Europe: A History (116 page)

As it happened, the cardinals of the
Congregazione della Reverenda Fabbrica
, who managed the building works, had other ideas. They authorized the construction of the Piazza’s pavement and of a second fountain, but not the propylaeum. Shortly afterwards Bernini’s ailing papal patron died; and no decision was ever made about the
terzo braccio
. The enclosure of ‘the amphitheatre of the Christian universe’ was left incomplete.
⁵⁷

As the size of the church demanded, the dimensions of the Square were grandiose. Its total length, from the main portico to the western entrance, was 339 m (370 yds): the maximum width 220 m (240 yds). It could accommodate a crowd of 100,000 with no difficulty. The shapes of its connected areas, though complex, were brilliantly harmonious. The tapered quadrilaterals in front of the façade opened out into an ellipse between the arms of the colonnade. In all, the colonnade contained 284 Doric columns and 88 rhomboid pilasters arranged in quadruple rows. Its Ionic entablature carried 96 statues, with a further 44 above the galleries of the forecourt. The Obelisk of Heliopolis, 41 m (135 ft) high,
erected in 1586, was left at the focal point of the ellipse. It was flanked on either side by a circular fountain, one by Maderna (1614), the other added by Bernini in 1667.

Map 17.
Rome, Ancient and Modern

The building of Bernini’s colonnade terminated a programme of reconstruction that had been in progress at St Peter’s for 161 years. It concluded works which had spanned the whole of the Counter-Reformation. Though a start was made in 1506, the greater part of the grand plan drawn up by Bramante, the basilica’s first architect, had remained on paper throughout the sixteenth century. Michelangelo’s dome was completed in 1590. Even then, there was no nave; and the remnant of Constantine’s fourth-century basilica still blocked the old piazza. Not until 1605 was Carlo Maderno authorized to demolish the old basilica, and to erect the new portico and façade in time for a grand opening on Palm Sunday 1615. The young Bernini added two lofty
campanili
or bell-towers to Maderno’s façade in the 1620s, only to see them pulled down twenty years later. Nominated as chief architect in 1628, he was not awarded the remaining ‘great commissions’ until 1655. The
Scala Regia
—the chief staircase to the Vatican Palace—the Throne of St Peter, and the new Piazza with its colonnade, occupied Bernini for the next dozen years.
⁵⁸

The Rome of Bernini’s lifetime was a hive of intrigue and activity where the art and politics of the Church combined with the ambitions of the great aristocratic clans, the bustling prosperity of traders and artisans, and the grinding misery of the plebs. Bernini would have heard of the burning of Giordano Bruno, and was present during the trials of Galileo. He would have watched the ruin of the Papal States, and the impotence of the popes to intervene in the religious wars. He would have seen the Tiber in flood—which inspired one of his most spectacular tableaux—the visitations of the plague, and the citizens’ laments against ever-rising taxes:

Han’ fatto piu danno
Urbano e nepoti
Che Vandali e Gothi,
A Roma mia bella.
O Papa Gabella!

(This Pope of the Salt Tax, Urban and his ‘nephews’, have done more harm to my beautiful Rome than the Vandals and the Goths.)
⁵⁹

It was a mystery how the Church could support such splendour amidst so much hardship.

At 68, Bernini was at the height of his protean powers, and still had a decade of creativity before him. He was the son of an engineer-architect in the papal service, Pietro Bernino, who among many other things had designed the ‘ship fountain’ in the Piazza di Spagna. From the day he came to Rome with his father at the age of eight, he had daily contact with the city’s monuments, and enjoyed intimate familiarity with cardinals and wealthy patrons. He was personally acquainted with eight popes, from the Borghese, Paul V (1605–21) to the Odaleschi, Innocent XI (1676–89). Paul V told Bernini’s father: ‘We hope that this boy will become the
Michelangelo of his century.’ Urban VIII (1623–44) told him: ‘It is your good fortune, Cavaliere, to see that Cardinal Matteo Barberini is now Pope. But our fortune is far greater to see that Cavaliere Bernini lives during our pontificate.’ Alexander VII (1655–67) summoned him to the Vatican and commissioned the final works at St Peter’s on the very first evening of his reign.

