7
SACRED AND PROFANE
Rome’s lyrically named vicolo del Divino Amore (Lane of Divine Love) shows no hint of godliness or affection. Filthy bins overflow with trash. Empty wine and beer bottles line the gutters. The stench of rotting food fouls the air. As I enter from via dei Prefetti, I walk briskly past walls blotched with graffiti and peeling posters. But after several minutes, I notice a difference. With every step, the vicolo seems brighter, cleaner, safer. When the street stops at via del Clementino, I turn and retrace my steps.
Almost midway between the lane’s two dead ends—one shadowed and dodgy, the other sunshine bright—I find a structure that was once the home and studio of Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio (the name of his parents’ village). His bold use of chiaroscuro, the contrast between dark and light, underscored his passion for daring innovation as a painter. Meanwhile, his personal life, also oscillating between extremes, pushed him ever nearer to the brink—physically and psychologically.
In 1604, Caravaggio tore half the roof off his second-floor rooms on the vicolo del Divino Amore, then stopped paying rent and never compensated the outraged landlord. In the nearby Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, he painted three stunning scenes from the life of San Matteo (Saint Matthew) that have stirred viewers’ souls for centuries. A few blocks away, in a small piazza now choked with cars, the most celebrated, sought-after artist in Rome killed a man and fled for his life. The city offered a bounty for his severed head.
This was Rome in the seventeenth century, the age of the Baroque and its often-dizzying passion for contrasts and extremes. More so than at any time since the heyday of the Roman Empire, the Eternal City preened, in the words of the Venetian ambassador, as “the emporium of the universe” with people “from every direction, in every season, and from all nations” flocking to the “Mistress of the World…to gaze upon her magnificence.”
The force behind this magnificenza was the Catholic Church. Under siege by Protestant reformers, the Vatican fought back—not just with a crackdown on abuses, but with an all-out crusade for Christian souls. The leaders of the Counter-Reformation wanted to inspire, impress, even seduce believers with a renewed vision of God’s grandeur, reflected in awe-inducing masterpieces. The ultimate aim of this lavish campaign was to demonstrate through sheer material splendor that Rome remained the cultural center of the world and the Roman Catholic Church the one true religion.
Pilgrims poured into the Eternal City—so many that they outnumbered its one hundred thousand residents during “holy years” that offered absolution of all sins. Yet then as ever, vice vied with virtue. Prostitutes boldly flaunted their lures. Fortunes were won—and more often lost—in raucous gambling casinos. Gangs clashed in bloody turf wars. Robbery, rape, and murder were everyday occurrences, often unprosecuted and unpunished.
Artists and artisans also flocked to the citywide bottega that the capital of Christendom had become. In this most flamboyant of creative eras, Italian maestri merged a passion for redefining art with a passion for pushing beyond legal and moral limits to devour life whole. Breaking free of Renaissance classicism, they unleashed dazzling visual pyrotechnics. They also left a more personal legacy through lives suffused with both the sacred and the profane, darkness as well as light.
CARAVAGGIO (1571–1610), an orphan who had apprenticed with a painter in Milan, arrived in Rome around 1592—young, scrappy, and hungry. He and other artists found themselves competing for the same commissions, drinking in the same taverns, and fighting for the same women.
Desperate for money, Caravaggio initially churned out paintings in the equivalent of an artistic sweatshop while sleeping on a straw mattress in a storage room. A horse’s kick landed him in a hospital for the poor for several weeks. One of his early works, Self-Portrait as Sick Bacchus, captures his reflection in a mirror—an ashen, gaunt youth with eyes like dark pools.
A cardinal impressed by a Caravaggio painting in a local gallery offered the artist his first lucrative commissions as well as lodging in the imposing Palazzo Madama, now the seat of the Italian Senate. During his six-year stay, a new world opened for the country boy as Rome’s art-loving elite clamored for his works.
