MEASURED AGAINST THE SPAN OF THEIR careers, the time that Bernini and Borromini worked together at St. Peter’s was relatively short—only nine years, from 1624 to 1633. But for both men the experience could not have been more defining—or more abiding. For the rest of their lives, what went on during the design and construction of the enormous bronze Baldacchino—more than 28 meters (almost 92 feet) tall and weighing more than 63,000 kilograms (almost 70 tons)—influenced their careers and what the two thought of each other. It became the figurative backdrop for the almost operatic rivalry that wove through their lives, binding them together in ways neither could have predicted.
In its final form, the Baldacchino is the melding of two artists’ creativity and inventiveness, but it is more than that. It is the first great emblem of the Baroque, the beginning of a new kind of art—one that relied on emotion more than intellect, on drama more than logic, on the expression of passion more than the stability of reason. It became the commanding presence at St. Peter’s, and its profile transformed the central space of the church into a place of pilgrimage and worship. The Baldacchino does for the interior of St. Peter’s what Michelangelo’s dome does for the exterior: It proclaims the miracle that lies beneath it.
In 1682 Filippo Baldinucci declared that “what appears to the viewer is something completely new, something he never dreamed of seeing.” The French historian Victor-L. Tapié said that Bernini “turned something provisory and mobile into something stable, strong and gigantic, and finally united two qualities which might seem irreconcilable—lightness and hugeness—without impairing either.” Even Henry James, not a writer known for an abiding interest in Catholicism, was so struck by the Baldacchino during his several visits to St. Peter’s that he wrote in 1873: “There are days when the vast nave looks mysteriously vaster than on others and the gorgeous baldacchino a longer journey beyond the far-spreading tessellated plain of the pavement, and when the light has yet a quality which lets things loom their largest…. [Y]ou have only to stroll and stroll and gaze and gaze; to watch the glorious altar-canopy lift its bronze architecture, its colossal embroidered contortions, like a temple within a temple, and feel yourself, at the bottom of the abysmal shaft of the dome, dwindle to a crawling dot.” Not every American was overwhelmed by its splendor, however. One tourist in 1853 pronounced it a “huge uncouth structure.”
For Bernini, the Baldacchino was his first, and arguably his greatest, architectural triumph at St. Peter’s. But Borromini’s work on the Baldacchino, which was considerable, has been largely overlooked—glossed over or ignored by a combination of intent and laziness. While the Baldacchino is inevitably and rightly credited to Bernini, it cannot have come from just one mind, one imagination.
Even as a young man, Bernini didn’t shun the limelight. While it was said he never suffered from professional jealousy—as one critic put it, “he had no reason” to—he did little to make sure that credit for the Baldacchino was apportioned fairly. It was an oversight that rankled Borromini as much as it had Giuliano Finelli.
Indeed, Bernini’s work on the Baldacchino was nearly always collaborative: first with Maderno, from whom he inherited the commission and with whom he worked on at least one of the temporary structures; then with Borromini, who after Maderno’s death became an active collaborator in the structure’s design and casting. Both Maderno and Borromini were talented and capable, and at the time both were more skilled at the technical aspects of casting bronze than Bernini was. Yet popular history deems this Bernini’s Baldacchino.
This oversight is due in large part to the difficulty in determining precisely who is responsible for what parts of the Baldacchino. While Vatican records reveal a great deal about how this unique piece of architectural sculpture was designed, cast, built, and paid for, they are tight-lipped about the origins of its myriad details. This much is clear: Gianlorenzo Bernini was the pope’s chosen artist for the Baldacchino. Francesco Borromini was his deputy.
Borromini’s time at St. Peter’s wasn’t nearly as professionally profitable as Bernini’s. For a good deal of his time there, he was one of the thousands of Vatican laborers who toiled in the chaotic and dusty building yards surrounding the church, the carpenters and carvers and stonemasons and ironworkers who carried out the designs the great men planned. But while most of his fellow workmen were content with their lot, Borromini was not. He wanted more.
Though he was not a precociously talented sculptor who had caught the eye of the pope, Borromini nevertheless took advantage of the extraordinary opportunities that providence threw in his path. When he arrived in Rome, the man he turned to for help was his maternal uncle, Leone Garovo, a respected stone carver from Lombardy. Garovo took in Borromini, allowing him to live at his house, and hired him as his assistant at St. Peter’s.
Garovo’s father-in-law was Carlo Maderno.
It was Maderno’s task to complete St. Peter’s, and he needed as many skilled and trustworthy masons, carvers, stuccoists, and surveyors as he could find. A young kinsman vouched for by his son-in-law could be valuable.
Borromini worked closely with his uncle, but it wasn’t long until tragedy occurred: In 1620 Garovo fell from the scaffolding at St. Peter’s and died.
From such misfortune sometimes springs opportunity. Borromini bought Garovo’s tools and continued working at St. Peter’s. In 1621 he partnered with other stone carvers from Lombardy—marmorarii—to found a società di arte del marmo, per servizio di qualunque persona: a quasi cooperative of masons and carvers. The talented stone carver from the north was becoming an entrepreneur.
And in due course he became a valued assistant. Whether Maderno had heard of Borromini’s abilities, or perhaps because Garovo’s death brought home how tenuous life can be, when his son-in-law died, Maderno engaged Borromini to work for him. Over time, he grew to rely on Borromini both as a carver and, more important, as a draftsman, turning to him to create finished drawings of the maestro’s plans. Borromini became such a proficient draftsman, impressing Maderno with vivid, precise renderings of his designs (using Maderno’s preferred finish of a final, colorful wash), that eventually Maderno replaced Filippo Breccioli as his first assistant, putting Borromini in his place. (Breccioli was demoted to the less favored role of misure, or measurer.) Even today, the plans that Borromini produced for Maderno are full of nuance and subtlety, and make clear that the young artist was as exceptional on paper as he was in stone.
