TWELVE
‘A little before my Comming to the Citty,’ wrote the English diarist, John Evelyn, during his visit to Rome in 1644, ‘Cavaliero Bernini, Sculptor, Architect, Painter & Poet… gave a Publique Opera (for so they call those Shews of that kind) where in he painted the Seanes, cut the Statues, invented the Engines, composed the Musique, writ the Comedy and built the Theater all himself.’
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, then at the height of his astonishing powers, had been brought to Rome as a child by his father, a sculptor who had come from Naples to work in the Cappella Paolina1 in the Church of S. Maria Maggiore. A precociously gifted and industrious boy, he had spent long hours studying in the Vatican, copying paintings and, as his own son was later to testify, making ‘so many sketches you wouldn't believe it’. By the age of eight he had already, with expert skill, carved a head in marble. The painter Annibale Carracci, who had been summoned to Rome to work at the Farnese Palace, said of him that he had arrived in childhood where others would be proud to be in their old age. He may have been as young as fifteen when he finished the assuredMartyrdom of St Laurence, having put his own leg in the fire to study in a looking-glass the features of torment. Within a year or so he had completed the Martyrdom of St Sebastian and had long since gained the admiration of the Pope who, having commissioned a portrait bust from him, had expressed the hope that the young artist would ‘become the Michelangelo of this century’.
Camillo Borghese had been elected Pope and had chosen the title of Paul V in 1605. Tall, strong, healthy and vigorous with a neat moustache, triangular beard and myopic eyes that rendered his peering gaze disconcerting, he had the appearance of a shrewd and successful merchant; and he certainly made sure that his family, to whom he was devoted, enjoyed all the benefits that riches could bestow. Yet he was a devout man, most assiduous in prayer: he made his confession and said Mass every day; and, when celebrating, was ‘the ideal of the priesthood’. He was believed to have preserved his baptismal innocence. Charitable to the poor, he was also cultivated and indefatigably industrious. While he lavished money upon building and works of art, and indulged his nephews in their every whim, creating Marcantonio Borghese Prince of Vivaro, and loading Scipione with ecclesiastical offices and revenues, it was generally felt that such extravagance might be excused in one so conscientious, pious and chaste.
There was also a political motive behind his artistic patronage. The Roman
42. A self-portrait of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who worked in Rome from his boyhood until his death there at the age of 81 in 1680.
Church which had evolved from the Counter-Reformation could not afford to be complacent: constantly assailed by its enemies, it was still vulnerable to attack, still beset by problems. There was trouble with the Venetian Republic over papal jurisdiction and ecclesiastical immunity; there was trouble, too, with England where the Protestant King James I had required Roman Catholics to take an unacceptable oath of allegiance; there were disturbances in Germany where differences between Catholics and Protestants were soon to lead to the Thirty Years’ War. Yet, while there was no cause for complacency, the Church could now afford to present – and, so its leaders henceforth believed, should present – a less formidable aspect to the world, to offer exhilaration rather than repression, to welcome rather than exclude, to enlist a less austere art in the service of the faith, to replace the cold mannerism into which the High Renaissance classicism had degenerated with that enthusiasm of feeling, that exuberant style later to be known as Baroque.
The many monumental fountains which Paul V created in Rome were harbingers of the wonders to come. In the days of the Emperor Trajan, as the Pope was fond of reminding visitors, there had been as many as 1,300 fountains in the city supplied by eleven aqueducts. And modern Rome, while it could not expect to have so many, deserved far more than it had. To provide an abundant supply of water for his new fountains, the Pope repaired the aqueduct of the Emperor Trajan, renamed the Acqua Paola, which carried water from the lake of Bracciano as far as the Trastevere; and to celebrate the completion of the restoration in 1612 he built the grandiose Fontanone dell' Acqua Paola on the Janiculum.2 Other fountains were erected in the Cortile del Belvedere, in the Piazza Scossa Cavalli, in the Piazza di Castello (destroyed in the revolution of 1849), in the Piazza di S. Maria Maggiore, in that of the Lateran, in the Via Cernaia ‘for the thirsty country people and the dust-covered carriers’, and, for the Jews, in the piazza of the synagogue. Three magnificent fountains were built in the Vatican gardens, the Fontana degli Specchi, the Fontana delle Torri and the Fontana dello Scoglio, all designed by Carlo Maderno who also built the fine fountain on the north side of St Peter's piazza, later to be matched on the south side by a fountain by Bernini.3
While these fountains were being erected all over Rome, the Pope was busy supervising the construction of the Borghese Chapel in S. Maria Maggiore, the removal of the huge classical pine-cone to the Cortile della Pigna at the Vatican, the restoration and decoration of several churches and the building of the new Church of S. Maria della Vittoria.4 He was also actively occupied in the enlargement of the Quirinal Palace, the embellishment of the Vatican, the paving of streets, and the adornment of his family's three palaces. These were the palace which had been built for Cardinal Adriano Castellesi da Corneto in the Borgo and which later became known as the Palazzo Giraud-Torlonia; the Borghese Palace which, designed for the Spanish Cardinal Deza by Martino Longhi the elder, had been bought by the Pope in 1605 and soon afterwards presented to his nephew, Marcantonio;5 and the palace, later to be known as the Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi, which was designed by Giovanni Vasanzio and Carlo Maderno for the Pope's nephew, Scipione Borghese.6
43. Camillo Borghese, Pope Paul V (1552–1621), who expressed the hope that the young Bernini would ‘become the Michelangelo of this century’.