Yet Caravaggio never abandoned life on the city’s often-mean streets. With his band of young toughs, he swaggered through the Campo Marzio, blade ever at the ready, looking for trouble—or letting trouble find him. In one three-year span, he was arrested and jailed five times.
“Almost everything we know about Caravaggio’s personal life comes from police records and tribunals,” the art historian Sara Magister tells me as we trace the painter’s footsteps through Rome. His barber, testifying in an assault case, described him as “a stocky young man, about 20 or 25 years old, with a thin black beard, thick eyebrows, and black eyes, who goes dressed all in black, in a rather disorderly fashion, wearing black hose that is a little bit threadbare, and who has a thick head of hair, long over his forehead.”
Caravaggio’s rap sheet included brawling, carrying a forbidden weapon, insulting police officers, and “house-scorning,” a rowdy form of vandalism in which a gang threw stones, broke windows, and hurled animal bladders filled with blood or ink at a rival’s home. Caravaggio once became so enraged with a waiter over whether artichokes should be prepared in oil or butter (the latter a northern preference derided in Rome) that he flung a plate at the youth, wounded him under the eye, and ended up in jail for assault.
This devil-be-damned attitude bled into Caravaggio’s paintings, melding his evocative style with his gritty view of Rome’s underbelly. Workers with dirty fingernails and soiled feet appear as apostles and martyrs. Prostitutes in low-cut dresses serve as models for Mary Magdalene and, more blasphemously, the Virgin Mary. An undercurrent of animal ardor sizzles beneath every surface. Pieces of fruit in a still life seem charged with desire. Saintly figures, however devout, exude an erotic energy. Mythic gods, male and female, pulse with ripe sensuality.
A realist in an age of idealism, Caravaggio orchestrated beams of dramatic brightness to make scenes from mythology or the gospels look and feel as if they were happening right here, right now. “Caravaggio is always telling a story, often of the moment when something happens and everything changes,” says Magister.
We see San Paolo sprawled on the ground during his epiphany; San Pietro splayed upside down as the cross is raised for his crucifixion. Caravaggio’s chilling portrait of the Medusa catches her frozen scream of horror just after her head’s separation from her body. His own haunted features appear on the decapitated head of Goliath, dangling by the hair from the fist of a somber young David.
Astounded by his revolutionary approach, young painters called Caravaggisti imitated his “miracles” of virtuosity and popularized his technique. Although some critics blasted Caravaggio for “seeking out filth and deformity,” commissions flooded in. By the turn of the seventeenth century, he reigned as Rome’s artistic superstar.
IN MAY 1605, a simmering feud between Caravaggio and a rival gang leader named Ranuccio, reportedly the pimp for one of the painter’s models and lovers, culminated in a confrontation in a Roman piazza. Caravaggio attacked, forcing Ranuccio to retreat. When he stumbled and fell, Caravaggio thrust his knife toward Ranuccio’s groin—perhaps to castrate rather than kill him. But the blade severed the femoral artery, and blood gushed from the wound. Ranuccio’s brother lunged at Caravaggio, slashing his side. His friends rushed the badly wounded artist to safety.
Sentenced to death, with a bounty on his head, Caravaggio fled south to Naples, capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. In the sprawling city three times the size of Rome, Caravaggio readily found lucrative commissions. Venturing to the island of Malta, he painted portraits and altarpieces and won a knighthood—only to be expelled from the order as a “corrupt and stinking member” and locked in a fetid underground pit. Bribes helped him escape and sail to Sicily, where he produced brooding masterpieces. Back in Naples, he was bludgeoned so savagely, probably by bounty hunters, that his face became unrecognizable.
After four years on the lam, Caravaggio won a papal pardon through the intercession of an influential cardinal. With a few paintings for his benefactors, he boarded a boat to Italy. A dispute of some sort landed him in jail in a small town on its western coast. Caravaggio bought his freedom, only to discover that the boat had sailed north with his paintings on board.