THAT THE BALDACCHINO is in St. Peter’s at all is due as much to serendipity as to design. By the rules of ecclesiastical architecture, it shouldn’t exist at all. In the original Constantinian basilica, the end of St. Peter’s is where the current main altar and tomb stand, and attention was called to it by a ciborium, a permanent domed structure that used columns to support a solid dome. A drawing from 1581 by Sebastian Werro now in the Bibliothèque Cantonal et Universitaire in Fribourg, Switzerland, indicates that the original ciborium at St. Peter’s was a square of four Doric columns that bore the weight of a tall dome embellished with thin, ridged ribs and topped by a narrow (possibly metal) Greek cross. On each of the square’s sides, at the base of the dome, four nearly semicircular screens, which come to a Gothic-like point at their apex and curve down on either side in a flourish, are decorated by delicate vinelike patterns of leaves. The effect is reminiscent of an eighteenth-century garden temple on an estate in the English countryside.
In 1594, when the wall that protected the old St. Peter’s from the recent construction was finally dismantled, a new, more prominent ciborium was needed. The old ciborium was replaced by a grouping of eight columns, their bases and capitals made of papier-mâché, and four pilasters, covered by a domelike canopy of wood and canvas. Though the exact design of the new ciborium has been lost, the goal was to give the altar more prominence in the church.
Pope Paul V also directed that a second ciborium be built at the end of the church, away from Saint Peter’s tomb. This one was probably similar to an elevation drawn later by Borromini. Eight tall, twisting columns—which, legend has it, had been brought to Rome by Constantine from the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem—were arranged in a square. The right angles of the square were cut, blunting the corners of the ciborium by short, angled sides that turned a square into an octagon. Reusing these columns was a skillful example of spolia, a kind of architectural recycling. Four impressive arches push through each long side of the square and are topped by carved pediments and an elaborate, elongated dome that looks similar (at least in Borromini’s elevation) to the dome of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini. Above the columns on the short sides of the octagon are set discrete oval openings. Extending straight out from both sides of the ciborium are screens of traditional columns.
Borromini was clearly struck by the details of this design. He even used some of the same motifs, particularly the blunted corners, in his own independent commissions later in his career.
By 1606 Pope Paul V took the bold step of disregarding church architectural tradition by replacing the ciborium with a distinctly different kind of covering, a baldachino. A baldachino is traditionally a cloth canopy, often of silk, that is either suspended from above or held aloft by people (or statues) holding staves at the four corners to support the canopy. It is often used to protect, or call attention to, a sacred relic or an important person in a procession. By its definition, a baldachino is flexible or movable. But the Baldacchino, as Paul wanted it built, was neither.
W. Chandler Kirwin, an art historian who has written extensively about the Baldacchino, describes this interim Baldacchino as “a wooden armature with a tasseled canopy, supported by four upright staves held by four stucco angels. The angels knelt on elevated bases, which were decorated with the coat of arms of Pope Paul V.” At nearly 11 meters (36 feet) high, it was taller than any ciborium had been before at St. Peter’s, which made sense: It was only after the dome was complete that its designers and builders, Maderno chief among them, knew how truly mammoth the space under the dome actually was. And even though the Baldacchino couldn’t be moved, the inclusion of the angels in the design gave the impression that it might—if God and the pope deemed it worthy.
Maderno probably designed the first Baldacchino, before Bernini came to St. Peter’s, and its size and profile helped to delineate the ciborium in the apse and the marker for Saint Peter’s tomb, which included the confessio, a double set of curved stairs that Maderno had designed that descends to an iron grille below and in front of the altar, which allows pilgrims to lower things to touch the saint’s tomb. This canopy was likely the one Bernini knew as a child, and as Baldinucci writes somewhat breathlessly:
It happened one day that he [Bernini] found himself in the company of Annibale Carraci and other masters in the basilica of St. Peter’s. They had finished their devotions and were leaving the church when that great master, turning toward the tribune, said, “Believe me, the day will come, no one knows when, that a prodigious genius will make two great monuments in the middle and at the end of this temple on a scale in keeping with the vastness of the building.” That was enough to set Bernini afire with desire to execute them himself and, not being able to restrain his inner impulse, he said in heartfelt words, “Oh, if only I could be the one.”
In 1622, during the brief papacy of Gregory XV (1621–23), a full-size though temporary model of the planned Baldacchino was built. Again as he built, Maderno modified some of the details and increased the height of the entire structure, making it only 2 meters (6.5 feet) shorter than the final version seen today. He also fluted the staves that support a tasseled canopy and decorated them with cherubs and what Kirwin calls “vegetation.” The four stucco angels now knelt rather than stood, as if they were holding steady the supporting pier of a tent no one but they could see. Maderno left the sculpting of these statues to Bernini, who thus appears first in the history of the Baldacchino as a sculptor.
The Baldacchino that Bernini is eventually credited with designing and building with Borromini’s help was actually the fifth structure over the main altar of the new St. Peter’s, and its design and construction, like everything else at the basilica, sparked its own debate and controversy.
Maderno was supposed to design the Baldacchino; in fact, on July 3, 1623, a month before Urban was elected, the Congregazione had approved a new type of baldachino, designed by Maderno, which used wooden columns, not staves, to support a cloth canopy. The minutes of the meeting record that “the four columns made for supporting the baldachin above the high altar are to be put in place to be gilded in accordance with the idea of the architect.”
But like everything else in St. Peter’s, the construction of this baldachino didn’t progress as expected. It, too, fell victim to circumstance and a change in regime. After Gregory XV’s death in 1623 and before Urban’s election, no work was done on the Baldacchino; in fact, it is unlikely that this structure was ever installed. And when a new pontiff sat on the Throne of Peter, with new ambitions and new ideas for the basilica, other proposals for what should stand above the main altar took center stage.