Scipione, the extravagant, sybaritic and amiable cardinal whose expressive features have been captured for all time in Bernini's extraordinary lifelike bust,7 was as prodigal a patron as his uncle. He not only paid for the restoration of the Basilica of S. Sebastiano and for the construction of Giovan Battista Soria's magnificent façades for S. Gregorio Magno8 and S. Maria della Vittoria, but he also assembled one of the finest private collections of art and antiquities that the world has known. It contained some of the most impressive of Bernini's early works, including the Apollo and Daphne and the David, which were displayed – and can still be seen – in the villa that the Cardinal built for his own pleasure and the entertainment of his friends in the large park he had created beyond the Church of Trinità dei Monti.9
John Evelyn went to see this park one November day and thought that, from a distance, its wall, ‘full of small turrets and banqueting houses’, gave it the appearance of ‘a little Towne’.
Within is an Elysium of delight [Evelyn continued]… The Garden abounds with all sorts of the most delicious fruit, and Exotique simples: Fountaines of sundry inventions, Groves & small Rivulets of Water. There is also adjoyning it a Vivarium for Estriges, Peacocks, Swanns, Cranes, etc; and divers strange Beasts, Deare & Hares. The Grotto is very rare, and represents among other devices artificial raines and sundry shapes of vessells, Flowers & which is effected by changing the heads of the Fountaines. The Groves are of Cypresse and Lawrell, Pine, Myrtil, Olive etc. The 4 Sphinxes are very Antique and worthy observation. To this is a Volary full of curious birds… The prospect towards Rome & the invironing hills is incomparable, cover'd as they were with Snow (as commonly they continue even a greate part of summer) which afforded a sweet refreshing. About the house there is a stately Balustre of white Marble, with frequent jettos of Water & adorned with statues standing on a multitude of Bases, rendering a most graceful ascent. The walls of the house are covered with antique incrustations of history as that of… Europe's ravishment & that of Leda. The Cornices above them consist of frontages and Festoons, betwixt which are Niches furnished with statues, which order is observed to the very roofe. In the Lodges at the Entry are divers good statues of Consuls etc. with two Pieces of Field Artillery upon Carriages (a mode much practiz'd in Italy before the Greate Men's houses) which they looke on as a piece of state more than defence.
Inside the villa Evelyn was shown a wonderful collection of art and curiosities, of antique statues, oriental urns, ‘Tables of Pietra-Commessa’ and vases of porphyry, looking-glasses, clocks, ‘Instruments of Musique’, Bernini's sculptures, which he considered ‘for the incomparable Candor of the stone & art of the statuary, plainely stupendious’, and a ‘World of rare Pictures of infinite Value & of the best Masters’. ‘In a word nothing but magnificent [was] to be seene in this Paradise.’ Among the curiosities were a toy satyr ‘which so artificially express's an human Voice with the motion of eyes & head that would easily affright one who were not prepared for that most extravagant vision’, and a chair ‘which Catches fast any who sitte downe in it, so as not to be able to stir out of it, by certaine springs conceiled in the Arms and back thereoff, locking him in armes & thighs after a true tretcherous Italian guize’.
