THE EARLY DAYS OF BERNINI’S AND BORROMINI’S association were dominated not by what they thought of each other but by the forces that threw them together in the first place. Those were nothing less than the ambitions of one pope and his vision for two of Rome’s monumental buildings, St. Peter’s Basilica and the Palazzo Barberini.
For more than two centuries, the hulking form of the new St. Peter’s grew stone by stone. As it did, it loomed over Rome like a Gulliver of marble, pinned to the ground by miles of scaffolding and ropes, worried over by hundreds of laborers who struggled to create a suitable temple to the Almighty.
Construction on the new St. Peter’s had begun almost a century before Bernini and Borromini were born, in 1506, and work continued on it for the next 150 years. It commanded the attention of a dozen popes and a parade of talented architects, painters, and sculptors from all over Italy. Artists of the caliber of Bramante, Raphael, and Michelangelo all had a hand in the church that stands on the spot Peter is said to have been buried around A.D. 64, though the historical records are irritatingly inexact on this detail.
St. Peter’s is a church of superlatives. It is more than 186 meters (610 feet) long and 58 meters (190 feet) wide across the aisles and nave. Its dome is 136 meters (446 feet) from its base to the top of the cross, and arranged under it throughout the church are 44 altars, 778 columns, 395 statues, and 135 mosaic panels. While it seems to have dominated Rome forever, as everlasting as the life in heaven it promises the faithful, St. Peter’s is, by the standards of the Roman church, relatively new, being only five hundred years old—a young home for a religion founded two millennia ago. And it is not the first church to occupy the site. The original was a T-shaped building begun around A.D. 315 by Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor, at the request of Pope Sylvester I.
The legend or miracle surrounding the first building’s genesis begins with the vision Constantine saw on his way to battle against his rival Maxentius. As he rode toward what became known as the Battle of Milvian Bridge, Constantine saw a cross in the sky with the words in hoc signo vinces above it: under this sign you shall conquer. Constantine triumphed in battle, and he converted to the upstart faith of Christianity. In thanksgiving, he founded a basilica over the tomb of Saint Peter.
Despite the imperial imprimatur, the site for St. Peter’s was hardly the most desirable in Rome, at least by the standards of the time. The basilica was built on the Ager Vaticanus, the marshy plain between the Tiber and the Vatican hill across the river and northwest from the city proper. The area was meagerly settled, with a few minor wharves along its riverside and small kilns and modest farms inland. It was a less than promising region for development because the mercurial Tiber often overran its banks.
At the time of the church’s construction this was suburban Rome, insignificant and inauspicious, though the wealthy owned a handful of houses and gardens that lent the neighborhood a certain low-key cachet. Agrippina, the mother of the legendarily debauched emperor Caligula, had built a villa and garden nearby, and the whole countryside was traversed by roads lined with an impressive string of tombs. This area was already accustomed to death because its chief attraction during the pagan days of Imperial Rome was the Circus of Caligula and Nero, the nearly oval-shaped stadium south of the current St. Peter’s where countless Christians were killed—crucified and burned for the enjoyment of those Romans amused by such spectacle.
These bloodthirsty diversions demanded brisk, efficient removal of the bodies and a convenient place to bury them—the ancient Romans were nothing if not well organized—and it was not long before a necropolis, or burial place, was established north of the circus. It was there, the legends tell, that the body of Peter, the simple fisherman called by Jesus to spread the word of God, was brought to a tomb west of the great round, squat mausoleum of Hadrian (now the Castel Sant’Angelo), after having been crucified near what is now the church of San Pietro in Montorio.
Soon after Peter’s burial, the faithful and the curious began to visit the site to pay homage to the Prince of the Apostles. Nearly two centuries after Peter’s death, after he formally recognized the religion in A.D. 313 with the Edict of Milan, the now-Christian emperor Constantine directed that a church be erected over Peter’s tomb and that a road be laid from Rome to it via the Pons Aelius, the Roman bridge that spanned the Tiber (which eventually was replaced by the Ponte Sant’Angelo).