Urban was not a pope willing to be overlooked or overruled. A complicated man of enterprise and conviction, he could be hard, even ruthless: It was said that after he became pope he demanded that every bird in the garden outside his bedroom be killed because their chirping disturbed his sleep. Yet he believed that one of his duties as leader of the church was to improve the city of Rome, to embellish it for the greater glory of God. He understood that whatever form the final Baldacchino took, it must be a rousing symbol of the church, simultaneously poignant and dramatic, inspiring and breathtaking. He wanted it to draw the eye upward and the spirit toward the eternal. “From the day of Urban’s election ceremony, the actual spherical crossing of the new St. Peter’s became for him Catholicism’s sacred square, the interior piazza where he would erect an elaborate defense both of the tomb below and this office above, with its universal claim to spiritual authority,” Kirwin notes. On that stifling night in August, Urban sat under a temporary wooden canopy that had been built by Maderno at Paul V’s command and proclaimed a new sensibility, what Kirwin calls “a wise conjunction of the Academy and the court” where religion and art met as equals to honor God.
Urban VIII, according to his biographer Andrea Nicoletti, “wanted not only to emulate them [his predecessors] but with more marvelous ornaments and the most splendid memorials to augment more and more the majesty of that temple [which had] become for all occasions the most celebrated of Christianity; and especially to show his devotion toward the Apostles Peter and Paul, he applied his mind to ennoble the place where their bodies were conserved, which is called the Confessio, situated in the center of the basilica.”
Urban’s choice of Bernini to create such ornaments and memorials was shrewd. He was talented enough to be useful, undeveloped enough to be molded, ambitious enough to be adaptable. But as capable as Bernini was, the pope knew he had much to learn about the mechanics of art, particularly architecture. He needed to become an artist who had broader mechanical and technical experience than sculpture had given him so far. So less than two months after Urban assumed the papacy, the pope set about expanding Bernini’s expertise. On the first day of October 1623, Urban made Bernini soprastante, or overseer, of the Vatican foundry—a post for which the twenty-four-year-old sculptor had no qualification whatsoever. Six days later, the pope appointed Bernini superintendent of the Acqua Felice, one of the city’s main water supplies. Bernini suddenly found himself supervising two vital aspects of seventeenth-century Roman life. The young artist was being forced to learn how to be a competent administrator.
Bernini’s appointments undoubtedly raised eyebrows within the Vatican. But the pope had his reasons. He wanted Bernini to become an expert in bronze casting and how to administer a complicated bureaucracy. It wasn’t coincidence that the Congregazione debated again the disposition of the Baldacchino the day before Bernini’s appointment to the Acqua Felice. Urban attended the meeting, and it was decided that “the four columns made to hold up the baldachin in the middle of the church should be set in place so that if His Holiness had some better idea, it may be obeyed.”
Two months later, Urban had a better idea.
Just before Christmas 1623, another temporary baldachino, the last one built, was constructed over the altar, probably from another design by Maderno. To stand atop the tall pedestals at the baldachino’s base, which Maderno had fashioned of travertine and marble, Urban directed that Bernini sculpt four angels, which appeared to support the staves. By the next Easter, April 10, 1624, Bernini had completed—in stucco, a lighter, less permanent medium than his usual marble—four oversize angels, which were placed at each corner of the baldachino, looking as if they might suddenly come alive and follow the pope as he walked down the nave, holding the canopy above him.
Even though Maderno had designed this temporary altar covering, the sun was setting on his days as the first architect of Rome, just as it was dawning on Bernini’s. Though Maderno retained the post and title of architetto della fabbrica di San Pietro for the remainder of his life (he died in 1629), it was Bernini who held the pope’s confidence. It must have been a bitter mixture of regret and disappointment for Maderno to accept. There was no question that a seismic shift of taste was under way.
Yet Maderno—who in addition to gout suffered from painful kidney stones—still found it within him to be generous, even gracious, to the sculptor-turned-architect. He worked amicably with Bernini—at least there are no stories that tell of any enmity between the two. In fact, Kirwin notes that “Maderno no doubt took Bernini under his wing and oversaw his first commission inside the building, namely his participation in the decoration of the temporary baldachin,” which Maderno had designed.
Soon Bernini wouldn’t need Maderno’s help.
ON JUNE 7, 1624, the Congregazione della Reverenda Fabbrica di San Pietro announced a contest, what was called an “open competition,” to find the best design and architect for a permanent baldachino. The Congregazione declared “a proclamation in which it is made known that he who has intentions in architecture, inventions or the like to make the baldachino above the altar of the most holy Apostles in St. Peter’s, may make some models and take them to the next Congregazione, which will be held in fifteen days, at which they [the members] will give by voice their own opinion and advice.”
A little over two weeks to devise and prepare modelli (a word that at the time could mean both three-dimensional models or a set of drawings) for a structure that would stand above the most important tomb in Christendom seems rushed at best. Such haste after centuries of caution and debate fueled speculation that the pope had already selected an architect: Bernini, that “creature of the pope,” as one commentator called him.
Such suspicion seemed well founded, an aggrieved Borromini said later, when Urban told Maderno around this time that the elder architect “would have to resign himself to see Bernini do this work.”
On June 17, ten days after the contest’s announcement, Bernini’s name was mentioned in documents as the monument’s designer and regular payments were made to him that referred to his “work of metal that will be made for the altar of the Apostles.” By that September, a model column was put in place to determine how the finished column would look, and by November an agreement was reached with the bronze founders for the first two columns. The contract stipulated that the work “in its size, proportion, and quality [is] to be supplied by Cavalier Bernini.” In a few short months, the pope’s favored sculptor had become his architect of choice.
