THE VIA DEL QUIRINALE IS AN UNLIKELY place to stumble across an artistic metaphor for Bernini and Borromini—which is, perhaps, why it became one. It is a typical Roman street, undistinguished and easy to dismiss. On its north side runs the monotonous and rather cheerless garden wing of the Quirinale Palace—dubbed the manica lunga, or the long sleeve—while on its south side stand two small churches, which face the Quirinale’s uniformity like well-behaved schoolchildren waiting for a tiresome class to begin.
Yet for hundreds of years this prosaic street—once called the Via Pia after Pius IV, who reorganized this area in the middle of the sixteenth century—and the two churches along its south side, Bernini’s Sant’Andrea al Quirinale and Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, have been sought out by artists and historians, tourists and dilettantes, the faithful and the curious. They have walked the three hundred paces between the Via della Quattro Fontane and the Via Milano to visit these two churches, whose storied beauties and serendipitous proximity recall the stunning talent of their creators and the enduring connection between them. Each day that the churches are open, visitors can compare the brilliance of both as an appraiser might a pair of mismatched diamonds mounted in the same setting.
But it’s impossible not to prefer one church over the other. It doesn’t matter if you’re a tourist or a scholar, one will touch your soul the way the architect meant it to when he designed it 350 years ago, and the other will leave you with respectful admiration.
This isn’t unusual in Rome. It is a city full of churches visited more for their art than for their sanctity. But even though they have been dirtied by city grit and sullied by the inattentions of a profane age, Sant’Andrea and San Carlo are still marveled at, still compared, still judged. These two buildings, together with dozens of others across the city, have given Rome what Rudolf Wittkower describes as “an appearance of festive splendor.” If anyone invented the Rome we know today, it is Bernini and Borromini. It was their passion, their vision, which gave us the Rome of extravagant churches of travertine and broad piazzas of granite. The Rome of towering domes that reach toward God and expansive palazzi that declare the power of man. The Rome we remember and the Rome we dream of.
But recognition of such men and their talents does not come without a price. It is human nature to distrust genius. We are suspicious of the exceptional and the brilliant; they unsettle us. Too often we recoil at the extraordinary, alarmed by the originality we see. If we are not prepared for the canvas of a van Gogh or the poetry of a Blake, we’re confused, even angry. It is a rare artist, a rare man, who can produce work that others welcome and that can weather the whimsy of taste and the scrutiny of time. To succeed at such an endeavor, an artist must be equal parts diplomat and sage, someone accustomed to finessing the shortcomings of lesser mortals while staying true to himself and his imagination. He must draw courage from his vision while weighing it against the expediency of compromise that gnaws against every project. For architects in particular, this is crucial: Their art cannot survive in a vacuum. As the architectural historian and critic Sir Nikolaus Pevsner once observed, “For a while a poet and a painter can forget about their age and be great in the solitude of their study and studio; an architect cannot exist in opposition to society.”
Gianlorenzo Bernini understood this. Francesco Borromini did not.
The story of these two men, of their exceptional careers and the great rivalry that grew between them, splitting them apart as it grafted them together, is one of ambition and desire, antagonism and hope. It is the contradictory tale of how one artist thrived by embracing the world and how another withered by withdrawing from it. It is the story of their antagonism and of the superb architecture that sprung from it: magnificent churches, chapels, and palaces, buildings that reveal the power of an architect’s imagination and that still, nearly four centuries after they were built, have the power to astonish.
LIKE ALL ART, architecture springs from the ability to translate imagination into both physical being and poetic truth. Gianlorenzo Bernini knew how to accomplish this better than most: His talent was equaled by few and surpassed by still fewer. A man of extraordinary ability, ambition, and charisma, he was sublimely in sync with the rhythms of his time, the seventeenth century. The harmonies he created in architecture, sculpture, and painting—he was master of all three—were at once lively and subtle, energetic and thoughtful, deeply emotional and yet always carefully calculated. He possessed perfect artistic pitch.
The virtuosity he displayed in all of his buildings and sculpture, and the awareness he showed for the emotion and effect they gave rise to in the observer, were so attuned to what Rome and the world wanted at the time that while still in his twenties Bernini became the most celebrated artist in Europe. Rome’s taste became his, and his Rome’s. He almost always surpassed the expectations of the commissions he took on. But when he failed, he did so spectacularly. His artistic sensibility, coupled with his capacity to charm and to be charming, were nearly flawless—so impeccable that they helped to create a new style, the Baroque, which reflected new ways of thinking about the world and about God.
Bernini was an intuitive artist. He had an almost frightening ability to transform a block of marble or a building site into a piece of uncommon artistry. “Not even the ancients succeeded in making rocks so obedient to their hands that they seemed like pasta,” he boasted. Filippo Baldinucci wrote in his Life of Bernini published in 1682 that Bernini said of himself that “he devoured marble and never struck a false blow.” It’s an observation brimming with brisk overconfidence, but it was one that a succession of seventeenth-century popes and princes wholeheartedly agreed with and one that Bernini worked diligently to achieve.
Domenico Bernini, one of Bernini’s sons and the author of his own biography of his father, admits that his father was “aspro di natura, fisso nelle operazioni, ardente nell’ira”: stern by nature, steady in his work, passionate in his wrath. It was a sensibility that complemented his physical appearance. Domenico explains that his father had a long, handsome face, a broad, high forehead, and dark hair and eyes, which “could quell an opponent with a look.” The early self-portraits of Bernini show such a man, one with perceptive, deep-set eyes and an expressive mouth who seemed poised, even eager, to unleash his ambition.