44. Maffeo Barberini, Pope Urban VIII (1568–1644), in whose pontificate Bernini executed much of his finest work.
Beyond the walls of the villa the gardens were fully worthy of the horticultural centre which Rome had now become. There were giardini segreti in which the fragrance of orange blossom mingled with that of rare herbs; a sunken garden planted with anemones, hyacinths and narcissi, herbaceous borders, beds of carnations and tuberose; a tulip garden surrounded by roses; rows of strawberries hedged with jasmine. And at the approach to these delights the visitor was welcomed by a large marble tablet inscribed with the words, ‘Whoever thou art, so long as thou art a free man, fear not here the bonds of the laws! Go where thou wilt, ask whatever thou desirest, go away whenever thou wishest… Let seemly enjoyment be the guest's only law…’
At first all were freely admitted to the grounds, Romans and foreign visitors alike; but when a staid tourist was shocked by some of the pictures in a summerhouse, the Pope, sympathetic to such aversions, took the opportunity of ordering that the park should be closed to strangers. And thereafter he could retire to the villa in perfect peace to contemplate the view across the green park to the Campagna, while his more gregarious nephew could entertain his many friends without disturbance.
Throughout the life of Paul V, Bernini remained on excellent terms with the Pope and his family, his principal and generous patrons. But when Cardinal Maffeo Barberini came to the papal throne as Urban VIII in 1623, he required the exclusive services of the great sculptor and allowed him no time for other patrons, making only one exception in the case of Scipione Borghese who had helped him in his election. Otherwise Bernini was now a Barberini man; and when Cardinal Mazarin attempted to persuade him to go to work in France, the Pope was adamant in his refusal. ‘Bernini was made for Rome,’ he said, ‘and Rome was made for him.’
Maffeo Barberini was fifty-five at the time of his election, a good-looking, accomplished, masterful and highly intelligent man, a scholar and a poet. The son of a rich Florentine, he had both the means and taste to ensure that Rome deriveded the fullest benefits from Bernini's genius. He had known him well for long. Indeed, while Bernini was working on his David he supposedly held a looking-glass to the sculptor's face to provide a model for the hero's look of tense concentration. And as soon as he became Pope he sent for Bernini, then aged twenty-three, and said to him, ‘It is your great fortune, Cavaliere, to see Maffeo Barberini made Pope; yet our fortune is even greater, since Bernini lives in our pontificate.’
The friendship between the two men now deepened. The Pope was devoted to the younger man, as he might have been to a beloved son. ‘He is a rare man,’ the Pope declared, ‘a sublime artist, born by Divine Disposition and for the gory of Rome to illuminate the century.’ He gave instructions that the sculptor should be allowed to enter his room whenever he chose to do so, and begged him to have no reserve in his presence now that he was Pope. He asked Bernini to sit and talk to him while he was having dinner, and to stay until he fell asleep. And Bernini, a small, spare man who ate little apart from fruit, did what he was told. Whereas
45. St Peter's in the pontificate of Paul V (1605–21), after the erection of the obelisk but before the piazza was enclosed by Bernini's colonnade.
with others he was renowned for his independence and fiery temper, with the Pope, himself liable to bouts of excessive irascibility, Bernini was always pliable and patient, equable and polite.
Although the sculptor's earlier works in the new pontificate were relatively minor – a new façade for the Church of S. Bibiana,10 for example, and a statue of the saint to be placed inside it – the Pope had great plans for him in mind. And in the summer of 1626 Bernini was given the most important commission of his career so far, a monumental work for St Peter's which was to occupy him and numerous assistants, including his father, for nearly ten years.
The appearance of St Peter's had changed dramatically since the death of Michelangelo. The confused clutter of buildings of all periods and styles, mostly dilapidated and some dangerous, which still clustered beneath the dome when it was finished in 1590, had all been swept away. For, one stormy day in 1605, a big block of marble had fallen to the pavement during Mass, narrowly missing those members of the congregation who were standing by the altar of the Madonna della Colonna and driving them screaming from the church. The Fabbrica had been forced to conclude that the whole of the old, tottering remaining parts of the basilica must be demolished, and the Pope had reluctantly agreed, despite the protests from various cardinals and conservative Romans who reiterated the protests which Julius II and Bramante had had to face a hundred years before. Far more respect had been shown for the monuments and relics, however, than ‘il ruinante’ and Julius had had the patience to grant them. Records had been kept; corpses had been reverently disinterred and reburied with full honours elsewhere; treasures had been carefully packed and taken away, in many cases to the lasting benefit of other churches.
