion was his last—the colonnades and piazza of St. Peter’s.
In the summer of 1656, while Bernini was creating the Cathedra, Pope Alexander asked for preliminary studies of a structure that in his words would be “the theater of the porticoes.” Although the concept of a grand entry to the new Basilica had been bandied about the Vatican for years, Alexander devoted the second year of his papacy to realizing it. From his meticulous daily diaries we know that he discussed various plans with Bernini.
Alexander imagined a colonnade open at the sides, with parallel columns and statues on top, enclosing a piazza. The colonnade would serve several purposes.
It had to introduce and welcome visitors and frame and exalt the Basilica. It also had to conceal the fact that the obelisk was not perfectly aligned with the Basilica nave and the tomb of Peter, overcome the difficulti
es of a vast, irregular space hemmed in by numerous small buildings, and correct the feeling of disproportionate width created by the façade.
Bernini believed that “an architect proves his skill by turning the defects of a site into advantages.” Initially ignoring the Fabbrica’s recommendation for a rectangular construction, he submitted a number of proposals. From a trapezoid, influenced by Michelangelo’s Campidoglio, his design evolved into a rectangle and then an oval. One model followed another as the pope and architect debated the best solution. Their goal was an arena with clear sight lines, so that a pilgrim standing anywhere in the piazza could see the Benediction Balcony and receive the pope’s blessing, urbs et orbis.
When Alexander proposed the colonnade, St. Peter’s was the center of a crowded neighborhood. The Swiss Guard barracks, a clock tower built by Paul V, the old church of Santa Caterina, and dozens of low houses and shops had to go to make room for the colonnade. A fountain added by Maderno east-northeast of the Basilica added a further complication. Bernini would resolve it by moving Maderno’s fountain so that it was aligned with the obelisk and sculpting a complementary fountain on the other side of the obelisk for visual balance. Diverting the water for Maderno’s fountain to the new location proved more of a headache.
Through the fall and winter of 1656, while Bernini was defining his ideas, the Fabbrica began to clear the site, buying then razing the houses and shops around St. Peter’s. As Alexander’s diaries attest, pope and architect considered a host of variants—for double or triple porticoes, for extending and vaulting the arms, for the circumference and order of the columns.
Finally, on May 20, 1657, Alexander wrote in his diary: “Cavaliere Bernini showed the plans and elevation of the porch of St. Peter’s and we shall finish it like this.” Three months later, on August 28, he laid the first stone. But just as the Basilica itself had remained a work in flux, subject to change throughout its construction, the stones of the colonnade were not set. The columns in this “final” plan were probably Corinthian, repeating the colossal order of the Basilica. That would change as Alexander and his architect continued refining the design.
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