Bernini was well capable of returning the compliments. Pleased by Louis XIV’s ability to stand still during modelling, he said: ‘Sire, I always knew that you were great in great things. I now know that you are also great in little things.’ And he knew how to flatter the ladies. ‘All women are beautiful,’ he once announced. ‘But under the skin of Italian women runs blood, under the skin of French women— milk.’

By profession Bernini was a sculptor. He performed the most prodigious feats of skill and artistry from his earliest years. His first major commissions, such as
Aenea, Anchise e Ascanio
(1618–19), which portrayed a muscular figure carrying an older man across his shoulders, were executed in his teens. His last commissions, such as the extraordinary Tomb of Alexander VII, which portrayed Truth in the daring form of a female nude, were still in the making 60 years later. His work was characterized by the tension produced from the competing qualities of realism and fantasy. His portraits in stone could be shockingly lifelike: at the unveiling of the bust of Monsignor Montoia, the Pope addressed the statue and said, ‘Now this
is
the monsignor’, then, turning to Montoia, ‘and this is a remarkable likeness.’ The dramatic poses, the dynamic bodily and facial gestures, and unfailingly original designs brought spiritual power to the most hackneyed subjects.
⁶⁰

According to the connoisseur Filippo Baldinucci, who wrote the first biography, Bernini possessed two supreme virtues—ingenuity and audacity. ‘His highest merit lay in … making beautiful things out of the inadequate and the ill-adapted.’ Above all, he betrayed no fear of the unconventional. ‘Those who do not sometimes go outside the rules’, he once said, ‘never go beyond them.’
⁶¹

The catalogue of Bernini’s sculptures runs into several hundred items. The best known among them included the portraits of Charles I of England (1638), executed from a painting by Van Dyck, and of Louis XIV of France (1665),
The Rape of Proserpina
, the
David
, who is arched backwards to tense the catapult,
The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, The Death of Beata Albertoni, Truth Unveiled by Time
, and the tomb of Urban VIII, where the angel of death is shown writing the book of history.

Sculpture, however, was only Bernini’s starting-point. It provided his entrée into artistic compositions which called for the broadest co-ordination of all the arts. His expertise extended to decoration, painting, and architecture as well as sculpture. In St Peter’s, it is met at every turn: in the fantastically threaded bronze pillars of the
Baldacchino
(1632) of the high altar; in the decoration of the piers supporting the dome; in the bas-relief over the front door, and the multicoloured marble floor of the arcade; in the bronze and lapis lazuli ciborium of the Chapel of the Sacrament—the ‘holiest of holies in the greatest temple of Christendom’.

Bernini’s abundant contributions to the city of Rome ran to no fewer than 45 major buildings. He built the stupendous
Fontana del Tritone
(1643), where the
Triton spouts a jet of water from a conch as he sits in a broader shell held aloft by three dolphins; and he was part-author of the
Fontana dei Fiumi
in the Piazza Navona, with its portrayal of the four great rivers of the world—the Nile, Ganges, Danube, and Plate. He built the façade of the College for the Propagation of the Faith, the Jesuit Church of S. Andrea di Monte Cavallo, and the town church of Castelgandolfo. He restored the Quirinal and Chigi palaces, and the Arsenal at Civitavecchia.

In the eyes of contemporaries, Bernini’s most appreciated talents lay in the realm of scenography. Posterity is a loser from the fact that much inventive energy was thrown into plays, masques, carnivals, and processions, which were staged on a heroic scale but which left no record. In 1661 he decorated the hill of S. Trinità del Monte for a firework display celebrating the birth of the French Dauphin. In 1669 he organized a famous show to mark the defence of Crete. In the theatre of the Tor’ di Nona (1670–6) he worked with playwrights, stage designers, actors, and composers such as Corelli and Scarlatti. Theatricality is often mentioned as the spirit of Baroque. In this respect, Bernini must be described as the most spirited practitioner of the genre.

Bernini’s failures were few but wounding. The demolition of his bell-towers at St Peter’s must be attributed to the ill will of rival advisers under Innocent X. But the fiasco of his foray into France in 1665 was less explicable. The project started with a flattering invitation from Colbert, who described him in a letter as ‘the admiration of the whole world’. He travelled to Paris, taking plans with him for the construction of an amphitheatrical building, based on the Colosseum, to fill the space between the Louvre and the Tuileries. But the plans were rejected, and he returned home six months later, his dismay sweetened only by the memory of the jolly sittings with Louis XIV. At the very end of his career, when cracks appeared in the stonework of the piers under the crossing of St Peter’s, Bernini was blamed for the fault. Baldinucci was inspired to write his book in order to disprove these accusations.