The artist set out in desperate pursuit, traveling by whatever means he could find, including on foot, in stifling midsummer heat. Pushing beyond exhaustion, Caravaggio collapsed on a beach near the fishing village of Porto Ercole on the Tuscan coast. According to a contemporary, “without the aid of God or man, in a few days he died”—possibly of dysentery after drinking contaminated water. He was thirty-nine years old.
Caravaggio’s death is the town’s sole claim to historic fame. I know. For almost thirty summers, my husband and I have vacationed in this picturesque port, charming but lacking any distinguished museum, church, or work of art. Yet even here Caravaggio provoked extreme reactions.
A stately column carved with a Medusa, erected in 1973 in tribute to the artist, stands in a sun-dappled grove of pine trees adjacent to the beach where he collapsed, a tranquil place for a troubled soul to rest in peace. A few years ago, Porto Ercole unveiled another memorial, along with a casket containing several bones from the local cemetery that may—or, more likely, may not, according to scholars—belong to his skeleton.
“Where can I find Caravaggio’s tomb?” I ask a local.
“Behind the butcher shop,” he replies, “where bones like that belong.” There a grim stone-and-steel mound of symbols representing the torment and despair of his final years evokes the darkness that won over the light in Caravaggio’s life.
The painting that most dramatically captures these tensions hangs in the grandiose halls of Palazzo Barberini in Rome. Judith Beheading Holofernes recounts the Old Testament tale of a Hebrew widow who became both a killer and a heroine. After the Assyrian general’s siege had starved her town to the brink of surrender, Judith, in her best jewelry and finest gown, gained entry to his military encampment. Smitten by her beauty, Holofernes invited her to stay and dine with him. Plied with wine, the general fell into a drunken slumber. Judith seized his sword and hacked off his head.
Caravaggio sets the brutal murder in a Roman brothel, with his favorite courtesan-model as Judith. Holofernes lies on rumpled sheets, his mouth gaping in midscream, his head pulled upward by Judith’s left hand tugging at his hair. Her placid face frowns in concentration as she presses the blade deep into his neck. Blood jettisons from the dying man’s throat in ribbons of bright red as Judith’s wizened old servant watches impassively.
Many artists have portrayed the same chilling scene, but only one painting strikes me as superior to Caravaggio’s. Its creator was the daughter of a member of his street gang, Orazio Gentileschi, his talented imitator, “fellow swordsman and friend.”
CRITICS OF HIS DAY lauded Orazio as a “poet of light” who blended Caravaggio’s realism and Raphael’s classicism, but it was his daughter who won both notoriety and renown: Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–ca. 1652). Jane Fortune, founder of the Advancing Women Artists Foundation, describes her as “one of history’s most influential painters,” with a “rich baroque style” strongly influenced by Caravaggio. Artemisia’s life, too, turned into a tale of passion played out against a backdrop of dark and light. And as with Caravaggio, this contrast would shape the way she painted—and the way she lived.
Growing up in the freewheeling artists’ quarter at the foot of Rome’s Pincio Hill, Artemisia learned how to draw, mix colors, and paint in her father’s workshop. After her mother died in childbirth when Artemisia was twelve, the young girl channeled her grief into art. While still in her early teens, she demonstrated such promise that her father hired a colleague named Agostino Tassi to tutor her.
Tassi became obsessed with Artemisia, following her through Rome and intimidating any boy who dared approach her. One afternoon, when her chaperone left them alone, he raped Artemisia, who was sixteen or seventeen at the time. Promising marriage, Tassi continued to force the teenager to have sex with him until her father denounced him to the pope, charging him with stuprum (forcible defloration of a virgin).
In 1612, in a sensational seven-month trial, Artemisia described the violent attack. Pinned down on the bed, a handkerchief jammed into her mouth, a knee forcing her thighs open, she fought back. “I scratched his face and pulled his hair….I grasped his penis so tight that I even removed a piece of flesh.” Squirming out from under her rapist’s weight, she fumbled for a knife in a drawer close by and threatened to kill him. He taunted her by baring his chest. Artemisia lunged. He parried, although she managed to draw blood.