As della Porta's successor, and an architect whose work was much admired by Paul V, it had fallen to Carlo Maderno to build the new nave. He was then fifty-one years old, good-natured and amenable. He had worked with his uncle, Domenico Fontana, in erecting obelisks for Sixtus V; he had subsequently worked for another uncle whose studio specialized in the design of fountains; and he had himself designed several fountains, other than the one in St Peter's piazza, as well as a new façaade for the Church of S. Susanna.11 He watched work begin on digging the foundations for his new nave at St Peter's on 8 March 1607, and he remained chief architect until his death over twenty years later, having provided the basilica with a nave which has been severely criticized for blocking the view of the dome from the piazza and a façade which has been as strongly condemned for being too wide in relation to its height.12
Appointed to succeed Maderno, Bernini proposed improving the facade by providing it with towers at either end as Maderno had originally intended. Pope Urban agreed to this and work began. Soon the first two stages of the south tower were finished, and a wooden and painted canvas model of the third stage had been placed in position above them. This addition to the basilica's facade was admired by all except Bernini's most jealous rivals. But then, to the architect's horrified mortification, cracks began to appear not only in the tower but also in the facade to which it was attached. Bernini's structure, hastily built while the unreliable members of the Fabbrica still approved of its design, was evidently much too heavy for Maderno's foundations which had not been intended for such a weight. Orders were immediately given for the tower to be demolished before further damage was done. Humiliated and castigated by the Fabbrica and even by the Pope, Bernini retired to his house where he was reported to be ill in bed, while other architects were commissioned to propose plans in place of the capomaestro's disastrous enterprise.
Fortunately for Bernini's reputation, he had already begun work on the great canopy under the dome, the baldacchino over St Peter's grave13 which, followed by the nearby statue of Longinus14 and the tomb beneath which Pope Urban was to be buried,15 ensured that his failure with the towers was ultimately eclipsed. The construction of the baldacchino also nearly ended in failure, since the erection
46. The crossing of St Peter's, showing Bernini's baldacchino (1624–33) beneath the dome.
of so massive a bronze monument, as high as the Farnese Palace, required extensive foundations; and the digging of these beneath the pavement of St Peter's necessitated the disturbance of many holy graves and relics. Protests against such sacrilege were vociferous; and when several men engaged upon the work died in mysterious circumstances and others refused to carry on, fearing the whole project was accursed, there were demonstrations in the piazza and marches of angry objectors throughout the Borgo. But the Pope, although himself seriously ill – an additional sign of God's disfavour – was determined that the baldacchino should be completed. He authorized the payment of additional wages to the workmen, and he even sanctioned the stripping of the bronze revetment from the portico of the Pantheon, an act of vandalism which gave rise to the celebrated pasquinade, attributed to the Pope's physician:
Quod non fecerunt barbari,
Fecerunt Barberini.
What the barbarians did not do,
the Barberini did.
So long as the Barberini Pope lived, Bernini was secure in his position as the recognized artistic director of Rome. But he was still only thirty-four when the baldacchino was completed; and the especial esteem in which he was held by the Pope aroused the deepest resentment among his older rivals, a resentment which his manner did little to alleviate. Increasingly moody and unpredictable, he was at times friendly and amenable, at others arrogant and dismissive. His sardonic sense of humour was always unsettling: it was difficult to be sure when he was making a joke. He maintained with all apparent seriousness, for example, that the dilapidated Hellenistic ‘Mastro Pasquino’, was the finest of all antique statues. Also, while he never spoke ill of his rivals, it was felt that he regarded their work as decidedly inferior to his own on which he was always careful to place a high price; and, being acquisitive, he became extremely rich. Deeply religious, he went every day to the Church of the Gesù for vespers and was most exact about confession. And his enemies declared that he had much to confess. It was believed that he had contracted the morbo gallico and this may, indeed, be why the Pope, paying the compliment of visiting him when he was ill, suggested that he should settle down, marry when he recovered and have children. He replied that his statues were his children. But soon afterwards he did marry and he did have children, eleven of them; and the marriage seems to have been a very contented one.
Bernini's professional career, however, suffered a severe setback on the death of his patron in 1644 and the election of Cardinal Giambattista Pamphilj as Innocent X. The new pope was a dour, uncommunicative and distrustful man, without close friends and much influenced by an astute, grasping and interfering sister-in law, Donna Olimpia Maidalchini. Tall, gaunt and excessively unprepossessing, with a furrowed brow, ugly chin, bulbous nose and bilious complexion, he made the sad, resigned comment when shown the remarkable portrait of him by Velasquez, which hangs in the Palazzo Doria picture gallery, ‘Troppo vero, too true, too true.’16
Recognizing that there was no trace of beauty in his own form, he had a horror of displays of nudity in art. And parsimonious though he was, he paid for fig leaves and metal tunics to cover the genitals and breasts of numerous offending statues in Rome. He was even said to have required Pietro da Cortona to clothe a nude figure of the child Jesus by Guercino. With Bernini and with Poussin, who had become one of the leading painters in Rome, he had as little as possible to do. ‘Things in Rome have greatly changed under the present papacy,’ wrote Poussin to a friend in Paris, ‘and we no longer enjoy any special favour at Court.’ Associating them with the family of his detested Barberini predecessor, whose extravagance and largesse towards his family had left the papacy almost bankrupt, Pope Innocent turned to other artists instead, to the sculptor, Alessandro Algardi, one of whose early commissions was the huge statue of S. Filippo Neri in S. Maria in Vallicella, to Girolamo and Carlo Rainaldi, and to an architect a few months younger than Bernini, Francesco Borromini.