Perhaps even more remarkable, Bernini’s fame actually kept pace with his talent. From papal Rome to the Paris of Louis XIV to the unwelcoming shores of Protestant England, Bernini was known as a master, the maestro. He was one of the last of the great artists who made Rome the undisputed artistic center of Europe and was not only proclaimed a genius during his lifetime but also amply rewarded for his efforts, dying a wealthy man.
Francesco Borromini was not so fortunate. Perhaps more of a natural architect than Bernini was, he was the only man in Rome who successfully breached Bernini’s artistic supremacy. His approach to architecture was vastly different from Bernini’s, and while he worked hard to find a place for his work, he ultimately failed to sustain the favor of Rome’s art patrons, the collection of popes, cardinals, papal relatives, and leaders of religious orders that commissioned new buildings. The fault was in Borromini, not his work: He never found a way to adapt himself to the demands of others. His was an unyielding spirit, trapped in an era that demanded obedience. If Bernini had perfect artistic pitch, Borromini was socially tone-deaf. He never understood the value of keeping silent.
Borromini could be suspicious, temperamental, and melancholy; at times, he was tiresome to be around. He had a hair-trigger sense of honor and an unwillingness to hear criticism about his designs, which made him difficult, even impossible, to work with. Yet his architectural vision was unequivocal, as clear today as it was then.
The antagonism between two such gifted men lasted for decades—nearly all of their professional lives. It evolved slowly, from their early days when they worked together at St. Peter’s, the greatest church in Christendom, and deepened as their chances for advancement grew increasingly lopsided.
WHERE DOES SUCH talent come from? What combination of ability, inclination, and environment fuses to produce an artist of the caliber of Bernini and Borromini?
Neither science nor religion offers a clear explanation. But in the early years of both artists there were hints of where each came from and what he might become.
For Gianlorenzo Bernini, the seeds of his talent lie in his family and the city of his birth, and his gifts manifested themselves first in sculpture, then architecture.
He was the eldest son of Pietro Bernini, a sculptor from Sesto Fiorentino, a village north of Florence. Pietro first came to notice as an apprentice in Florence under the now-forgotten sculptor Ridolfo Sirigatti. He eventually moved south to Rome, where he studied painting and sculpture. There he worked under the tutelage of Giuseppe Cesari, the Cavalier d’Arpino, a painter employed by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese.
In 1584 Pietro moved farther south to Naples, which was then ruled by Spain and therefore not under the control of the papacy. The Spanish viceroy had commissioned the Florentine sculptor Caccini to decorate the church in the massive Carthusian Monastery of San Martino, and Pietro was hired to carve statues and reliefs for it. While living in Naples, Pietro met and married Angelica Galante, a Neapolitan, and on December 7, 1598, Gianlorenzo, named for his grandfather and great-grandfather, was born—“by divine plan,” Baldinucci wrote, “this child who, for Italy’s good fortune, was to bring illumination to two centuries.”
Bernini was born just before the dawn of the seventeenth century, the vibrant, tempestuous era that saw an astonishing out-pouring of genius. Rembrandt and Rubens, Descartes and Shakespeare, Galileo and Newton all lived and worked during this age, transforming art and science and how we think of them. It was a period when men of talent and ability were reimagining the world, and it would not be long before Bernini became one of its leading lights—the foremost artist of his age.
Bernini’s early years were spent in Naples, which has been called the most beautiful city in the world and the most maddening. Its setting certainly supports the former claim, situated as it is along a dramatic arc of Mediterranean coastline at the base of the San Martino and Capodimonte hills. Its narrow, winding streets hunch up and over the steep hills and narrow valleys of what was known as the ancient city of Neapolis, and its original layout can be glimpsed along the Via dei Tribunali and Via Benedetto Croce, Decumano Superiore, and Via San Biagio dei Librai, Decumano Inferiore.
Neapolitans know what it means to be subjugated by outsiders. The city has a history nearly as long as Rome’s, though unlike that of its neighbor to the north, it is a story of defeat and domination. Founded in the fifth century B.C. by Greeks, Neapolis was first conquered in 327 B.C. by the Romans. The Byzantines came next, followed by the Normans, who combined Naples and the surrounding area with the Kingdom of Sicily. By the thirteenth century, Naples was part of the Holy Roman Empire, and was used offhandedly as a bargaining chip by a succession of kings, emperors, and popes who cared more about consolidating power than ruling the people who lived there.
In 1494 Charles VIII of France invaded Italy and in the next year seized Naples, only to retreat from a coalition counterattack led by Spain, then the most powerful nation in Europe. The political squabbling continued, eventually leading to France ceding Naples and Sicily to Spain in the Treaties of Blois (1504–5). For two centuries Spain ruled the region through a succession of viceroys, one based in Palermo, the other in Naples. Under Spanish rule, the people of southern Italy were taxed heavily, though the nobility and the church were exempt from such treatment. Yet as the church and Spanish and Italian landowners continued to bicker, it only added to the confusion of life there and led to crop failures and widespread famine. Disease flourished almost as robustly as local superstition did. Before long, southern Italy was one of the poorest, most exploited, and most backward areas of Europe.