As recorded in the trial transcript, Artemisia spoke with poise and precision. Everything was at stake for the teenage girl: her honor and reputation, her family’s social standing, her prospects for marriage, her hopes for a future as an artist. To verify the truthfulness of her accusations, she had to repeat her testimony while undergoing torture with metal rings that squeezed fingers tight enough to leave permanent scars and, in some cases, break bones. Despite the excruciating pain, Artemisia did not waver.
Testimony at the trial revealed that Tassi had a wife (whom he had planned to murder before she ran off with another man) and an adulterous relationship with his sister-in-law. Although convicted, the rapist fled from Rome and never served his sentence of a year as a galley slave.
A month after the trial ended, Artemisia’s father married off his “sullied” daughter to a minor artist named Pierantonio Stiattesi. The newlyweds moved to the groom’s hometown of Florence.
AT A TIME WHEN respectable women either married or entered a convent, Artemisia managed to live by her paintbrush. In the city-state ruled by Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici, she quickly won high-profile and high-paying commissions. The duke and duchess hired her to paint several works, as did Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger (the artist’s nephew).
Although she didn’t learn to read and write until adulthood, Artemisia immersed herself in the poetry of Petrarch and Michelangelo and moved easily amid the theatrical, musical, and artistic glitterati at the Tuscan court. In 1616, she became the first woman inducted into Florence’s prestigious Accademia delle Arti del Disegno (Academy of the Arts of Drawing). Galileo Galilei, a fellow member, befriended her, and they shared warmly affectionate notes until his death.
Many of Artemisia’s paintings reflect both the trauma of rape and the steely determination of a survivor. Of almost sixty known works, most portray women—not as tranquil Madonnas or doleful martyrs, but as the strong, assertive heroines of mythology and the Bible. Several bear a striking resemblance to the artist as she captured her image in self-portraits: intense, full-cheeked, dark-haired, demanding to be taken seriously at a time when most women were not.
Artemisia painted several variations of the Bible’s murderous matron Judith. The best known, in the Uffizi’s Sala di Caravaggio (Caravaggio Room) in Florence, both ensnares and repels viewers with its graphic violence. Caravaggio presented an intricately staged murder; Artemisia depicts a bloodbath.
Judith has sliced open Holofernes’s throat with his sword. Bright red blood spurts from the wound, spilling over the sheets and gushing toward her elegant gold gown. Her young maid holds the flailing general down with her muscular arms. Judith, her face resolute, shows no hesitation or remorse. The painting, commissioned by the grand duke, so distressed his wife that it was hung in one of the Uffizi’s remote corners. (It was later moved to a more accessible site, where it was damaged in a 1993 terrorist bombing of the museum.)
ALTHOUGH SHE RETURNED OFTEN to violent subjects, Artemisia also painted sensual nude or nearly nude women, including a sleeping Venus and an enraptured Danaë with Jupiter’s gold coins piled between her fleshy thighs. A cache of long-lost letters discovered in 2011 revealed that the artist herself had a passionate secret life. “I am Artemisia,” she wrote to a Florentine aristocrat during their decades-long affair, “and I burn with love.”
Francesco Maria Maringhi, a nobleman of means and influence, may have entered Artemisia’s life as a patron. At some point, the two began a romantic liaison hidden from everyone except Artemisia’s husband. In notes scrawled on the backs of Artemisia’s letters, he communicated regularly with Francesco, praising his wife’s achievements and genially accepting Francesco’s role in their life—especially the financial support that came with it.
Artemisia gave birth to four children—two girls and two boys—in Florence. Three died in childhood; only a daughter survived to adulthood. Despite her hefty income and her lover’s generosity, Artemisia and her husband lived wildly beyond their means and struggled constantly with debt. Merchants’ account books reveal multiple complaints about overdue payments and a charge of theft against Artemisia, which she furiously denied. Despite her own extramarital entanglement, she refused to pay some of her husband’s bills because he “was still with said woman.” (We don’t know whom.)