The original basilica was a typical early Christian church, and at 118 meters long and 64 meters wide (about 400 feet long and 200 feet wide), it was roughly half the size of the current church. A tall, rectangular central nave that looked much like those of other Roman public buildings was lined on both of its sides by two lower-ceilinged aisles, which were separated by marble columns, twenty-two in each row, connected by stone arches. Peter’s tomb was placed in the center of the choir at the far end of the church, just beyond the altar, so that the faithful could see it. The church was decorated with impressively elaborate mosaics and frescoes, and it was lighted by nearly a hundred oil lamps; in the eighth century, Pope Gregory II had several dozen olive yards planted nearby to keep the Vatican supplied.
The church faced east, and outside its entrance was a broad stone staircase that led from the road to a square arcaded courtyard. Near the courtyard’s center, under an elaborate baldachino, or canopy, stood an immense bronze pinecone, the Pigna. Originally the Pigna had been a fountain in the Campus Martius near the Pantheon, and was probably moved to the atrium outside the old St. Peter’s in the eighth century. (It now holds pride of place in an enormous three-story niche at the Belvedere Courtyard at the Vatican Museums.) Beyond the Pigna, closer to the main door of the church, was a fountain, which acted as a kind of spiritual barricade: No unbaptized person—that is, no non-Christian—was allowed beyond it. It marked the line between the secular and sacred worlds.
Such rules of separation in the early church were not uncommon. Indeed, for the first fourteen hundred years that the Catholic Church existed, clear distinctions remained between the church of San Giovanni in Laterano, the official seat of the pope as the bishop of Rome, and the basilica of St. Peter. Where San Giovanni was the pope’s official residence and church, St. Peter’s was its ceremonial center. This distinction was maintained throughout the Middle Ages, notes Jonathan Boardman, the author and Anglican chaplain of All Saints Church in Rome, “with St. Peter’s preserving its close connection with royalty and fostering the concept of Christian kingship. Thus it was on the steps of St. Peter’s, not at the Lateran, that Charlemagne was proclaimed Holy Roman Emperor” on Christmas Day A.D. 800. St. Peter’s, Boardman writes, “was primarily an imperial shrine under papal protection.”
Over the years, as Peter’s tomb and the church that memorialized it attracted a growing number of visitors, additional houses and hospices—early inns—were built along the road from Rome to lodge and feed them, including the Scholae Francorum, Frisonorum, Saxonum, and Langobardorum. Monasteries also began to settle in the area. Charlemagne himself had an imperial palace built during his second visit to Rome in 781, almost twenty years before he was crowned emperor.
Even though the papacy’s spiritual home remained on the other side of the Tiber at the Lateran and the land around St. Peter’s was discouragingly boggy—with underground springs that a millennium later would make the area the cause of a provocative and public clash between Bernini and Borromini—the papacy found it increasingly difficult to ignore the growing numbers of pilgrims who made their way to Peter’s shrine. Constantine’s basilica of St. Peter’s grew in splendor and repute, with its impressive mosaics, precious metalwork, and other art treasures making it a shrine nearly equal to Rome’s other patriarchal basilicas. It had, in short, become a tourist attraction.
Pope Symmachus (498–514) was the first pontiff to build a residence at the Vatican, having been forced to abandon the Lateran Palace during the barely remembered Laurentian Schism in 501–506. He began the trend of adding papal accommodations around St. Peter’s, thus ensuring the eventual and perhaps inevitable move from San Giovanni to St. Peter’s. By the middle of the fifteenth century, the Vatican became the pope’s principal residence.
Though the pope’s residence changed, St. Peter’s did not—at least not for its first thousand years. As with much in the Catholic Church, it took a crisis, the Avignon Exile, to bring about action.