Naples may not have been the ideal place for even a competent sculptor like Pietro Bernini to work in and live. At the end of the sixteenth century, the city was overcrowded and dirty, on the margins of an empire that a foreign king ruled from thousands of miles away. Rome must have seemed an infinitely more appealing place than Naples: It was the capital of a civilization that had survived for two thousand years and was the center of European art. In addition, the Roman Catholic Church, having stumbled badly during the Reformation—England, Scotland, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and parts of Germany had been lost to Protestantism—was regaining worshipers by adopting a kind of robust Christianity to combat those spouting heresy. It began to use art to spread God’s and the church’s message, becoming the foremost art patron of Europe. Naples, despite being less than 150 miles from Rome, was, by comparison, a relative artistic backwater.
Despite such hindrances, Pietro Bernini was well regarded as a sculptor and found enough work to support his family. He was commissioned to carve a large relief of San Martino and a group of statues known as Virgin and Child with the Infant St. John, both for the monastery church of San Martino. In 1600 he carved the satyrs that decorate the Medina Fountain, which at the time of the commission stood outside the residence of the Spanish viceroy, Enrico de Guzmán, near the Arsenale waterfront.
Sometime during the years of 1605 and 1606 Pietro was called to Rome by Pope Paul V. The former Cardinal Camillo Borghese, who had been elected pope in 1605, was determined to restore the city’s monuments and churches as a way of reviving Rome as a city worthy of the Church Triumphant.
Though Paul was not known as an aesthete, he was bold and shrewd, and as a city planner he thought in monumental terms. He had no compunction about ordering the tearing down of ancient buildings and co-opting marble and other materials to use in his overhaul of the city. And when he called upon dozens of artists to help him achieve his goals, Pietro was among the sculptors selected. His task was to assist in improving the thousand-year-old Santa Maria Maggiore, the remarkable pilgrim church that sits atop the Esquiline Hill, by working on the Cappella Paolina, the Pauline Chapel, an elaborate mélange of architecture, sculpture, and painting that celebrates the Virgin as it serves as the Borghese family chapel.
Santa Maria Maggiore is one of Rome’s four great patriarchal basilicas, having been built on the site where Pope Liberius witnessed a miracle on August 5 in A.D. 356: The Virgin appeared to him and caused snow to fall on the spot that outlined the plan of the church. Its grand and elegant nave—Henry James called it “singularly perfect”—is as wide as it is tall and is decorated with forty Ionic columns of white Athenian marble and thirty-six extraordinary mosaics from the fifth century that depict scenes from the lives of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses. The ornate ceiling by Giuliano da Sangallo—composed of coffered squares arranged in five long rows—is gilded, a gift from Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, who donated what legend says is some of the first gold brought back from the New World. Countless prayers have been offered and innumerable souls have been unburdened over the fifteen centuries that this church has stood on this spot. It was already one of Rome’s glories when Pope Paul V determined that it should also be the site of the Borghese family chapel.
For a decade the church hummed with artistic activity; only St. Peter’s employed more artists and artisans. Paul commissioned Pietro on December 30, 1606, to carve a large relief for the chapel depicting the Assumption of the Virgin, the moment when the body of Mary, uncorrupted by death, was taken into heaven. Pietro continued to receive payments for it until 1610. It has been hailed by critics as Pietro’s masterpiece; it’s certainly his major work in Rome. Using exaggerated perspective and almost painfully contorted figures, Pietro carved what appears to be—to modern eyes, at least—a three-dimensional painting of a perplexed Mary being escorted to heaven by a disorganized band of harp-wielding seraphim—one of them playing an organ—and several scattered cherubim, who are using their tiny backs to convey her into the clouds. Several apostles gaze up at her with expressions of amazement and concern. It’s a portrayal of a miracle captured in stone, caught forever for the faithful. Pietro’s treatment of the details in the piece—the curling hair of Saint Peter’s beard, the folds of Mary’s robes, the delicate flowers that are about to tip off the edge of a tilting table—is confident: Despite the strangeness of the composition—one of the apostles is actually wearing eyeglasses—there is an assurance to the piece; the artist intended us to see exactly what we do.
Pietro worked on his Assumption for four years, and it is tempting to ponder what his eldest son might have learned from its planning and execution, as the relief was certainly in his father’s studio and house during Bernini’s formative years from ages eight to twelve. In speculating on what part the youngster may have had in it, Charles Avery, the art historian and expert on Bernini, writes that “the hand of the young Gianlorenzo has been detected in the cherubim bearing the Virgin to Heaven.” Given how young Bernini was at the time of the Assumption’s carving, it may seem hard to believe, but it is not impossible. There are indications that the young Bernini was already a sculptor—or at least was trying to become one—during this time. Domenico claims that Bernini “at the age of eight, to prove himself…made a small marble head of a little angel” (Baldinucci says it was the head of a child). It may be improbable that an eight-year-old boy, no matter how precocious, could have completed a piece in as technically demanding a discipline as sculpture, but there is no question that Bernini grew up immersed in the techniques and procedures of the art form. Surrounded as he was by the constant drilling and chipping of stone, the carving and smoothing of marble, literally breathing the dust of creation, it is feasible that he could have found a manageable block of marble, perhaps a cast-off stone from a larger commission, and carved a small statue from it.