A brew of blackmail, jealousy, scandal, and debt forced Artemisia to flee Florence for Rome in 1620. There she set up a busy bottega. Somewhere along the way her husband slipped out of the picture, and her lover Francesco joined her and her daughter.
Admirers penned sonnets praising her “amazing miracles” and painted portraits of her, including a black-and-red chalk drawing of her right hand by a besotted Frenchman. Detractors also had their say. “To carve two horns upon my husband’s head,” one snarked in a sham first-person verse, “I put down the brush and took a chisel instead.”
Forced to move to avoid outbreaks of the plague and to acquire new patrons, Artemisia spent extended stays in Venice and Naples. In 1635, King Charles I of England commissioned Orazio and Artemisia, father and daughter, to decorate the queen’s house in Greenwich. Orazio, a favorite of the British court, died in London in 1639.
Artemisia, bankrupt and in need of work, returned to Naples. There she promised a prominent collector that she would show him “what a woman can do.” She did so in a lush painting of a naked Diana in her bath, which, as she put it, depicted “the spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman.” Artemisia continued painting until about the age of sixty, when the plague claimed her life.
After her death, Artemisia slid into anonymity, with some of her early works attributed to her father. Overlooked for centuries, she was resurrected in the late twentieth century as a feminist icon who overcame rape and ignominy to gain respect and acclaim. In recent decades, Artemisia has inspired novels, plays, and an Italian television miniseries.
In a novel called The Passion of Artemisia, Susan Vreeland writes a dialogue between Artemisia and her father toward the end of his life. “We’ve been lucky,” she tells him. “We’ve been able to live by what we love. And to live painting, as we have, wherever we have, is to live passion and imagination and connection and adoration, all the best of life—to be more alive than the rest.” Although the scene is imagined, whenever I encounter Artemisia’s work, these words come to mind and ring hauntingly true.
VREELAND, SPEAKING AS ARTEMISIA, deftly captures the essence of Baroque art and architecture. A sense of passionate “aliveness” pulses throughout the period. I feel its seductiveness most in Rome, the dome-capped city of gushing fountains, monumental staircases, and sunlit piazzas.
I didn’t realize that many are the gifts of one singular artistic sensation until I rented an apartment a half block from the home and studio of Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680). After days of walking by this palazzo, I stopped to translate the commemorative plaque on its facade: “Here lived and died Gianlorenzo Bernini, a sovereign of art to whom reverent popes, princes, and peoples bowed.”
Who was the uncrowned marvel who inspired such homage? “The Brad Pitt, Jeff Koons, and Frank Gehry of his age, all rolled into one,” the author of a website dedicated to the omni-talented genius writes. Over his long career, Bernini emerged as the Michelangelo of his time, a master sculptor, architect, painter, city planner, draftsman, engraver, playwright, and scenographer who moved effortlessly from sacred to profane in both his personal and professional lives.
The son of a sculptor, Bernini began working with his father in Rome as a boy while diligently sketching the Vatican’s masterpieces, one by one. If he didn’t return home for dinner, his father knew that his son was indulging his creative passion with his “girlfriends,” as he referred to the papal treasures. Early critics called the youngster “a monster of genius.”
In his first self-portrait, the “monster” appears slender and hollow-cheeked, with a wide forehead, unruly black hair, dark eyes, sensual red lips, and a rapt expression. Throughout his long career, he would work uninterrupted from dawn to dusk. “Let me be,” he’d say to assistants who tried to coax him to pause for a meal, “I am in love.” Going to work, he often said, was “like entering a garden of delight.”
When Bernini was just twenty, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, an avid art patron, hired him to create sculptures for his ornate villa, now home of the Galleria Borghese. These early works, which include Hades pursuing Persephone, Apollo grasping Daphne, and David confronting Goliath, testify to Bernini’s genius for bringing cold hard marble to hot passionate life.