A gloomy, solitary man, often depressed, usually irascible and always difficult, Borromini was bitterly conscious of his humble origins, of his early years as a stonemason in the studio of his relative, Carlo Maderno, and he was inordinately jealous of Bernini's easy success and self-assurance. His own dealings with his clients were constantly disrupted by quarrels and often ended in acrimony, while with his assistants he was a demanding, rarely satisfied and sometimes violent master. On one occasion he had a workman beaten so savagely for a misdemeanour that he died of the wounds inflicted upon him. Disdainful of the smart clothes that Bernini wore, Borromini dressed like a workman, deriding his rival's concern about money and fashionable living, and finding it impossible to forget that his smart contemporary had been hailed as a genius long before his own exceptional talents had been recognized. When his chance to overtake Bernini came with the accession of Innocent X, Borromini lost no opportunity of blackening his rival's name and of bringing up the errors that had led to the demolition of the tower on the façade of St Peter's.
Yet Innocent was a man of taste and discernment. While appreciating Borromini's exceptional gifts, he could not be blind to Bernini's, however predisposed he was to dislike him personally. When the tomb of Urban VIII was unveiled in 1647, he was heard to declare, ‘They say bad things about Bernini, but he is a great and rare man.’ It was not long before he was persuaded to take him into his own employment.
The Pope's family, the Pamphilj, had originally come from Umbria; but in the sixteenth century they had settled in Rome where they had an unpretentious palace on Piazza Navona. Pope Innocent determined to rebuild this palace on a much grander scale and to make its surroundings as distinctive and imposing a memorial to his own family and reign as the neighbourhood of the Palazzo Barberini17 was to that of Urban VIII. He commissioned Girolamo Rainaldi to undertake both the new palace18 and, assisted by Carlo Rainaldi, a new church beside it, S. Agnese in Agone.19 Borromini was later called in to help with both these buildings and had already been consulted about a fountain which was to be created in the piazza around an obelisk that the Pope had noticed, lying broken in pieces, by the Via Appia.
Artists other than Borromini had also been asked to submit designs for this fountain, but Bernini had not been one of them, although his Triton fountain20 in the Piazza Barberini was an acknowledged masterpiece and the Fountain of the Barcaccia21 in the Piazza di Spagna22 had shown how ingenious he was in solving any problems which might be presented by a lack of pressure in the water supply. It seems, however, that a friend of his, Prince Niccolò Ludovisi, who had married a niece of the Pope, persuaded Bernini to submit a model and arranged for it to be placed in a room where His Holiness could not fail to see it. Another story, related by the Modenese ambassador, has it that a silver model of Bernini's design was presented to the Pope's bossy and influential sister-in-law who told him he need look no further. In any event, the Pope was enchanted by Bernini's model. ‘We must indeed employ Bernini,’ he said. ‘The only way to resist executing his works is not to see them.’ And so the splendid Fountain of the Four Rivers came into existence and Bernini was restored to papal favour.23
He remained in favour throughout the pontificate of Innocent X, making two fine busts of him, designing the Fonseca Chapel in the Church of S. Lorenzo in Lucina24 for the Pope's doctor, Gabriele Fonseca, and building the Church of S. Andrea al Quirinale25 for the Jesuit novices living on the Quirinal hill with money provided by Cardinal Camillo Pamphilj. Bernini was also on excellent terms with the Chigi Pope, the devout and intellectual Alexander VII who, on the very day of his election in 1655, sent for him to ask for his services. And it was in Alexander VII's pontificate that St Peter's piazza was transformed into the most dramatically realized public space in Europe by Bernini's colonnades,26 that the beautiful staircase connecting the Vatican palace with the basilica, the Scala Regia,27 was built, and that the basilica itself was enriched by the Cathedra of St Peter, the grand frame for the throne of St Peter which Bernini created in the apse.28
It was also in the reign of Alexander VII that Rome welcomed that most extraordinary of exiles, the former Queen of Sweden. Vivacious, witty and unconventional, Queen Christina had given up her throne eighteen months before at the age of twenty-seven, and had been received into the Roman Catholic Church. Regardless of the impression she created, she seemed to take delight in shocking people and once introduced her intimate friend, Ebba Sparre, to the staid English Ambassador as her ‘bedfellow’, assuring him that her friend's mind was as lovely as her body. She often wore men's clothes and, although short in stature, spurned the high heels that women usually favoured and wore men's flat shoes instead.