Bernini was not much older—eleven or twelve—when he carved a life-size bust of Monsignor Giovanni Battista Santoni, an aide to Pope Sixtus V who died in 1592, six years before Bernini was born. He carved the bust from a portrait or death mask to fit into a monument to Santoni that would be hung in Santa Prassede, a small church south of Santa Maria Maggiore.
Even at such a young age, Bernini must have been well enough thought of to be given such a task, and he does not disappoint. He carved a solemn, severe-looking cleric, with a receding line of close-cropped hair and a shaggy beard that shares similarities with the goat’s coat on another piece he carved around this time, The Goat Amalthea Suckling the Infant Jupiter and a Satyr.
The bust of Santoni has an almost photographic quality to it: Bernini carved the head turned slightly to the viewer’s left and leaned it forward out of a tight oval frame. The light falls naturally across the face, giving the impression that the monsignor was about to say something when the artist caught him. Santoni is frowning, his eyebrows pulled together, as if irritated by the interruption or even the questioner himself, and this causes the crow’s-feet around his unblinking eyes to appear more pronounced. It is a grave bust, handsome yet off-putting. It is the cautious, correct work of a gifted ten-year-old who is mastering the techniques of sculpture but who has not yet grasped how to communicate his subject’s underlying emotions. This is hardly surprising, given how young Bernini was at the time and that he hadn’t known Santoni at all. But as the art historian Tod Marder notes, “Bernini’s early portraits must have been valued not only as striking images but also as marvels from the hand of a mere boy”—artistic curiosities from a prodigy in an age that revered portraiture.
As Bernini grew, so did the attention he received. In time, the acclaim heaped upon him reached the ears of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, an aide and favorite nephew of Pope Paul V, who sent for the young sculptor. It proved to be the first stroke of good fortune in a lifetime overflowing with it.
Borghese was always searching for new artists to bring to his uncle’s attention, and he had seen the bust of Santoni and wanted to meet the young artist all of Rome was talking about. Borghese was a man of cultivated artistic tastes who had an unsavory reputation for acquiring the art he liked by any means necessary. If he could not buy a painting or a sculpture he wanted, he resorted to other, less civilized methods—no matter who owned it. Late one night in 1608, for example, Raphael’s Deposition from the Cross disappeared suddenly from the church of San Francesco in Perugia and found its way into Borghese’s private collection. And the cardinal had the painter Domenichino imprisoned for several days because the artist was foolish enough—and principled enough—to refuse to sell him his magnificent Diana. Borghese greatly admired the painting, but Domenichino had committed the unpardonable sin of promising it to Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, one of Borghese’s adversaries. It was not long before Borghese made it clear to Domenichino, and to everyone else in Rome, that no one, not even a favored artist, disobeyed the pope’s nephew. Borghese got Diana, which still hangs in the Villa (now the Galleria) Borghese.
No one could fault the young Bernini or his father if either felt uneasy about meeting the cardinal, whose influence in the Vatican was as well known as it was feared. But Bernini, Domenico wrote, “carried himself with such a mixture of vivacity and modesty, of submission and alertness, that he captivated the mind of the Cardinal, who immediately wanted to present him to the Pontiff.”
When Bernini was brought before the pope and his courtiers, he knelt and kissed the pope’s foot and asked for his blessing. Paul “wished to try the courage of the boy by affecting terribleness, and, facing him, he commanded in grave tones that there, in his presence, he should draw a head.”
Bernini picked up the pen and smoothed the paper that had been given him. He had just started to draw when he paused, “bowing his head modestly to the Pontiff,” Domenico explains.
“What head do you wish?” Bernini asked the stern pope. “A man or a woman? Young or old?…And what expression do you wish? Sad or cheerful? Scornful or agreeable?”
The boy’s questions surprised and charmed the pontiff. “If this is so,” Paul replied, half in jest, “you know how to draw everything.” He directed that Bernini draw the head of Saint Paul.
When the sketch was finished in half an hour, and with what Domenico called “a few strokes of the pen and with an admirable boldness of hand,” the pope was “lost in wonder, and only said to some of the Cardinals who were there by chance, ‘This child will be the Michelangelo of his age.’” It was high praise from the most powerful man in Rome.
(Later in life, when Bernini had been called to Paris by Louis XIV to design an addition to the Louvre, his escort, Paul Fréart de Chantelou, recounted in his diary that “at the age of eight [Bernini] had done a Head of St. John which was presented to Paul V by his chamberlain. His Holiness could not believe that he had done it and asked if he would draw a head in his presence. He agreed and pen and paper were sent for. When he was ready to begin he asked His Holiness what head he wished him to draw. At that the Pope realized that it was really the boy who had done the St. John, for he had believed that he would draw some conventional head. He asked him to draw a head of St. Paul, which he did then and there.”)
Paul declared that Bernini was an exceptional artist and that the church must nurture his talents and put them to use. He directed the Vatican to oversee his education and instructed Cardinal Maffeo Barberini to instill “fire and enthusiasm” in the young Bernini for the study of art. The pope then gave Bernini twelve gold coins—as many as the boy could fit in his hands. It was the first gift Bernini ever received from a pope. They held so much meaning for him that he kept the coins until he died, seven decades later. Their symbolic value was more precious to him than their monetary worth.