Hades’s hand grips Persephone’s thigh so tightly that we can see the imprint of his fingers. Transformed into a tree to escape Apollo’s lust, the nymph Daphne sprouts bark and branches that seem to grow before our eyes. Bernini portrays boyish David in midthrow, his body wound like a baseball pitcher’s, his arm pulled back, his face grimacing in concentration. The youth’s features and taut torso belong to the sculptor, reflected in a mirror reportedly held by Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, who would become his greatest patron as Pope Urban VIII.
AS HE GREW OLDER, Bernini expanded his passion for “girlfriends” to flesh-and-blood beauties and quickly earned a reputation as a “sexual wild man.” In the mid-1630s, the sculptor took up with Costanza Bonarelli, the wife of one of the artists in his bottega, described by a biographer as “a lusty, independent-minded strong-willed woman capable of matching his passion and ardor.”
Bernini carved a bust of his lover with her full lips parted, hair tousled, and dress rumpled. A critic described it as “a petrified figment of passion.” More than a century would pass before artists would again depict a woman in the throes of such sexual heat.
Bernini’s passion blazed to red-hot fury when he discovered that Costanza was also sleeping with his brother. When he spied them kissing, he chased his sibling through the streets of Rome with sword in hand, beat him unconscious, and broke his ribs. The hot-blooded artist paid a servant to slash Costanza’s face (a Roman mark of shame for faithless lovers). Her marble bust remained untouched.
Bernini’s distraught mother wrote to Pope Urban VIII, pleading with him to corral her volatile son, who believed “that anything he chooses to do is perfectly legitimate, as if over him there were neither masters nor law.” Bernini paid a large fine. His henchman was exiled. His brother left Rome for more than a year. The pontiff strongly “suggested” that the sculptor find a wife.
And so, at age forty, Bernini wed a fetching twenty-one-year-old named Caterina, daughter of a respectable family—so perfect, he told the pope, that he could not have “created a better one on his own, had he been able to cut her out of wax.” Caterina bore him eleven children in a marriage that lasted for more than three decades.
During his twenty-one-year pontificate, Urban VIII presented Bernini not simply with accolades, but with the Eternal City itself to use as a canvas. “You were made for Rome,” he told his “impresario supreme,” overseer of art, buildings, fountains, and public works, “and Rome was made for you.”
When the pope ordered Bernini to refine his painting skills, he adroitly produced more than 150 works. Directed to master architecture and urban planning, Bernini assembled a small army of subcontractors and transformed the landscape of central Rome. To fill the vast emptiness of St. Peter’s Basilica, he combined sculpture and architecture to create the baldacchino, a massive bronze canopy that spirals above its high altar. For the adjacent piazza, Bernini created a semicircular colonnade that literally and symbolically wraps the arms of the Catholic Church around the faithful.
With a passion flaring into obsession, Bernini hounded his workers, who trembled in fear of his fury. His glance alone, according to his son, “could instill terror.” Yet Bernini drove himself hardest of all. Describing his commitment to a project, he quoted Michelangelo: “I shit blood when I work.” His son more poetically described his father as entering “a state of ecstasy, as if he were sending out through his eyes his own spirit in order to give life to his blocks of stone.”
AFTER NONSTOP ARTISTIC AND ARCHITECTURAL triumphs, Bernini suffered a humiliating public failure in 1636. A bell tower he had created for St. Peter’s developed cracks that some feared might trigger the collapse of the entire facade. Bernini’s enemies accused him of jeopardizing Catholicism’s Mother Church. His financial assets were seized; he lost major commissions. The devastated artist took to his bed and stopped eating, starving himself almost to the point of death.
But another woman in ecstasy revived his career: Santa Teresa, the founder of the Discalced (shoeless) Carmelite sisters. In 1647, the patriarch of the Cornaro family commissioned Bernini to sculpt her statue for a private chapel in Rome’s Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria. Teresa, a stout middle-aged nun plagued with disfiguring maladies, had described mystical unions with God that induced periods of levitation, when she appeared to float in midair.