During the fourteenth century, the kings of France exerted considerable influence on papal and church affairs, so much so that in March 1309 the papacy moved from Rome to Avignon. When the popes finally returned to Rome almost seventy years later in 1377, St. Peter’s had fallen into great decline. It wasn’t until after the Western Schism (1378–1417) had been resolved, that Pope Nicholas V (1447–1455) determined that St. Peter’s was unsalvageable and had to be rebuilt. In 1451 he selected the architect Bernardo Rossellino to draw up plans for a new choir for St. Peter’s, which was to be constructed beyond the western wall of the church as it then existed. Nicholas clearly had plans to enlarge the church, not just rebuild it. But when he died in 1455, and with the Turks advancing west, new priorities took hold and the new choir was suspended—though the choir walls were already 1.5 meters (about 5 feet) high. Not until the early sixteenth century, when it became imperative that something be done before the church collapsed, did a new pope focus attention on the problem.
In 1505 Pope Julius II, one of the most influential popes of the Renaissance, made the daring—and controversial—decision to scrap the old St. Peter’s completely and build a brand-new basilica. The reasons were as much pragmatic as spiritual. In addition to the church being unsalvageable in its present condition, the artist and historian Giorgio Vasari noted that Julius—the former Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, a man not known for his modesty—wanted a St. Peter’s that could house the massive and magnificent tomb that Michelangelo, the greatest sculptor of his age, was carving for him. The pope commissioned Donato Bramante, a painter-turned-architect who was one of the period’s most gifted artists, to draw up plans for it.
Bramante was the man for the task. A talented architect and engineer who was sympathetic to his time’s humanistic leanings and the renewed interest in classical culture, he inserted illusionistic features more typical of painting and stagecraft into his architecture. For the new St. Peter’s, Bramante said, he wanted “to perch the Pantheon on top of Constantine’s basilica.” It was a radical idea to alter the tradition-bound longitudinal church of the old St. Peter’s so drastically. No doubt he was inspired by Leon Battista Alberti’s seminal treatise, On the Art of Building, published in 1452, which argued that the layout of a church should symbolize “the heavenly Jerusalem” and be designed according to rational mathematical rules and geometric forms. Following such principles, Bramante selected as the central form for St. Peter’s a Greek cross, a square X shape composed of four wide aisles, each beginning as a semicircle (though rectangular on the church’s exterior), all leading toward a huge cylindrical space at the center of the church that would be crowned by a dramatic central dome. Four smaller but still impressive chapels, also planned as Greek crosses, were to be placed in each corner of the church and covered by lower domes; tall towers would be built at each corner of the immense, cubelike edifice. With its campanili and assortment of domes, the church’s plan had an exotic, almost Byzantine look to it: a Hagia Sophia for the Western church.
Bramante’s plan on paper looks like a piece of finely stitched needlework, with the four monumental central piers anchoring the delicate-looking threads of columns that connected the main church to its chapels. It was an inventive blend of bulk and delicacy, darkness and shadow, and it represented a new way of thinking. The Renaissance had been invited into the Vatican.
Bramante imbued his design with symbolism that he borrowed from the ancients and their traditions. The entire building represented the world, the four broad arms the four compass points and the towering dome the human reach for heaven. It was an apt metaphor for a Renaissance church, combining as it did the purity of reason, the beauty of geometry, and the mystery of faith.
Work on the new church began in 1506—the same year that another long-standing Vatican institution, the Swiss Guard, was founded—with a special ceremony on April 18 that found Julius himself laying the foundation stone for the first pylon, the northwest cornerstone of the central pier that housed the relics of Saint Helena. (The foundations for the other three pylons were laid the next year.) To oversee its building, Julius created the office of the Fabbrica di San Pietro, and in 1523 Clement VII selected a committee of sixty men to the Congregazione della Reverenda Fabbrica to oversee the church’s construction and administration.