Despite his youth and inexperience, Bernini was not a complete architectural neophyte. Through his membership in the Academy of St. Luke, an elite organization of Roman artists, he had met the city’s best architects, and in December 1621 he helped in the design of a catafalque for the body of Paul V to lie upon in the Pauline Chapel at the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. Later, in February 1624, Bernini received his first actual architectural commission: to refurbish the church of Santa Bibiana. Though the appointment came from the chapter of Santa Maria Maggiore, it had the unmistakable imprimatur of Pope Urban, who clearly wanted his architect to get some experience.
This small shrine to a now obscure saint sits snugly—some might say uncomfortably—against the western access tracks that slither into Rome’s cavernous train station. It stands in forlorn and forgotten surroundings—at the south end of a small, oddly shaped courtyard—and suffers the indignities of noise from passing trains and traffic.
The church honors Saint Vivian, a fourth-century martyr who as a modest girl of fifteen refused the advances of Apronius, a Roman official. For her rebuff, Vivian—Bibiana in Italian—was tied to a column and whipped to death with a leaded cord.
Such a public death of a young Christian virgin at the hands of a pagan authority prompted a righteous fervor, and by the eighth century a cult had sprung up around Santa Bibiana. A contemporary guidebook to Rome called Itinerario Einsidlense mentions that by then a shrine already existed on this spot. Visiting the shrine was further encouraged during the Counter-Reformation by Cardinal Cesare Baronio, who took every opportunity to emphasize the simple faith of the early Christians as examples for people distracted by the criticisms of the Reformation: Defending Christ’s virtue against man’s lust can transport one’s soul to paradise.
Shrines for saints who met their deaths at the hands of cruel heathens were especially popular stops for pilgrims. And because Santa Bibiana stood between the larger churches of Santa Maria Maggiore and the city gate that led to San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, and was set (at the time) in an agreeable suburban setting aloof from the city’s disorder and cacophony, Urban determined that the church should be restored for the Holy Year of 1625.
Bernini designed a new façade for the building and carved a life-size statue of the saint, his first major religious statue. Today the sculpture stands above the church’s main altar, in a narrow niche scalloped at its top. The saint’s right arm is raised as she leans against a section of a column representing the one against which she was killed. To a modern eye her gaze is one of disbelief, like a guest of honor at a surprise party, though she undoubtedly was supposed to look transfixed by the vision of her martyr’s reward. She gazes heavenward, her lips parted in a mix of rapture and astonishment.
Despite the statue’s cramped setting, the saint’s face is well lighted: a filtered white light shines down upon it from a hidden window. This marks the first time that Bernini used a hidden light source to illuminate his work and suffuse it with metaphorical meaning. Its effect is dramatic and attention-getting, particularly in the cool shadows of Santa Bibiana. It was optical ingenuity he would use again—and more spectacularly—at the Cornaro Chapel.
Santa Bibiana was Bernini’s first public religious architectural commission. In his 1627 work La vita di S. Bibiana vergine, e martire romana, the scholar Domenico Fedini explains that Urban, who as a cardinal had written poetry extolling the virtues of Bibiana, wanted to “rescue” the church from obscurity. By assigning the task to Bernini, the pope succeeded.
Bernini’s new front for the church is an enterprising contrast of light and shadow, surface and space. It is a somber yet supple two-story wall of stone, with a trio of ground-level arches supporting a second story that is accented by three tall, narrow, rectangular windows. A broken pediment above the central window topped by a simple cross of gold is the only obvious ornament.
Today, in a city of churches saturated with decoration and drama, the classic lines of Santa Bibiana appear restrained, even humdrum. But in its time, it was seen as a lucid, imaginative example of church rebuilding and decoration. Bernini created a façade with a subtle, cunning rhythm of movement; its thick, blocklike pilasters advance toward a visitor as the deep arches recede into shadow. The impression is one of anticipation and reticence, boldness and hesitancy, and it recalls one of Maderno’s most famous churches, Santa Susanna on the Via XX Settembre, which was completed in 1603. Even as a young man Bernini knew the wisdom of following in the footsteps of more experienced architects.
This is a lesson he used at the Baldacchino. Bernini’s first plan for it resembled Maderno’s earlier proposal, which had its genesis, Borromini claimed, with Paul V. It was the pope’s idea, Borromini asserted, “to cover the high altar of St. Peter’s with a baldachin of proportionate richness to the opening made at the confessional and tomb of Peter.” Borromini added margin notes to a manuscript copy of Fioravante Martinelli’s guidebook of Rome where he indicated that Maderno had designed for Paul V a baldachino with twisted columns in which the actual altar covering “touched neither the columns nor their cornice.” Borromini doesn’t say how Maderno pulled off such an engineering trick; no plans for this design legerdemain exist.
What is clear is that Maderno had taken the risky step of blending the columns of a ciborium with a baldachino, starting a process that culminated in the Baldacchino that still stands in St. Peter’s.
Some architectural purists were troubled by this fusion. They felt that the elements of the ciborium and the baldachino should never be combined. It was like pouring red wine into a decanter of white: No person of taste saw any advantage.
Such criticism did not bother Maderno—it was, after all, his idea—and it certainly didn’t worry Bernini. So when Bernini began his own designs of the Baldacchino, he took the lessons he had learned from Maderno’s plans. He envisioned a quartet of four high, twisted “Solomonic” supports topped by small winged angels, each contrived to look as if it were supporting one of four cross ribs that sweep up in a graceful arch, meeting above the center of the altar. For the top of the structure, Bernini envisioned a large statue of Christ the Redeemer, which would stand on a pedestal. Cloth was to be draped over the cross ribs, like finery discarded by some disorganized deity. A line of decorative pieces, shaped rather like a child’s bib, each with a tassel dangling from it, hung between the columns in orderly rows, giving a slightly military hint to the design, as if the Baldacchino were the battlefield tent of a mighty potentate. All of this was to be fashioned in gilded bronze, the metal of choice when embellishing important churches, shrines, and reliquaries. Church legend has it that Constantine himself ordered Saint Peter’s remains placed in a cypress coffin encased in a casket of bronze: a cross of gold, inscribed as a gift from the emperor and his mother, Helena, was said to have been arranged on it.