Her voice and nearly all her actions are masculine [wrote the Duc de Guise who had seen much of her during a visit to France]. She has an ample figure and a large bottom, beautiful arms, white hands, but more like those of a man than a woman; one shoulder is higher than the other [she had been dropped as a baby], but she hides this defect so well by her bizarre dress, walk and movements… Her face is large but not to a fault, also all her features are marked: the nose aquiline, the mouth big but not disagreeably so, teeth
47. Queen Christina of Sweden, who lived in Rome from 1655 and died in the Riario Palace in 1689.
passable, her eyes really beautiful and full of fire; in spite of some marks left by chickenpox her complexion is clear… The shape of her face is fair but framed by the most extraordinary coiffure. It's a man's wig, very heavy and piled high in front… She wears her skirt badly fastened and not very straight. She is always heavily powdered over a lot of face-cream… She loves to show off her mastery of horses… She speaks eight languages, but mostly French and that as if she had been born in Paris. She knows more than all our Academy and the Sorbonne put together, understands painting as well as anyone and knows much more about our court intrigues than I do. In fact she is an absolutely extraordinary person.
In Rome she was to be judged so, too. At first, however, she behaved with the utmost discretion, obviously delighted with the respect and honour shown to her. She was received in private audience by Pope Alexander who arranged for her to sit beside him, even though a chair had to be specially designed for her by Bernini, since only a ruling sovereign could sit in His Holiness's presence in a chair with arms and no chairs without arms which were sufficiently imposing could be found. She was invited to occupy apartments in the Torre dei Venti above the Cortile del Belvedere which had been beautifully furnished for her and provided with a blazing fire and a silver bed-warmer. She was presented with a splendid carriage and six horses, a litter and two mules, an exquisitely caparisoned palfrey and a sedan chair, designed, like her bed, by Bernini, with sky-blue velvet upholstery and silver mountings. She was invited to a banquet by the Pope, although protocol did not allow him to eat in the presence of a woman; and upon the table, fabricated by Bernini's assistants, were all manner of concoctions in gilded sugar, allegorical compliments to the Queen's character and attainments. The orchestra played; the choir of St Peter's sang; a sermon was preached by a Jesuit priest; and after the meal was over the Queen was accompanied by a procession of distinguished guests to the Palazzo Farnese, which a less favoured convert, Frederick of Hesse-Darmstadt, had been required to vacate for her benefit.
From the Palazzo Farnese, which had been redecorated and refurnished for her, the Queen set out to see the sights of Rome under the direction of the charming and amusing Cardinal Azzolino. She was escorted everywhere, from St John Lateran to St Peter's, from the Sapienza where she was given over a hundred books, to the Propaganda Fide29 where she was welcomed in over twenty languages, from the Collegio Romano where she was shown an apparatus used for making antidotes to poison, to Castel Sant' Angelo, where, having a meagre appetite and little taste for alcohol, she was not tempted by the offer of refreshments comprising the richest wines and huge mounds of crystallized fruits, nougat and sugared almonds. That year the Carnival was known as ‘the Carnival of the Queen’; and at the end of February a magnificent pageant, the Giostra delle Caroselle, was presented especially for her benefit. She was serenaded in her box as Cavaliers fought Amazons in the arena below and a fierce dragon, rockets issuing from its nostrils and flames from its mouth, was slain in her honour.
But by now the Queen's eccentric behaviour and the depredations of her unpaid servants, who went so far as to chop up the doors of the Palazzo Farnese for
48. A bird's-eye view of Rome in 1637,
firewood, were causing widespread annoyance in Rome. Having given up male attire for the moment, the Queen now wore the most provocative dresses, even when receiving cardinals. She hung some extremely indelicate pictures on the walls of the palace and had fig leaves removed from its statues; and when the Pope was persuaded to remonstrate with her both about this and her refusal to make public displays of her conversion, she merely replied that she was not in the least interested in ‘considerations worthy only of priests’. It was rumoured that she was enamoured of a nun whom she had met in a convent in the Campo Marzio; and it was also said, with good reason, that she had fallen in love with Cardinal Azzolino. The news that Queen Christina was to leave Rome for a time was accordingly greeted with relief by the papal Court.