Even as Julius was solemnly setting the first stone into the ground, there were those who felt that the Constantinian-era basilica should have been preserved as a physical connection to the early Christian church. Others objected to what they saw as Bramante’s cavalier dismantling of parts of the old St. Peter’s that they thought could have been—and should have been—incorporated into the new building. Because of his seeming lack of concern for the old St. Peter’s, Bramante earned the nickname of Bramante Ruinante—Bramante the Destroyer—an epithet that clung to him for the rest of his life.
By the time Bramante died in 1514, a year after Julius, the four central piers and the arches between them to support the dome had been completed. But it was several years before work on St. Peter’s proceeded much beyond that. Future popes had their own ideas for how the new church should look, and they employed other architects whose tastes and visions differed from Bramante’s. Over the next four decades, various artists and popes joined in on what seemed an interminable debate about the new St. Peter’s. In fact, Rome became so used to the unfinished—and perhaps to some unfinishable—church that Raphael, even during Julius’s pontificate, used the domeless center of St. Peter’s as the background for his magnificent fresco School of Athens, which he painted in 1510–11 for one of the pope’s rooms at the Vatican.
With the church’s four central piers in position, like unchanging sentries of stone, the church’s location was determined. But what form would the completed church take? Would it have a centralized plan, like a Greek cross, as Bramante had planned? Or would it be a longitudinal one, like a Latin cross, as Constantine’s original church had been?
Most Renaissance architects favored a central plan. It fit the times, blending in one supple design the logic of the ancients with the innate theatricality of the Mass and other papal celebrations. It also offered a new—and to some a welcome—antidote to the Gothic tradition, which had held sway in northern and western Europe for two centuries. Though the Gothic’s influence had never been felt significantly in Rome, its tendrils had reached into Milan: The Gothic-tinged Duomo that was being built sparked disdain in Rome. Gothic architecture was based on geometry and mathematics, not on the proportions of man, as classical architecture was and which Renaissance architects preferred.
Still, the central plan for St. Peter’s was not a unanimous choice. Other architects favored a longitudinal plan, believing that the new church should more closely approximate the old St. Peter’s and that a longer church would serve as a dramatic setting for processions. Over the next fifty years, such favored papal artists as Raphael (in 1514) and Baldassare Peruzzi (in 1520) provided designs. Raphael submitted to Pope Leo X a design that was in the shape of a Latin cross; after Raphael’s death in 1520, Peruzzi took over and reverted to the Greek cross. In 1538, under Pope Paul III, Antonio Sangallo the Younger submitted another version of the Latin-cross plan, even going so far as to construct an enormous wooden model of his design (736 centimeters [24 feet] long, 602 centimeters [19.5 feet] wide, and 468 centimeters [15 feet] high), which still exists in the Vatican. But when Sangallo died in 1546, Paul appointed the aged Michelangelo, the unrivaled maestro of an exceptional artistic age, to finish the church.
In his early seventies and infirm, Michelangelo, who considered himself first a sculptor, returned to papal service solely to complete St. Peter’s. Like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, it was an assignment worthy of a genius, but it was a commission for which Michelangelo would accept no payment.
Michelangelo returned to Bramante’s design, adopting once again the Greek cross, but he simplified his predecessor’s layout, creating a more organic flow that tied the corner chapels more closely to the larger church. He designed a façade based on the Pantheon, the most complete ancient structure in Rome, using two rows of massive columns, and he reimagined the dome. As a Florentine, Michelangelo knew the dramatic silhouette of the church of Santa Maria del Fiore—Brunelleschi’s dome—and understood what a profound impact such a silhouette can have on a city’s skyline. To Michelangelo, previous proposals for the dome on St. Peter’s weren’t grand or ambitious enough. So he razed what had been built of the dome and revised it. His vision was taller, stronger, more vigorous, reaching toward heaven with a confidence and a fervor that Bramante’s proposed dome did not have: Michelangelo seemed to believe his work could touch God, and that it was man’s right to try. He also strengthened the church’s central piers and its outer walls so that they could carry the building’s massive weight, and he reduced the inner walls to allow in more light, giving the immense interior a lighter feel and a greater sense of space.