In 1667 Pope Alexander VII was almost exactly Bernini’s contemporary. As Cardinal Fabio Chigi, he had been a career diplomat. Serving as Nuncio in Cologne throughout the 1640s, he was the Vatican’s chief negotiator in the settlement of the Thirty Years War, where he gained the reputation for opposing all concessions to the Protestants. He thoroughly approved of Bernini’s quip, ‘Better a bad Catholic than a good heretic.’ He was a devotee of St Francis de Sales, whom he canonized, was friendly to the Jesuits, and took a harsh line against Jansenism. In short, he was a model Counter-Reformation pope. At the same time he was a man of great literary and artistic refinement. Himself a published Latin poet, he was a collector of books and a determined patron of the arts. He was already employing Bernini on the Chigi residences when still Secretary of State, before summoning him on that first evening of his pontificate.

Alexander’s chief rival as Rome’s leading patron was undoubtedly ex-Queen Christina of Sweden. Arriving in Rome in the December after Alexander’s election, Christina was the most famous Catholic convert of her age. A forceful
intellectual, she turned the Palazzo Riario into a salon of wit and taste and, through the
squadro volante
(action group) of Cardinal Azzelino, into a hotbed of ecclesiastical intrigue. Her lesbian leanings, and her longing for the cerebral kind of Catholicism by which Descartes had originally been impressed, made her a poor fit in Alexander’s puritanical Rome.

Seen from Rome, Christendom had reached a sorry pass. By the 1660s the long struggle against Protestantism had reached stalemate. Hopes of embracing the Orthodox were lost. With the exception of France, all the leading Catholic powers were in disarray; and France, like Portugal, was in tacit rebellion against the Pope’s authority. The Empire under Leopold I was ravaged and depopulated: Poland-Lithuania likewise; Spain was bankrupt.

In northern Europe, all sorts of conflict took place without any reference to Rome. As soon as England made peace with the Netherlands by the Treaty of Breda, the French made war on Spanish Flanders. Restoration England had just survived the plague and the Great Fire of London, celebrated in Dryden’s
Annus Mirabilis
. In the East, at Andrusovo, the Orthodox Muscovites were tempting Poland to cede Ukraine, and threatening to tip the balance in perpetuity. Brandenburg Prussia, recently independent, was poised to unseat the Swedes as the leading Protestant military power.

In the Balkans and the Mediterranean, the Turks were in the ascendant. The Venetians were hanging grimly onto their last Cretan stronghold at Candía (Heraklion). The Papal States, like the rest of Italy, were suffering a dramatic economic decline. It was inexplicable how they supplied the revenue to pay for Bernini’s extravaganzas, and for the Venetian subsidies. For all its magnificence, Catholic Rome was tangibly reaching the end of its greatest days.

The Vatican’s quarrel with France was rooted in the grievances of the late Cardinal Mazarin. Mazarin could not forgive Rome for giving shelter to his
bête noire
, Cardinal de Retz, Archbishop of Paris. He took his revenge by helping the Farnese and the d’Este in their dispute over property in the Papal States. For his trouble, he was excluded from the Conclave of 1655 that elected Alexander VII, on the grounds that cardinals needed the permission of the Curia to assume permanent residence abroad. Louis XIV had chosen to continue the feud after Mazarin’s death. On the pretext that the immunity of the French embassy in Rome had been infringed, he expelled the Nuncio from Paris and occupied Avignon. The hapless Alexander was obliged to offer humiliating apologies, and to erect a pyramid in Rome inscribed with an admission of the offences of the Pope’s own servants. Relations were not improved by the humiliation felt in the Vatican in 1665 from Bernini’s abortive visit to Versailles. Bernini may have scored a great success with Louis: by parting the King’s wig during one of the sittings, he inspired an instant hairstyle known as
la modification Bemin
. But no one could fail to see, in taste as in politics and religion, that France was determined to set her own course. Versailles was to take no notice when the Vatican opposed the persecution of the Huguenots.