Missing the pleasures of power and hoping to solve her financial problems, she had decided to have herself made Queen of Naples. But her schemes foundered; and, having ordered the execution of her equerry, the Marchese Gian Rinaldo Monaldeschi, on the grounds that he had betrayed them, she returned to Rome, much to the annoyance of Pope Alexander who expressed the opinion that she was ‘a woman born a barbarian, barbarously brought up and having barbarous thoughts’. He was, however, slightly mollified when Cardinal Azzolino obtained the Palazzo Riario for her at a modest rent; she would not, therefore, be living so close to him as she had been at the Palazzo Farnese.
Soon her new palace was filled with treasures, despite her irregular allowances. Pictures and furniture from Stockholm, books and more pictures from Prague, carpets from Persia, musical instruments, marbles, sculptures and an extraordinary variety of other works of art, including one of the finest collections of paintings of the Venetian school ever assembled, were arranged in profusion in the rooms. In the garden exotic and beautiful flowers and shrubs appeared with each passing season; during the spring of 1663 alone 275 orange and lemon trees and 200 jasmine plants were passed in her name through the Roman customs. She remained as unpredictable as ever. One grand visitor who tediously complained of his solitary life, received the reply, ‘Better three days by oneself than half an hour with you.’
With the death of Pope Alexander VII in 1667, however, Queen Christina entered upon a more tranquil and less contentious stage of her life. The new Pope, Clement IX, in whose election her friend, Cardinal Azzolino, had played a critical role, was a kind-hearted, modest man, well disposed towards a highly intelligent woman who shared his love of pictures, music and the theatre. Anxious to make her feel at home in Rome, he came to visit her at the Palazzo Riario and gave a public banquet in her honour. At this banquet he provided a chair for her at his own table, a privilege no one could remember ever having seen granted by a pope to a woman before; and after Christmas he gave her a liberal pension.
Her finances now in more satisfactory condition, she added to her collections both at Palazzo Riario and at another palace which she leased, Palazzo Torlonia. The Queen also became a patron of archaeology, having obtained the Pope's permission to excavate the ruins of Decius's palace near the church of S. Lorenzo in Panisperna. She interested herself in alchemy and astronomy, providing a meeting-place at Palazzo Riario for the Accademia di Esperienza founded by Giovanni Giustino Campini; she granted her patronage to the oceanographer, Marsigli, and to the scientist, Borelli, and she took up writing, compiling books of maxims and essays in autobiography. She founded her own Academy, the Accademia Reale, forerunner of the celebrated Arcadia, at which distinguished scholars gave lectures, read papers and held seminars; and she gave her warm support to the theatre which was built on the site of the Tor di Nona prison30 and in which many of the finest performances were given by singers in her service, such as Antonio Rivani, known as Cicciolino, whose departure from Rome for the court of the Duke of Savoy prompted an imperious letter to her French agent:
I want it to be known that [Cicciolino] is in this world only for me, and that if he does not sing for me he won't be able to sing for long for anyone else, no matter who they are… Get him back at any price. People are trying to make me believe that he has lost his voice. That doesn't matter. Whatever has become of him, he shall live and die in my service, or ill will befall him!
49. The Piazza Navona, built on the site of Domitian's athletics stadium, The Fountain of Four Rivers, designed by Bernini, rises in the centre beyond his Fountain of the Moor.
Cicciolino obediently returned and was still in her service when he died in 1686. Some years before, Alessandro Scarlatti, whose great gifts the Queen had been one of the first to recognize, had also entered her service as her Maestro di Cappella. Arcangelo Corelli was the director of her orchestra. She had long since acquired the services of Bernini who had created for her the lovely looking-glass which stood behind one of her most precious possessions, the bronze head of a Greek athlete of about 300 B.C.