By the time of Michelangelo’s death in 1564 a few weeks before his eighty-ninth birthday, only the dome’s drum had been completed. But such was Michelangelo’s reputation that the architects who finished the dome—first Pirro Ligorio, then Jacopo Barozzi, known as il Vignola, and Giacomo della Porta, assisted by Domenico Fontana—completed it in large part as Michelangelo had envisioned it (though with a steeper profile), making it as personal and as passionate a piece of sculpture as he ever devised. (Though the dome was considered finished in 1590, it wasn’t until December 12, 1614, that its last stone was put into place, prompting church bells to be rung around the city and cannons to be fired in celebratory salute from Castel Sant’Angelo.)
Michelangelo’s profoundly personal artistic vision had once provoked critics to call him l’inventore delle porcherie, an inventor of obscenities, but Giorgio Vasari’s observation of another of Michelangelo’s architectural commissions, the Medici family chapel at San Lorenzo in Florence (which Vasari had worked on as a pupil of Michelangelo’s, beginning in 1525), holds true of St. Peter’s: “He made it very different from the work regulated by measure, order, and rule, which other men did according to normal usage and following Vitruvius and the antiquities, to which he would not conform…. Therefore the craftsmen owed him an infinite and everlasting obligation, because he broke the bonds and chains of usage they had always followed.” Even more important to future artists like Bernini and Borromini, Michelangelo demonstrated a personal approach to architecture, prompting Vasari to write that “he departed so much from the common use of others, that everyone was amazed.”
But Michelangelo did not have his way over all aspects of the new St. Peter’s. His revised Greek-cross plan languished after his death, and it was nearly half a century before the form of the basilica was actually decided. By then Paul V, the former Cardinal Camillo Borghese, was pope.
When Paul was elected pontiff in 1605, the dome had been considered complete for a dozen years. Much of the old St. Peter’s was still standing beneath it, though barely, including the now hopelessly out-of-fashion atrium at the front of the church. When a portion of the old church actually fell during a service on September 17, 1605, the original basilica literally crumbling before the eyes of the church fathers, the Congregazione della Reverenda Fabbrica declared that the remainder of the old church should be knocked down. It had become a public—and papal—safety hazard.
Paul V showed little public regret at demolishing what remained of the old St. Peter’s, but he exhibited considerable sympathy for the church’s contents. He directed the cardinals to oversee the removal and preservation of the basilica’s considerable number of ancient relics, tombs, and works of art. A venerated medieval wooden crucifix and a picture of the Madonna painted on one of the columns of the old basilica (which was purported to work miracles) were taken from the old St. Peter’s and stored until they could be returned. And the human remains of the pontiffs and saints interred in the church over the centuries were moved with considerable pomp. New burial places were found for Saint Gregory the Great, Saint Petronilla, Saint Boniface IV, and Saint Leo the Great.
This was a relatively swift process, for several months before, in October 1605, the demolition of the nave and the tearing down of Michelangelo’s still incomplete façade had begun, under the supervision of Carlo Maderno, Paul V’s handpicked successor to Giacomo della Porta. Though not as famous as some of the men who held the post, Maderno nevertheless filled the position of architect of St. Peter’s ably. He was the last of the great Renaissance artist-engineers. Though talented in his own right—he designed the beautiful and carefully proportioned façade of Santa Susanna—he didn’t have the peerless originality of a Michelangelo, the sculptural virtuosity of a Bernini, or the passionate inventiveness of a Borromini. But he was an excellent choice to undertake the herculean task of completing St. Peter’s because his talents tended toward the pragmatic rather than the high-minded. He was a practical artist who worked to satisfy the pope while adhering as carefully as he could to Michelangelo’s concept. He had the commendable capacity to combine the practical with the transcendent.