To see how a permanent baldachino might look, Bernini oversaw the construction of a temporary version of his design. By June 1624, workers had built an experimental column at St. Peter’s and by September 10 it was standing on a pedestal at the altar. Not long after it was garnished with five clay putti. Less than two months later, on November 5, 1624, bronze founders were engaged to cast two columns. Their design called to mind the so-called colonna santa, or holy column, which held pride of place in the northeast niche of the dome. This ancient piece of translucent marble, carved to twist like a tightly wound spiral, was revered because it was thought that Jesus had leaned against it when he preached at Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.
Within less than eighteen months of his becoming pope, Urban, with Bernini as his architect, had progressed further in creating a permanent baldachino than either Paul V or Gregory XV had in working with Maderno.
In an engraving from 1625 that commemorates the canonization of Elizabeth of Portugal, the trial baldachino appears, standing conscientiously over the altar like a new soldier at his first skirmish. There’s little of the robust confidence, the high-spirited jubilation, the witty detail that are such important parts of the Baldacchino of today. It is a cautious first attempt, tentative and unconvincing but interesting enough to proceed with further.
Perhaps contributing to Bernini’s prudence was the apprehensiveness of some less adventuresome observers who felt that Bernini’s combining of elements from the ciborium and baldachino was too bold, too unconventional. Borromini in particular found fault with Bernini’s early design. As Maderno’s assistant, Borromini had seen firsthand the maestro’s early designs of the Baldacchino, and he believed that Maderno had handled the blending of the two properly; he didn’t overdo it. Bernini, on the other hand, didn’t know his limits.
As evidence of this, Borromini quoted the painter Agostino Ciampelli, who remarked that baldachinos “are not supported by columns but by staves, and that the baldacchinos should not run together with the cornice of the columns, and in any case he [Bernini] wanted to show that it is borne by angels: and he added that it was a chimera.”
Such a critique today sounds quaint, almost charming. But it was the seventeenth-century equivalent of libel. Church traditionalists were uncomfortable with this mélange of styles: They felt the two were too different, their roles too diffuse. It was an “uncanonical” solution for a structure that would stand literally at the center of Christian orthodoxy. And to place such an important commission in the hands of a neophyte architect who knew little about architecture and even less about bronze casting was foolhardy.
The criticism that Bernini had created a “chimera” was a rebuke that stung and lingered. It is possible that Bernini remembered it years later when he used the same word to describe Borromini’s work. He knew the word’s power and its effect.
Bernini continued to revise his designs on the Baldacchino, and he continued to rely on Maderno for assistance, taking advantage of the elder architect’s expertise. Though Maderno had been relieved of the commission, he continued to act as Bernini’s consultant on the Baldacchino. As Kirwin points out, “if the Baldachin tells us anything, it is that Bernini was an excellent listener and observer, and a quick learner.”
On November 18, 1626, Urban consecrated the completed St. Peter’s (though its decoration would continue for decades), 120 years after Pope Julius II had laid the foundation stone for the first pylon of the new church. By the next spring, three years after Bernini began preparing them, the four towering bronze columns, gilded and decorated, were installed atop corresponding marble pedestals 2.6 meters (8.5 feet) tall that were carved by Borromini and Agostino Radi, Bernini’s brother-in-law—huge blocks of stone taller than the pope himself. At the bottom of each column, where it meets the pedestal, which the pope could see easily when he stood at the altar, Bernini placed small figures in the bronze: a rosary and a medal on the southwest column; a lizard on its northeast counterpart. Bernini added this sort of witty detailing all over the Baldacchino, primarily for Urban’s amusement. And he made effective symbolic use of the bee, an insect thought to be drawn to the sweet aroma of sanctity—and not incidentally the new emblem of the Barberini family (Urban having changed it from a horsefly). It figures prominently throughout the Baldacchino’s decoration. The Barberini crest of three bees is carved into the stone shields on the outer sides of the pedestals, and they’re set in bronze all over the columns, pollinating the seeds of divine wisdom as they wander through twisting vines and proclaim that the Baldacchino sprung from the buzzing energy of Urban VIII.
(Such personal aggrandizement in church building and decoration wasn’t unusual. Borromini did the same thing later for Pope Alexander VII at the church of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, even though it was not begun during Alexander’s pontificate.)
On June 29, 1627, on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, Urban celebrated the Baldacchino’s unveiling (though not its official completion). By then, the bronze columns must have been an impressive sight: some 26 meters (85 feet) tall, cast in massive sections of base, capital, and three center sections at la fonderia, the special foundry that stood behind the barracks of the Swiss Guard to the north of Piazza San Pietro, and embellished by gilded laurels that seem to grow up out of the columns’ grooved, gilded bases as they spiral up toward the dome.
There’s a theatrical realism to the decoration, intentionally so. Bernini chose a casting process that allowed him to place an actual item—a tree branch, even a lizard—into the columns to achieve a kind of sculptural verisimilitude. Using what was called the lost-wax process, he created a mold by placing wax between a heat-resistant core and cover and pouring molten bronze into the mold. The fauna and flora would be consumed by the liquefied metal, leaving behind nothing but the outline, caught forever in bronze. The Swedish art historian Torgil Magnuson notes that “one of the largest items in the accounts [of the Baldacchino], over 3,800 ducats, was for the great quantity of ‘best yellow beeswax’ needed for the casting, and that this cost about twice as much as the gold acquired for the gilding.” Bernini destroyed nature to create a magnificent artifice, and in the process, vast sums of money literally melted away.