Cardinal Barberini could not have been a more suitable—or a more important—mentor for Bernini. A powerful and influential papal courtier, he was, like Pietro Bernini, a Florentine. Born in Florence in 1568, Barberini moved to Rome with his mother when he was three years old, shortly after his father’s death. He was educated by the Jesuits at the Collegio Romano and was sent to study law at the University of Pisa, receiving his doctor of laws degree in 1589. Clever and capable, Barberini returned to Rome and worked to establish himself in the papal court. In 1604 Pope Clement VIII sent him to France as papal nuncio, where he developed an advantageous rapport with the French king, Henry IV, the politically expedient monarch who renounced his Protestantism to become king because, he said, “Paris is well worth a mass.” In 1606, as an indication of Barberini’s accomplishments, Paul V made him a cardinal.
Intellectually curious and attracted to new ideas, Barberini was a friend of Galileo’s and published several volumes of his own poetry. He enjoyed art and the artists who created it, and he took an active and sustained interest in fostering Bernini’s education. The boy had virtually unlimited access to the Vatican and its peerless art collection: Baldinucci writes that Bernini “spent three continuous years from dawn to the sounding of the Ave Maria” studying and copying antique and Hellenistic works and the paintings of Raphael and Michelangelo.
Bernini was particularly interested in mastering disegno, the capturing of a piece’s psychological moment of highest drama, what the architectural historian Howard Hibbard defines as “the delineation of noble figures in poise and equilibrium.” Raphael had used this technique decades before, and Bernini made effective use of it as well, both in his architecture and in his sculpture, untangling many design problems by constant revisions or reimagings of his ideas on paper.
The boy learned quickly, drinking in the great art around him, as if the paintings and sculpture—Roman copies from works by ancient Greek sculptors like Phidias and Praxiteles to those by Michelangelo—had been waiting to pour their secrets into him. He made such swift progress that Barberini once teased Pietro about his son’s skill.
“Watch out,” the cardinal told Pietro, “he [Bernini] will surpass the master.”
Pietro must have come to the bittersweet realization that his great gift was to be the father of an even greater artist. While his dissatisfaction may have been considerable, he could take pride in his son’s exceptional talent, even as it surpassed his own.
Pietro had the wit to reply to Barberini, “It doesn’t bother me, for as you know, in that case, the loser wins.” It is a father’s insight, perhaps born of regret, but tempered by pride.
Still, as an artist, Pietro was not without stature or reputation. When he returned to Rome with his family in 1605, he was elected president of the art association at the Academy of St. Luke. And when his son became a success, he joined his studio.
And it appears that Pietro was an exceptionally able motivator. He understood the importance of instilling in Bernini good work habits. Instead of unalloyed praise, Domenico says, Pietro “expressed both admiration and disparagement” for Bernini’s work, “praising the drawings while telling him that he was sure that he could not achieve the same result a second time, as if to say that the perfection of the first efforts was due to a lucky accident, rather than to his son’s ability. This was a very clever device as each day [Bernini] attempted to emulate his own virtues, and thus he was in constant competition with himself.”
As the light of Borghese patronage shone on him, Bernini attempted more ambitious work, creating some of his first life-size sculptural groups. Though carved when he was young, they are still among his most confident, self-possessed work—remarkable examples of his skill and dexterity. Four of them, Aeneas and Anchises with the Boy Ascanius (completed in 1619), Pluto and Proserpina (completed in 1622), Apollo and Daphne (completed in 1625), and David (completed in 1624), were commissioned by Cardinal Sciopine, and three of them are derived from Greek and Roman myths. The first depicts the scene from book two of the Aeneid in which Aeneas flees Troy, carrying his elderly father Anchises (who clutches the family household gods) on his left shoulder as his son Julius Ascanius, carrying the sacred fire of the hearth, the flame of Vesta, struggles to keep up. It’s a tall, narrow composition of the three ages of man, and to modern eyes there’s an unfinished quality to all three faces, as if the sculptor wasn’t confident enough to render each more precisely. Some experts have even argued that this was mostly the work of Pietro: The painter Joachim von Sandrart attributed the piece to Pietro alone in a book he published in 1675.
More successful is Pluto and Proserpina. In this vivid, energetic piece, Bernini portrays the moment when Pluto, the god of the underworld, secures Proserpina (also known as Persephone), the beautiful daughter of Demeter, as his wife and carries her back with him to Hades. Pluto’s massive hands and thick, greedy fingers dig into the soft flesh of Proserpina’s thigh and back as she struggles to escape, pushing ineffectively against the left side of his broad face. She looks terrified—bewildered and desperate—as she tries to break free from his embrace. Every muscle in her is strained, even down to her flexed left big toe. But while it’s clear what is about to happen—Proserpina is moments away from being raped—it is equally apparent that her resistance is in vain. In fact, Pluto actually seems to be enjoying her struggle: He is amused by her fear and her hysteria, perhaps seeing them perversely as a kind of foreplay before she submits to him. Behind the struggling figures, grinning in triplicate, is Cerberus, the three-headed hound that guards the entrance to the underworld, a silent witness to this disturbing but compelling depiction of passion and terror.
These two emotions are also explored in Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, though more subtly. As a piece of sculpture it’s a virtuoso performance, displaying as much ingenuity as any sculpture of his time—so much so that before Bernini carved it, the tale (from Ovid’s Metamorphoses) was thought to be suited only for canvas; marble wasn’t nearly pliable enough a material to display the requisite nuance and delicacy the story demanded. Bernini proved that assumption wrong.