In many ways, Maderno’s career was similar to both Borromini’s and Bernini’s. All three of them began their professional lives by transforming stone into their own notions of beauty. Like Borromini, Maderno was born in the north—in 1556 at Capolago, a small Lombard village along the banks of the Lago di Lugano near Bissone. He was trained as an artisan in the local specialties of stonecutter and stuccoist—a stuccatore. Like Borromini, Maderno traveled south to Rome, and by 1576 he was working for his uncle, Domenico Fontana, one of the favored architects of Pope Sixtus V. Almost thirty years later, in 1603, Maderno was appointed architect of St. Peter’s by Paul V.
Although Maderno was one of his era’s preeminent artists, relatively few portraits of him have survived. But if the popular view of him is accurate, including a likeness that appeared on a five-centime Swiss stamp in the 1950s, he was handsome, with dark, appraising eyes framed by well-formed eyebrows, well-tended hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, and a clipped triangular beard that lent his face a somewhat puritanical appearance. He looked remarkably like Anthony Van Dyck’s portraits of Charles I of England. But where Charles exhibited a certain superciliousness—an arrogance born of a blindness to his own limitations—Maderno appeared poised, direct, vigorous. He was a man who took himself seriously and expected others to as well.
Maderno became architect of St. Peter’s at one of the most decisive points in its evolution: Finally, after a century, the church’s final form would be, must be, decided. When della Porta died in 1603, it fell to Maderno to implement that decision.
After considerable debate among the Congregazione, the pope and cardinals determined that a Latin cross would best suit the needs of the church. Their reasoning was logical, almost businesslike. The church needed a nave large enough to accommodate all of the faithful who crowded church services and ceremonies. They also grasped the symbolism that a Latin-cross church would have, which the Council of Trent had recommended as the proper layout for new churches. (In 1595 the Papal Master of Ceremonies Paolo Mucanzio complained that the Greek-cross plan disregarded the ceremonial and sacramental rituals that were a part of the church, and argued for altering it because, if built, the Greek-cross church would not be constructed “according to ecclesiastical rule.”) The pope and the Congregazione also wanted a benediction loggia, which the pope could use to bestow blessings on large crowds gathered in front of the church. It was a design detail some believed was inconveniently absent from Michelangelo’s Greek-cross plan.
Those who continued to uphold the tastes of the Renaissance, including Cardinal Barberini and the architects Paolo Maggi and Fausto Rughesi, lobbied for Michelangelo’s plan. Rughesi argued: “One sees that in the present building of Saint Peter’s Michelangelo certainly turned his eye to the perpetual and the beautiful, but much more to magnificence, not concerning himself with convenience, since he knew that magnificence must be the principal goal of the temple building, being as it is the house of God and the place where men congregate to render Him glory.”
In the end, convenience won.
After a century, Michelangelo’s vision of a centralized domed church, a Pantheon for the faithful, was cast aside, superseded by the more earthbound needs of a revitalized church. But the idea of a Greek cross would not be completely forgotten—nor could it be ignored. For by the time the Congregazione had decided definitively on a nave, the new St. Peter’s had progressed too far to change course; its western end and dome were nearly complete. The only logical way to turn the Greek cross into a Latin one was to lengthen the church at its eastern extremity, to add six more chapels (three on each side) beyond where Michelangelo had determined the church should end.
A number of architects were called upon to offer their ideas for how the church should be added onto, among them Maderno, Flaminio Ponzio, Domenico Fontana, Girolamo Rainaldi, Niccolò Braconio, Orazio Torriani, Giovanni Antonio Dosio, and the Florentine painter Lodovico Cigoli. In the end, Maderno’s suggestions were adopted, and in the spring of 1608 his work began by tearing down Michelangelo’s façade.