Using real things prompted Bernini’s critics to deride him for not being enough of an “artist”—many believed that an artist should mimic reality, not use it to generate an effect. Another complaint was that Bernini relied too heavily on others for his casting. He had very little experience with bronze, and there were renewed mumbles of protest over Urban’s order that the recently installed bronze ribs that support the dome be removed and melted down to use in the Baldacchino’s casting. The grumbling grew louder still when the pope directed that the bronze beams of a roof truss at the Pantheon be dismantled and melted down—a task that Borromini was in charge of carrying out. Such papal disregard for an ancient and well-loved Roman landmark prompted Giulio Mancini, the pope’s physician, to wisecrack, possibly in the presence of the pope himself: Quod non fecerunt barbari fecerunt Barberini (What the barbarians didn’t do, the Barberini did). And when additional supplies of bronze arrived in Rome from Venice, providing more than enough bronze for the Baldacchino, the quip seemed even more apt.
By the end of 1627 Bernini could boast that he had built small-and large-scale models of the Baldacchino and columns, and “operated at the beginning to make the clay, wrap [it] in iron, to lower, to guide, to cook, to bury, to melt the metal, and to cast the pieces, which were twenty in number.” He had spent two years supervising the columns’ casting, using several assistants, including his father, Pietro, who oversaw the books and materials. Bernini may have been perceived as a dilettante by some, but the long, at times arduous process of building such a mammoth structure helped make him an able administrator—a skill he used effectively in his own workshop, which in time became one of the most efficient and profitable in Rome.
Despite such a promising beginning, completing the Baldacchino took another six years, and its design would evolve further still. There were several reasons for this. In part it was due to the difficulty of finding a satisfactory solution to the top of the Baldacchino—it took longer than expected, and in the end Bernini needed Borromini’s help. Also, other commissions began to come Bernini’s way, distracting him from finishing the Baldacchino. By 1629 Bernini had been commissioned to design and sculpt Urban’s tomb, and to construct two small campanili—bell towers—for the Pantheon (based, Magnuson says, on Maderno’s designs). He was also working with Maderno and Borromini on the plans for the Palazzo Barberini, the enormous palace the Barberini family was building for itself on the east side of the Quirinale Palace.
But the most significant reason for the length of time it took to finish the Baldacchino was a human one: a death.
When Carlo Maderno, old and sickly, died on January 31, 1629, an artistic age died with him. Urban spent little time mourning the loss of the architect who in his view had “ruined” St. Peter’s. Only five days after Maderno’s death, Urban appointed Bernini principal architect of the Reverenda Fabbrica and architect of the Palazzo Barberini. The young sculptor and architect was suddenly the most influential artist in Europe.
To be so talented and so successful at such an early age—he was just thirty—was astonishing, nearly unprecedented, and certainly unheard of in Urban’s Rome.
For Borromini, Maderno’s death was an earthquake, a seismic blow with all of its unexpected aftershocks. Maderno was the man Borromini had grown to revere, the father figure who had noticed his talents, fostered them, and given him unprecedented opportunities to use them. Now he was gone. Never again would Borromini be so close to, and so welcome at, the confluence of the city’s worlds of art and religion. Compounding his loss, he had to see his maestro’s place taken by a coddled contemporary, the pope’s lapdog who, Borromini thought, knew so little about the practical side of architecture. In Borromini’s opinion, Bernini was not the man to replace Maderno. He was.
It is one of the ironies of Borromini’s life that he was the only man in Rome convinced he should have been selected to be architect of St. Peter’s—a certitude that is both naive and self-indulgent. The choice of Bernini to complete the decoration of St. Peter’s was inevitable and unavoidable. Joseph Connors observes that Urban “had no intention of promoting what he must have thought of as the ‘setta madernesca’ [the Madernoesque sect] when his protégé, the new Michelangelo, was available and willing.” How could Borromini not see what everyone else did?
Perhaps he chose not to. Or perhaps he couldn’t. To see the world so differently from how others see it, to miscalculate the behavior of others so utterly, was a heartbreaking habit of Borromini’s. It is one of the ironies of his life that the vision that made his work so distinctive was often what made his life so intolerable.
With Maderno dead and Bernini now in charge at St. Peter’s and the Palazzo Barberini, Borromini was cast adrift. What was to become of him? And what would the Baldacchino finally look like?
There are documents suggesting that Borromini, as Bernini’s most important assistant, contributed substantially to the ultimate solution of the Baldacchino’s final silhouette. But his contribution isn’t clear-cut or obvious. It turned out that the statue of the Risen Christ that Bernini envisioned for the summit was much too heavy to be held aloft by meager arches. Bernini the artist had been too theatrical; here he needed to be pragmatic. So he was forced to rethink his design.
After more experimentation on paper, which Borromini assisted with, Bernini replaced the large statue with a smaller golden sphere topped by a cross. It was a more manageable solution, addressing the problem of weight and support, and it had the added benefit of mirroring the image atop St. Peter’s itself. A medal struck in 1633 shows the final outline of the top of the Baldacchino, a magnificent curling confection of gilded S-curved scrolls of wood dressed with patinated copper and strengthened by a metal bar inside each one. Their shapes were reminiscent of diving dolphins, thicker at their base than at their tail-like pinnacle. This arrangement supports the orb and cross nicely as it continues the sense of upward movement.
It was a neat solution that sprung in significant part from Borromini. According to Paolo Portoghesi, Borromini’s active role in the design process is supported by at least one drawing at the Albertina in Vienna, which looks very much like the finished Baldacchino. Others agree that this drawing reveals Borromini’s collaboration in the design, and according to Portoghesi, Borromini “contributed decisively not only to the execution but also the invention of the crowning, in which the four ribs of dolphin-like curvature replace the crossed arches surmounted by a statue of Christ the Redeemer originally proposed by Bernini.”