Bernini still lived on, working hard. He survived the reign of Clement IX for whom he supervised the disposition of the angels on the Ponte Sant' Angelo, carving the full-size models of two of them himself;31 and he worked on through the reign of Emilio Altieri, the Roman who became Pope Clement X in 1670 and for whose relation by marriage, Cardinal Paluzzi degli Albertoni, he decorated the Altieri chapel in S. Francesco a Ripa.32
He was in his mid-seventies when he set to work upon the deeply moving Death of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni in this chapel, but his faculties were little impaired. On a visit to France a few years earlier, he had been described by Paul Fréart, Sieur de Chantelou:
He is of modest height, but well proportioned… with a temperament that is all fire. His eyebrows are long, his brow large, with slight projections over the eyes. He is bald, and the hair that remains is curly and white… He is vigorous for his age and always wants to go on foot as if he were thirty or forty. One could say that his mind is one of the most beautiful ever made by nature, since, without having studied, he has most of the advantages that knowledge can give a man. He has, as well, an excellent memory, a quick and lively imagination, and his judgement seems clear and precise. He is a very acute conversationalist, and has a very special gift of expressing things in words, with his face, and by gesture to make you see as easily as the greatest painters do with their brushes. This is doubtless why he has been so successful putting on his own plays…
More than ever devout and fully conscious of the imminence of death, he set little store by his secular works, by such palaces he had designed in Rome as the Palazzo di Montecitorio33 and the Palazzo Chigi-Odescalchi,34 and by such conceits as the charming little elephant that carries the obelisk in the Piazza S. Maria sopra Minerva.35 Once, when driving past the spectacularly theatrical Fountain of the Four Rivers, he pulled down the blinds of his carriage in distaste, exclaiming, ‘How ashamed I am to have done so poorly. What did satisfy him, at least, were his major religious works, his Ecstasy of St Teresa in S. Maria della Vittoria, which he thought the best thing he had ever done, and his Sant' Andrea al Quirinale. Towards the end of his life he was discovered by his son, who had gone to say his prayers in this church, wandering about in it, as though he were a tourist. Domenico approached his father and asked him what he was doing there ‘all alone and silent’. ‘My son,’ Bernini replied, ‘I feel special satisfaction at the bottom of my heart for this one piece of architecture. I often come here as a relief from my duties to console myself with my work.’
He went on working to the end. In the last months of his life he was still as busy as ever, restoring the Palazzo della Cancelleria; and it was this activity, his doctors suggested, that resulted in paralysis in his right arm: it deserved a rest, he said resignedly, after all the hard labour it had performed. He died on 28 November 1680. Nine days later it would have been his eighty-second birthday. His last completed work had been an over life-size bust of Christ carved for Queen Christina.
The Queen had been bitterly disappointed by the election of Innocent XI in 1676, for this new Pope was a severely economical reformer, stern and austere. He strictly limited the festivities of the Carnival, refused favours asked of him with such regularity that the Romans called him ‘Papa No’, ordered the private parts of statues not already concealed by Innocent X to be decently covered, and the breast of Guido Reni's Madonna to be painted over. He had the public theatres closed, and banished women from every stage. Queen Christina's Tor di Nona became a granary. Yet, for all her regret for the lost pleasures of the past, the Queen was as entertaining as ever, and as obliging as she had always been to those who did not bore her, willingly allowing visitors to see her collections as though they were contained in a public museum, and sometimes inviting sightseers to come to see her, too. She was now, after all, as she herself liked to admit, an ancient monument, one of the sights of Rome.
50. Bernini's architectural masterpiece, the Piazza di S. Pietro, was completed in the pontificate of the Chigi Pope, Alexander VII (1655–67).
She is exceeding fat [wrote one French visitor in 1688]. Her complexion, voice and face are those of a man… She has a double chin from which sprout a number of isolated tufts of beard… a smiling expression and a very amiable manner. Imagine, as regards her costume, a man's knee-length black satin skirted coat, buttoned all the way down… men's shoes. A very large bow of black ribbons instead of a cravat. A belt drawn tightly round the coat over the lower part of the stomach revealing its rotundity.
She died a year after this description of her was written. She had expressed the wish that she should be buried quietly in the Pantheon, the church of the Rotonda, where the bones of Raphael lay. But this was considered an unsuitable resting-place and, in the ‘pomp and vanity’ she had wished to avoid, her body was carried to St Peter's and placed in the crypt where the remains of only four other women had previously been placed. Some years later, when the seventeenth century was nearly over, Carlo Fontana was asked to design a monument for her.
The Rome in which she died had changed out of all recognition from the city to which Michelangelo had been summoned. The gentle shapes of domes and cupolas beneath the greater dome of St Peter's had replaced the bristling tower of the medieval nobles. The forbidding fortresses of earlier ages, when swordsmen fought each other through the streets, had given way to fine palaces and splendid villas in spacious, flower-filled gardens. And the travertine stone, so extensively used by the architects of the Baroque, had begun to predominate over the marble of the Renaissance. This was the Rome which the travellers of the eighteenth century now came south to enjoy.