In his designs for St. Peter’s, Maderno understood, perhaps better than anyone else in Rome, that with a Latin-cross plan, St. Peter’s would become the end of a procession. As the pilgrim emerged from the tangled, narrow streets of the Borgo, the neighborhood around St. Peter’s, he would suddenly find himself in front of the new church. From there, his eye, and perhaps his soul, would be drawn forward, past the ancient Egyptian obelisk in the middle of the piazza (which had been moved from another site nearby and reerected by Fontana), up a shallow flight of stairs to a portico in front of a series of gigantic columns of white marble, through one of its five doors—the same number as in the original St. Peter’s—and along the sweeping nave to the dramatic altar, which stands under Michelangelo’s immense, irresistible dome and over the mortal remains of Saint Peter. It was the final step in a pilgrimage for the faithful, a deliverance from sin into the embracing arms of a forgiving God. When the pope, the leader of God’s church on earth, says Mass, he is literally surrounded by the words that proclaim the reason for his church’s existence: Tu Es Petrus et Super Hanc Petram Aedificabo Ecclesiam Meam et Tibi Dabo Claves Regni Caelorum (You Are Peter and Upon This Rock I Will Build My Church and I Will Give You the Keys to the Kingdom of Heaven).
Maderno and his workmen faced huge obstacles in extending the church, one of which was dealing with the underground springs that meandered through the sandy soil, making the ground unstable. Apparently the pope and his courtiers expected St. Peter’s to stand on faith alone.
Work on the façade and the nave proceeded quickly. At one point, 866 laborers were employed on the basilica, some of them working at night by torchlight. Unlike Michelangelo, Maderno made room in his design for a benediction logo, designing a façade that was both dramatic and restrained.
But not perfect. Because the church was lengthened and the façade and nave are so tall, the new St. Peter’s is too tall for anyone standing right in front of the church to see the dome. Le Corbusier, the French modernist architect, complained that Maderno had ruined Michelangelo’s design. St. Peter’s, he wrote, should “have risen as a single mass, unique and entire. The eye would have taken it in as one thing…. The rest fell into barbarian hands; all was spoilt. Mankind lost one of the highest works of human intelligence.” The façade, he maintained, “is beautiful in itself, but bears no relation to the dome. The real aim of the building was the dome: it has been hidden!”
Despite such criticism, the exterior is majestic. But as the major work on the exterior reached completion, attention inevitably turned to the interior, which deserved to be equally impressive. But first it had to be decided who would determine that.
After a brief two-year reign Gregory XV, who had succeeded Paul V in 1621, died. On August 6, 1623, in the thick of a sweltering and malaria-ridden Roman summer and after more than two weeks of one of the more rancorous conclaves in papal history, Cardinal Maffeo Barberini received the votes of fifty of the fifty-five cardinals who had convened in the Sistine Chapel and was elected pope. To the surprise of many, Barberini chose not a name that had already been associated with the Barberini family, but Urban, telling intimates later that he wanted to follow the lead of Urban II (1088–99), a French pope who had rallied Christianity against the Turkish conquest of the Holy Land six centuries before.
The new pontiff wanted to restore the Roman church, which had stumbled badly a century before as the Reformation had torn at the Catholic Church and the political map of Europe. As a cardinal who had worked for the papacy for nearly two decades, Urban understood what a pope was capable of, both as a politician and as a spiritual leader. He had a reputation as a capable scholar (having been educated by the Jesuits), a shrewd diplomat, and an occasional poet (a book of his poems, Maphei Cardinalis Barberini poemata, was first published in 1620 and was reissued in 1631 with a title page designed by his friend Gianlorenzo Bernini).
When he became pope, he embraced a new role, that of crusader. Urban VIII had recovered from the “malarial fever” he had succumbed to after his election, and he believed he would be a pope who proved his worth to God and to his followers through his public accomplishments. One place he demonstrated this was at St. Peter’s. And one of the first artists Urban turned to was Bernini.
Domenico writes that on the day that Urban was elected pope, he called the twenty-four-year-old Bernini into his presence and told him, “It is your great fortune, Cavalier, to see Cardinal Maffeo Barberini Pope, but our fortune is far greater in that Cavalier Bernini lives during our pontificate.”