The dolphin, like the bee, had long been a Christian symbol, though its unusual, elegantly fluid use atop the Baldacchino—like a dolphin diving back into the water—had few precedents in ecclesiastical architecture. Nevertheless, it was used to good effect in the Baldacchino, and Borromini employed the same motif in future commissions, bolstering the assertion that the top of the Baldacchino was Borromini’s invention. Borromini was deeply proud of his own work and acutely protective of his ideas—Baldinucci wrote that Borromini considered his designs come i propri figli, like his own children. It was extremely unlikely that he would co-opt a design created by another for his own buildings.
Borromini also found an opportunity to be creative at the Palazzo Barberini. In 1626, a year after Cardinal Francesco Barberini bought a palazzo from Duke Alessandro Sforza, he gave it to his brother Taddeo, and Maderno (despite the pope’s reservations about him) was commissioned to build a new palazzo on the site. Bernini was again assigned to assist him. Maderno, of course, had Borromini at his right hand.
The site was an unevenly sloping hill near the Quirinale, and Maderno, with the help of both of his young colleagues, designed a massive H-shaped residence, one that looked more like a suburban villa than the standard palazzo that had been built in Rome since the beginning of the Renaissance.
The Palazzo Barberini is, in fact, two rectangular villas connected by a three-story arcade and loggia, which looks as grave and as serious as a mausoleum. It sits back from the street and is angled away from it slightly. This is disconcerting to a visitor until one notices that the building faces St. Peter’s and the Vatican, the home of Maffeo Barberini, who as Urban VIII was involved in a building campaign of his own.
Maderno exploited the irregular site to advantage, a trick Bernini learned well and used throughout his career. On the north, sloping side of the hill, Maderno designed and built a four-story wing. In this way he allowed both wings of the palazzo to appear from the front to be three stories tall while gaining an extra story of livable space. And space was needed, because the north wing was to house the secular side of the Barberini family—Taddeo Barberini; his wife, Anna; their children; his mother, Costanza; and their servants and attendants. The southern wing, which was shorter than its northern counterpart and had one less story, was designed to accommodate the clerical side of the family, in the person of Cardinal Francesco Barberini. Though the cardinal lived a quieter life than his more worldly relations, his refined tastes demanded an elegant lifestyle. His suite of rooms must be large enough to accommodate a library, a theater, and an art gallery. A man of the church may be denied the pleasures of the flesh—at least in theory—but he is free to indulge in the delights of the mind, if he has the resources, which the good cardinal certainly did.
Behind the vertiginous three-story loggia, which today appears as narrow and cramped as a nineteenth-century shoe factory, stands an enormous two-story hall with a deeply coved ceiling. This gran salone is a gigantic rectangle-shaped room whose most arresting feature is The Triumph of Divine Providence, the magnificent (and magnificently large) ceiling fresco painted between 1633 and 1639 by Pietro da Cortona. It was Cortona’s brilliance—no doubt with the Barberini’s blessing—to place in the fresco three outsized golden bees—from the floor they look monstrous, as large as soccer balls—that trumpet (perhaps hum) the superiority of the Barberini. The whole composition of this room moves, as “the figures dart between the painted entablatures, the mock carytids, and the clouds,” the art historian Giulio Carlo Argan writes. “Decoration is no longer fable, but prayer and spectacle.”
Two large staircases, a square one in the northern wing and an oval one in the southern, are found on either side of the central arcade, and they lead directly from the forecourt to the piano nobile—the main story—and the families’ private apartments. The arrangement allows the wings to be used like connected town houses. Such ingenuity was used later by other architects, including Robert Adam, John Nash, and John Soane in London, and McKim, Mead, and White at the Villard Houses in New York.
Imposing though the Palazzo Barberini is, to a modern eye it appears ungainly—cheerless and top-heavy, more penitentiary than palace. Perhaps that’s because the building had so many people, so many opinions, superintending its design and construction. The palace is very tall, and the windows along the entrance front make the main front look crowded. Though Maderno oversaw the arrangement of the rooms and designed the building’s elevations and its loggias, Taddeo Barberini was deeply involved in its design. Cardinal Francesco Barberini claimed in a biography of his brother that “the entire fabric was the work of his mind…. There was not a day that he did not go there and see the drawings; and what was being done, if it was the idea of others, was approved and verified by him.”
That may or may not be true. What is true is that dozens of drawings for the palazzo exist in Borromini’s and Bernini’s hands. Their contributions are all over the building. Bernardo Castelli, Borromini’s nephew, indicates that many of the working drawings for the palazzo are by Borromini. And there are hints that Borromini’s role may have been more than just that of a draftsman. Cardinal Francesco Barberini told Cardinal Virgilio Spada, who was a friend of both Bernini and Borromini, that the palazzo “was in great part the design of Borromini.”
Borromini is known to have designed the two small, square windows, one at either end of the entrance front’s top floor, whose rounded pediments angle out away from the building at 45 degrees, creating a unique and completely Baroque invention. In addition, he was given the task of designing the oval staircase in the south wing, a dynamic spiral that the British art critic Anthony Blunt says was inspired by the Ottaviano staircase in the Quirinale Palace. Its curving, supple arc of marble draws the eye upward. Though it’s made completely of stone, the stairway feels organic, like a flower growing toward the sun. Even the sets of paired Doric columns set along the balustrade seem to pull the visitor higher.
By contrast, Bernini is known to have designed the stately marble staircase in the north wing. The climb to the piano nobile up the sixty-two stone steps that line the four sides of a square, cramped courtyard feels like more of an effort than climbing Borromini’s stairway. The stairway struggles to be grand, but it can’t pull it off. It’s a halfhearted effort, more utilitarian than ingenious.
Despite Borromini’s contributions, and those of Maderno early on, most of the credit for the Palazzo Barberini was showered onto Bernini. Borromini himself never took specific credit for the palazzo. In his annotations to the manuscript of Fioravante Martinelli’s guidebook, where Martinelli had written that the palazzo had been “achieved by many and especially Bernini,” Borromini added only the words “and others.” However, Connors notes that “in later years [Borromini] used to say that Palazzo Barberini was all his design.”