The story illustrates the tragic inequality of desire. The mischievous Cupid induces the unsuspecting god Apollo—through what Ovid called “savage spite”—to fall hopelessly in love with Daphne, a young nymph of exceptional beauty, while at the same time causing Daphne to detest him. Apollo’s desire for Daphne becomes as all-consuming as her aversion is to him. While he pursues her fiercely through the woods, wearing nothing but a swirling cloak, the beautiful and unclothed nymph struggles to keep free of his grasp. Desperate and near exhaustion, and as she feels Apollo gaining on her—literally breathing down her neck—Daphne pleads to her father, the river god Peneus, to save her. “Change and destroy this body which has been too much delight,” she pleads.
Her appeal is heard and granted. Just as Apollo catches the despairing Daphne, his left hand reaching triumphantly from behind to touch her waist, the nymph is transformed into a laurel tree. In an instant, Apollo’s exultation turns to despair as he feels the nymph he has caught slip from him. According to Ovid’s version, Apollo can still feel Daphne’s beating heart as her fingers become leaves, her legs the trunk and bark, her toes the roots.
By portraying the story’s decisive moment—of the eternal struggle between conquest and loss, possession and independence, lust and chastity—Bernini captures a wealth of human experience. He shows what it feels like to be young, to exult in the chase, and to ache with longing for another. At once physically powerful and psychologically subtle, Apollo and Daphne is also a technical wonder, a virtuoso performance in marble. Bernini renders the smooth, polished bodies of Apollo and Daphne with great sympathy and tenderness; he communicates an almost palpable appreciation for their beauty. From the delicate spit curls along Apollo’s jaw to Daphne’s outstretched fingers that transform into fragile leaves, Bernini masters the cold and unforgiving stone, imposing on it a range of emotions that are deeply human. It is a giant leap forward from his father’s accomplishments; by comparison, Pietro’s Assumption appears trifling and lackluster.
When Apollo and Daphne was complete, it surpassed the work of any other artist in Rome in its dynamic realism. Bernini had managed to fashion marble into flesh and bone. The two figures give the impression, according to one critic, “of having been modeled, as though by the adding of wax or clay, rather than the subtracting or chipping away of stone.” So revolutionary was Bernini’s work, Baldinucci wrote, “only the eye and not the ear can form an adequate impression” of the drama Bernini caught.
One drama that attempted to take attention away from the sculpture was whether Bernini was willing to share the praise being heaped upon him. According to the art historian Jennifer Montagu, while Bernini was responsible for the concept and execution of much of the piece, the “metamorphosis of the block of marble into delicate roots and twigs, and into floating tresses, was largely the work of Giuliano Finelli,” a sculptor from Carrara: “Bernini, perhaps because he was jealous of Finelli’s obvious talents, or because he was wary of his prickly personality, held him back from the advancement he had promised.” Montagu notes that this is the first time a talented artist left Bernini’s employment “revolting against the menial position to which his talents had been confined.” It would not be the last.
There were other concerns about Apollo and Daphne that went beyond dividing the credit. Some worried that such a depiction of pagan—and provocative—myth had no place in the art collection of a cardinal. Chantelou reported that François d’Escoubleau, Cardinal de Sourdis, was so disturbed by the piece that he told Borghese that he would not allow it in his house: “The figure of a lovely naked girl might disturb those who saw it.” To prevent such criticism, a couplet written in Latin by Borghese’s friend Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, later Pope Urban VIII, was carved into the statue’s base:
Quisquis amans sequitur fugitivae gaudia formae,
Fronde manus implet, baccas seu carpit amaras.
The lover who would fleeting beauty clasp
plucks bitter fruit; dry leaves are all he’ll grasp.
Cardinal Borghese had no such difficulty with Bernini’s David, as its subject sprung from the Bible, not from mythology. Unlike Michelangelo’s famous sculpture of David, which stands aloof and dignified and became a symbol of Florence, Bernini’s David is a study of the power of the human spirit and an object lesson in how art can involve the viewer. This is a young David preparing to hurl the fatal shot. His body is tense, ready. His face handsome but ordinary, his brow furrowed in concentration, his lips pressed together tightly, and his hair disheveled. (The story has circulated among Bernini’s early biographers, including Baldinucci, that the head of this David is a self-portrait, and that Cardinal Maffeo Barberini held a mirror so that Bernini could model his own head.)
In his left hand, David holds a stone taut in its sling. He is poised to step into battle with Goliath, into his fate, into history. Unlike the proud, masculine nakedness of Michelangelo’s David or even the leisurely nudity of Donatello’s David, Bernini’s version of David is draped. There is nothing noble or renowned here; this is a young man of humble birth called upon to perform a miracle. No one knows if he is up to the challenge, least of all David himself. And yet he doesn’t wear the cuirass, the traditional warrior breastplate, which Saul had lent him (and which stands conveniently upright at the rear of the sculpture for Bernini to use as support for his figure).
But David’s lack of armor is beside the point. His purpose is clear; his aim will be—must be—true. The viewer’s eye is drawn to David and the intensity of his vision, both literally and metaphorically.