The story may be apocryphal—it certainly sounds like artistic hyperbole—but even before he became pope, Cardinal Barberini told Bernini, “Whoever becomes pope will find he must necessarily love you if he does not want to do an injustice to you, to himself, and to whoever professes love of the arts.” There is no question that Bernini could visit the pope virtually at will. According to Domenico, Bernini was allowed unlimited access to the pope. Howard Hibbard, in his biography of Bernini, wrote that Urban “liked to talk to Bernini during the dinner hour until he was overcome with sleep; then it was Bernini’s task to adjust the window blinds and leave.”
Soon after becoming pope, Urban “informed Bernini that it was his wish that he dedicate a large part of his time to the study of architecture and painting so that he could unite with distinction these disciplines to his other virtues,” Filippo Baldinucci wrote. It was a request that revealed an enormous amount of confidence in the young sculptor, who until that moment had shown no particular inclination toward either discipline. But that did not concern Urban.
By 1623, when Urban became pope, Bernini had grown from the gifted youngster into a handsome, poised man: outgoing, diplomatic, and tactful; bright, intelligent, and witty—a consummate, if occasionally headstrong, artist and papal courtier. Urban certainly preferred Bernini to Maderno, who was still the official architect of St. Peter’s. The pope had never been an enthusiastic devotee of Maderno’s work: During his years as a member of the Congregazione, Urban made no secret that he preferred Michelangelo’s Greek-cross plan to Maderno’s (and Pope Paul’s) able if cautious solution for lengthening the church, and the cardinal had taken no pains to hide his disdain for Maderno’s execution. So strong was his opposition to Paul V’s decision to transform St. Peter’s into a Latin-cross church that his views found their way into a dialogue that appeared in a biography of Urban VIII written by a Monsignor Herrera in which the then cardinal countered Pope Paul’s arguments for laying aside Michelangelo’s design:
Pope Paul objected that Michelangelo had not made a sacristy. He [the cardinal] responded that in the space occupied by two large spiral staircases it was possible to make two sacristies, leaving still two other spiral staircases of the four there, and that near the tribune there were two ample rooms with others above that could likewise serve this purpose…. Pope Paul said that furthermore in Michelangelo’s design there was no choir for the canons. The cardinal responded that the choir could be put below, around the bodies of the apostles, where the confessio is today, giving it light from different sides…. Pope Paul also added that the bell tower was lacking. The cardinal replied that there were four most beautiful ones, that is, the four small domes that surround the great one. Finally, the pope said that it was unfitting that any part of the earlier church should remain visible as would be the case with Michelangelo’s design. He [the cardinal] responded that not even this followed, because Michelangelo had planned a projecting portico or ante-temple, as is seen today at the church of the Rotonda [the Pantheon], which was to hide the old church….[The cardinal]said to Pope Paul that another pope would demolish Maderno’s new design to restore that of Michelangelo. Paul V responded that he would make such a work around it that no pope would think of demolishing it.
Despite his public scorn for Maderno’s work, Urban retained the aging master builder as the chief architect of St. Peter’s. Perhaps the pope didn’t want to dismiss someone who had such a wide knowledge of the building and its construction. He even engaged Maderno to transform the Palazzo Sforza, a palace near the Quattro Fontane that the Barberini family had purchased, into a palace worthy of the family of a pope. Urban also assigned his young protégé Bernini to work with Maderno and his talented young assistant, Francesco Borromini, on the basilica and the new Palazzo Barberini.
But the pope’s generosity wasn’t boundless. Urban told Maderno that he had selected Bernini as the artist to design a huge canopy to stand over the altar at the literal and spiritual center of St. Peter’s. For the ailing Maderno, this was a galling, even humiliating, blow. It was a commission that he had long aspired to. Giovanni Baglione quoted Borromini in 1642 as saying that Urban also told Maderno—so ill with kidney stones that he had to be carried around Rome—that “he would have to resign himself to see Bernini do this work.” It was a slight to Maderno that Borromini never forgot and probably never forgave.