Bernini captures one such gravity-defying moment, but with considerable artistic license. In his sculpture, a radiant young woman, pierced by the arrow of divine love, trembles in ecstatic response to “the sweetest caressing of the soul by God.” Light from a hidden window illuminates her alabaster body—eyes closed, mouth open, arms outspread, a naked foot dangling from beneath the swirling drapery.
The sculptor had done the unthinkable. In the words of one of his contemporaries, he “put a scene of explicit sex inside a church.” Critics accused him of creating “an astounding peep show” and transforming the saint into “a Venus who was not only prostrate but prostituted as well.”
To modern visitors, the statue seems, as one put it, “almost porn,” with Teresa clearly enraptured by a carnal experience. Bernini’s defenders argue that the Baroque era unleashed such potent religious passions that physical and spiritual, sacred and profane, melded into one.
BERNINI’S BEST-KNOWN WORK may be his glorious Fountain of the Four Rivers, the centerpiece of Rome’s Piazza Navona, designed in 1651. To win the commission from Pope Innocent X, according to an anecdote become legend, Bernini fashioned a small silver model of his design and hung it on a chain carefully calculated to fall between the breasts of a papal favorite during a formal dinner. Captivated by the bauble, the pontiff asked to see a larger version. “Anyone who does not want to use Bernini’s designs,” he concluded, “must simply keep from ever setting his eyes on them.”
When the pontiff came to inspect the work in progress, Bernini couldn’t resist a prank: After telling the disappointed pope that the pipes weren’t ready, he waited until Innocent X had turned to go before signaling his workers to turn on the water full blast. At the sound of gushing streams, the pope turned around in childlike delight. “You have added years to our life!” he shouted to Bernini.
Bernini remained physically and mentally vigorous until 1680, when a series of strokes left his right arm paralyzed. The octogenarian consoled his children that it was only fair to rest an arm that had worked so very hard during its long life—a life that transformed the visual arts in all of Europe.
MY FAVORITE BERNINI SCULPTURES may be the least visited of his works. I came upon them by chance when I rented the apartment kitty-corner from his palazzo and across the street from the Church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte, literally out in the thrushes when it was built in the seventeenth century.
Inside this architectural gem, two gleaming white angels, standing on either side of the front altar, looked down on me with expressions that seemed hauntingly familiar. One held the crown of thorns placed on Jesus’s head; the other, the mocking inscription identifying him as “King of the Jews.” I was certain that I had seen them before.
In fact, I had seen copies—along with eight other angels on the bridge that crosses the Tiber to the Castel Sant’Angelo. This formidable fortress, built in the second century AD, served as a tomb for the emperor Hadrian, a military garrison, and a refuge for popes. According to legend, the archangel Michael appeared atop its tower in 590, sheathing his sword as a sign of the end of a plague that had devastated Rome.
In 1668, Pope Clement IX commissioned Bernini to adorn the bridge with ten grieving angels, each holding a symbol of Christ’s Passion. Assistants carved eight of the figures, but the only two statues sculpted by Bernini himself never took their designated places. Copies by lesser artists were installed instead.
How did the “missing” angels end up in Sant’Andrea delle Fratte? The pope, enthralled by the angels’ delicate beauty, may have wanted them for his private collection. However, he died soon after their completion, and the angels remained in Bernini’s workshop. In 1729, almost half a century after Bernini’s death, the artist’s nephew donated them to the nearby church.
In Sant’Andrea delle Fratte, an oasis from Rome’s ceaseless bustle, the pristine angels remain untouched by wind, weather, or pollution. To me, they embody the “aliveness” of Bernini and the Baroque. Their marble bodies seem to sway ever so gently. Their feathered wings almost flutter. Their lush curls look as if they would be soft to the touch. On their gentle faces, their eyes seem knowing; their mouths curve ever so slightly upward. Created by a man of passion in an age of passion, they honor the sacred as they hint, ever so slyly, at the profane.