What Bernini has done, which few other artists at the time had attempted, is to involve the observer in the event. Bernini’s David gazes behind and beyond the viewer, to a Goliath in the distance. The space between the art and the observer has been psychically charged; the observer is in the middle of the battle. Even the toes on David’s right foot—bare and dirty, the foot of a shepherd, not a hero king—curve over the statue’s base, as if to signal that a wall has been breached.
The brilliance of the piece isn’t enough to quell questions about the statue’s stance. Richard Norton, an early-twentieth-century art historian, posited that while David is based on the pose of the famous Greek sculpture known as the Borghese Warrior, it would rival the greatest of ancient Greek sculpture “had Bernini not made one mistake. The figure is turned to the wrong side. As he stands, the right arm drawn back, the left hand holding the stone in the sling in front of the body, the sling must fall loose and dead, the body must again be flung forward and the right arm swung upwards before the youth can get the momentum to hurl the stone at his enemy. Had Bernini turned the figure the other way with the left hand behind and the right in front of the body, this sense of ineffectiveness in the pose would not have existed, and the whole body would have been tensely set at the moment of rest between the action of drawing back for the aim and the instantaneously following motion of the cast.”
Bernini’s David is a very different kind of sculpture from those carved by Michelangelo and Donatello. We aren’t meant just to admire Bernini’s work; we encounter it. We are brought into its sphere, forcing us to confront the feelings it prompts.
It is this talent for engaging the observer, for drawing people into the work—be it the sculptures of the Villa Borghese or the Baldacchino at St. Peter’s—that made Bernini as famous an architect in his day as he was a sculptor. Though he did not set out to become a master builder, when he was prevailed upon to turn his talents to architecture, he approached each commission with imagination and diligence. As he had been known to quote, Nihil est melius quam vita diligentissima (There is nothing better than a very diligent life). And just as he did with a block of marble, he searched for—and eventually found—the sublime in the possibilities before him. Bernini the architect consumed space, devouring it in ways that dazzled. And as with his own sculpture, he almost never struck a false blow.
When he did—when he miscalculated—the failure was spectacular, and its effects were far-reaching, reverberating across the building sites of Rome and echoing through the corridors of the Vatican. Such a misstep is often also an opportunity, and no one understood this more profoundly than the only other man in Rome who could lay claim to being its preeminent architect: Francesco Borromini.
THE MAN WHO became known as Francesco Borromini was born in Lombardy on September 25, 1599, on Lake Lugano in Ticino, the southernmost canton of Switzerland that is part of what the art historian and Borromini scholar Joseph Connors calls “the jagged and illogical boundary” that divides Italy and Switzerland. He was the son of Giovanni Domenico Castelli Brumino, a master stonemason who probably worked for the influential Visconti family, and Anastasia Garovo (whose name over the years was also spelled Garvo, Garvi, Garogo, and Garuo), whose family was related to Domenico Fontana and Carlo Maderno, two of the great Late Renaissance architects who had moved to Rome and who helped design and build St. Peter’s.
Borromini was born in the village of Bissone, which sits on a small furrow of land on the southeastern shore of Lake Lugano. It was one of a loose string of small settlements that dot the area, which at the time of Borromini’s birth had been under Swiss domination for more than fifty years.
Bissone has never been a destination that visitors have flocked to in droves; the village’s beauty is not as polished as that of others along the canton’s lakes, being less pleasingly situated than Bellagio on Lake Como or even the town of Lugano, which sits along the northern shore of Lake Lugano, smug and well turned out like a plump, complacent countess. Its alleyways, called contrade, and vaulted stone promenade along the town’s main street, which roughly parallels the lakeshore, are attractive but not worth a special visit. In fact, the village provokes a certain tension, even anxiety, in a visitor. This is partly due to its narrow layout—barely two streets wide—and its cramped location along the coastline. But it is really the mountains that disconcert. They tower over the town, sheer, heaving walls of stone softened only slightly by the cypress and palm trees that grow on them. Their damp, omnipresent shadows besiege Bissone like silent warriors. The place feels occupied; it is a stronghold, not a sanctuary.
This is the world in which Borromini spent the first years of his life, living on a contradictory landscape, at once stark and lush, among the proud, skillful masons and stonecutters who for generations supplied central and southern Europe with the talented artisans who built and carved the great churches and imposing palaces that still stand today, from Palermo to Vienna, Prague to Istanbul.
In 1609, when he was ten years old, Borromini was sent to Milan by his father to apprentice with Andrea Biffi, a sculptor who carved many of the reliefs that decorate the elaborate choir screen and the monument to San Carlo Borromeo in Milan’s Gothic-influenced cathedral, the Duomo. (Some believe that Borromini changed his name from Castelli because of his devotion to, and pride in, a fellow Lombard, Archbishop Carlo Borromeo of Milan, who would be canonized in 1610.)
When Borromini arrived in Milan, the city appeared to be one large building site. In addition to the continuing construction on the Duomo, the Basilica of San Lorenzo Maggiore, an early Christian church, was being rebuilt, after having collapsed in 1573. Called the Pantheon of Northern Italy, San Lorenzo was, at the time of its construction in the fourth century A.D., the largest centrally planned building in Europe. Built on an octagonal plan, the church drew inspiration from several architectural styles, from Byzantine to Romanesque, and it had an ambulatory, or arcade, that surrounded the church’s central space. The rebuilding of the octagon-shaped church was given to the architect Martino Bassi, and his interior arrangement of the church shows a subtle architectural ballet: Four columns are arranged as shallow concavities on each side of the main sides, while flatter but nonetheless slightly concave diagonal walls connect them. The effect is of a restrained but distinct undulation to the central space, and it calls to mind Borromini’s first and perhaps greatest commission, the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome.
Construction on San Lorenzo proceeded until 1589, when Bassi’s designs were publicly criticized by Monsignor Guido Mazenta, the prefetto della fabbrica who oversaw the church’s rebuilding, and Tolomeo Rinaldi, a rival architect. They argued that Bassi was turning the sturdy church into a Gothic building, making it too delicate and too unconventional.
It was a characteristic criticism for a conservative architect to level against a building and an architect who wanted to break with tradition. Yet Bassi used a clever tactic to defend himself. To justify his ideas, he called upon the rules of nature, “maestra di tutte le cose,” the mistress of all things, which classical architecture used as its foundation. Nature, Bassi argued, assembles “structures that are durable even though they seem to stand on nothing, like the branches on a tree or the nose on a face.”
Bassi’s persuasiveness eventually won the day, and during the era that Borromini was in Milan, San Lorenzo was rebuilt to his designs. While it was being completed, Borromini attended the school for children of the master stonemasons affiliated with the Duomo. While there, he most certainly heard the endless debates that swirled around concerning San Lorenzo and the discussions that dissected two architectural traditions: the Lombard, which was influenced by the Northern Gothic; and the Roman, which reached back to ancient Rome. These differing cultures and customs, these two strands of artistic DNA, combined in Borromini.
Before he became an architect, Borromini was a decorative sculptor, an intagliatore. It was Biffi who trained Borromini, and it was a skill the young man used to support himself when, in 1619, without telling his parents, he left Milan using money he had collected on a debt owed to his father and traveled south with friends to Rome.
Filippo Baldinucci, in his account of Borromini’s life, which he wrote late in the seventeenth century, doesn’t explain what prompted the young Lombard to travel south except to note that by age sixteen Borromini “was already so enamored not only of that trade [stone carving and masonry] but of everything having to do with design and drawing, that, seized by the desire to see and study the stupendous antiquities of Rome, he resolved to go there. Thus, together with some other young men of his own age, and perhaps also of his profession, he undertook the trip at that time, without, however, saying a word to his parents. Rather—if indeed what has been recounted to us by someone in his confidence is true—he went and found a man, in the same city of Milan, who owed his father a certain sum of money, due in fixed payments, and in his [father’s] name received the payment in full up to that date, and with this allotment he departed.”
The young man stayed in Rome with Leone Garovo, a relative of his mother’s who lived on the Vicolo dell’ Angello (Nolli 542) between the Ponte Sant’Angelo and San Giovanni dei Fiorentini. This proved lucky for Borromini. Garovo’s father-in-law was Carlo Maderno, then one of the most prominent artists and architects in Rome and since 1612 the architect of St. Peter’s. It was inevitable that the young Borromini would come to the attention of the maestro.
Borromini began his career in Rome working for Maderno at St. Peter’s as a decorative sculptor. During his early years at the basilica, Borromini carved coats of arms, putti (young angels), and balustrades for various spots in the colossal basilica. After a while, Maderno began to allow his young relative to try his hand at designing some of the myriad details that fell under Maderno’s supervision as architect of St. Peter’s. By the time Maderno died in 1629, Borromini was one of the ablest draftsmen in Rome, having worked on the Porta Santa, the Holy Door, which is opened only at the command of the pope (usually once every twenty-five years), several angels around the doors at St. Peter’s—“spiritosi e vivaci”—and the oval base for Michelangelo’s Pietà. Maderno also allowed Borromini to design some of the wrought iron that decorates St. Peter’s and to come up with designs for projects at other churches the master was working on concurrent with St. Peter’s, including San Andrea della Valle on the Piazza Vidoni, at which Maderno let Borromini design the lantern for its dome, the second largest in Rome after St. Peter’s.
Maderno’s guidance was both benevolent and instructive, and under such supervision, Borromini thrived. As Maderno aged and his hands grew crippled with gout, the older man relied increasingly on Borromini’s emerging skills as a draftsman and on his imaginative suggestions. His respect for Borromini’s abilities grew so deep that he put the young stonecutter in charge of overseeing all of the designs and planning that came from Maderno’s office. (Some of the designs for details of St. Peter’s are in Borromini’s hand.)
By virtue of his talent and hard work, Borromini had become, in the few short years following his hasty flight from Milan, Maderno’s favored assistant.
Still, after Maderno’s death, it was a surprise to no one but Borromini that he was overlooked by the pope for the post prized above all others, that of architetto della fabbrica di San Pietro. Borromini was certain to have felt cheated and convinced that he deserved the position. He had worked so long and so well for Maderno, and only he knew the details of St. Peter’s, its possibilities and its limitations. Such an important post should not be given to an upstart sculptor whose knowledge of architecture was negligible. It should go to a man who knew both architecture and engineering. Such a plum should not be given to the Neapolitan Bernini.
But it was.
Yet to the surprise of many, Borromini was persuaded to join Bernini’s workshop, working under his contemporary as his assistant. The reasons they joined forces, like the men themselves, were mysterious and complicated, and the partnership was destined to fail. One thing is certain: It’s likely that Borromini didn’t consult Giuliano Finelli before accepting the job.