It’s certainly true that when Maderno died, Bernini knew that he would need help. He knew that Borromini was as vital to Bernini’s successful completion of both St. Peter’s and the Palazzo Barberini as he had been to Maderno.
“Knowing what Borromini had accomplished for Maderno at the fabric of St. Peter’s,” Castelli wrote, Bernini “begged [Borromini] not to abandon him…since he was already so well-informed about everything. And Bernini attended to his sculpture and in architectural matters he left everything for Borromini to do; and meanwhile Bernini feigned the role of architect…before the Pope, when in fact he was quite innocent of the profession at the time.”
Given Bernini’s extraordinary talents, this reads a bit like grandstanding—hyperbole among partisans. Yet Portoghesi quotes a section of an early draft of Baldinucci’s biography of Borromini deleted from the final manuscript, which casts a different spin on the relationship between the two men. Baldinucci wrote:
Urban…appointed him [Bernini] architect of Saint Peter’s and finding himself charged with this task and aware of his inability, since he was a sculptor, and knowing that Borromini had worked for Maderno at Saint Peter’s and had again for Maderno managed and followed up the work on Palazzo Barberini, he begged Borromini not to abandon him on this occasion. Promising that he would recognize his many labors with a worthy reward, Borromini allowed himself to be persuaded by his solicitations and promised to continue the work already begun in Saint Peter’s…. Bernini therefore tended to his sculpture and left the architecture to Borromini, and Bernini played the role of architect to the pope and Saint Peter’s, whereas, in fact, Bernini was at this time extremely unenlightened in that profession. But since Borromini carried out the building works of that pontificate so well, Bernini drew the remunerations and salary for the building works of both Saint Peter’s and the Palazzo Barberini, as well as the pay for the work of compiling the measurements. And never did he give Borromini anything for his labors of so many years, except good words and grand promises. And seeing himself thus deluded and derided Borromini completely abandoned Bernini, saying, “I do not mind that he has the money, but I do mind that he enjoys the honor of my labors.”
Why would Baldinucci recount such an unfavorable tale, only to delete it later? He offers no explanation. However, it could have something to do with Queen Christina of Sweden, who hired Baldinucci to write a biography of Bernini. As a man who understood the exacting standards of royal patronage, Baldinucci may have reconsidered his public castigation of the subject of a royal biography, particularly when the subject had been a personal friend of the most important Catholic convert in Europe. (Christina had renounced the throne in 1654, became a Catholic in 1655, and eventually settled in Rome.)
Equally revealing are the comments of Giovanni Battista Passeri, another seventeenth-century Borromini biographer. He was even blunter than Baldinucci had been initially. Of Bernini’s dealings with Borromini after the death of Maderno, Passeri wrote, “Lo procurò suo adherente” (He procured his allegiance)—a phrase disturbing in its repercussions. In addition, Passeri indicates that Bernini believed in “the exceptional talent of his assistant[,] almost feared his competition and tried to retard Borromini’s ascent by keeping him bound to his own service, while taking full advantage of his extraordinary technical capabilities”—a tactic that sounds similar to Bernini’s treatment of Giuliano Finelli.
Bernini was, Passeri wrote, “like the dragon guarding the Gardens of the Hesperides, who worked against anyone attempting to gain the golden apples of papal grace, and spat poison and sharply pointed darts of hatred all over the path that led to possession of the highest favours.”
The actual inducements Bernini used to keep Borromini as his assistant aren’t known. What is plain is that there was always a discrepancy between what Bernini was paid for his work and what Borromini was for his. On Borromini’s last payment record for his work on the Baldacchino, dated January 22, 1633, is the notation: “To Francesco Castelli (Borromini) 25 scudi for the present month of January for the drawings in full scale of the curvatures, the plants, mouldings, foliage, and other details that are to go on the ribs and cornices, and in addition he is obliged to make designs on the copper, and these are to be done so that the carpenters and those who beat the copper cannot err.” For the same month’s work, Bernini received 250 scudi, ten times what Borromini did.
If money was an issue for Borromini—and despite his later insistence that it was not, its indication of the value the pope and the Barberini family placed on his and Bernini’s work was impossible to ignore—his one attempt to seize the opportunity to improve his own fortunes was a debacle and helped end his relationship with Bernini.
Because finishing the interior of St. Peter’s was such an enormous undertaking—as difficult for Bernini as completing the exterior had been for Maderno—the basilica demanded a ceaseless supply of marble and an equally long list of capable stonecutters and marble workers to fashion the stone. Satisfying such a boundless need for stone afforded Borromini his chance to profit from the basilica’s—and Bernini’s—need.
According to Passeri, Borromini joined with Agostino Radi, a scarpellino who took advantage of the happy opportunity of being Bernini’s brother-in-law. Bernini hired the partnership to provide some of the marble and stone he needed for the basilica. Such a business arrangement wasn’t unusual in Rome, but there is no evidence that Borromini attempted such a venture when Maderno was architect of St. Peter’s. Perhaps he felt at the time that he was too young for such audacity. Perhaps he respected or feared Maderno too much even to broach such an idea with him. Perhaps Maderno refused to agree to such arrangements. Whatever the reason for Borromini’s past reticence, he showed no such reluctance when the Cavaliere Bernini was in charge and the opportunity presented itself.
Bernini gave a considerable amount of work to the men, which must have gratified both Borromini and Radi. Yet the enterprise continued to lose money—or at least to be not as profitable as it should have been. Borromini was puzzled by this. He began to investigate, and it could not have taken him long to discover that Radi and Bernini had come to a secret arrangement separate from the agreement Borromini was aware of: Radi was paying Bernini a portion of the partnership’s profits in exchange for the honor of supplying marble to the architect. It was the seventeenth-century version of a kickback.
Once Borromini learned of this subterfuge, his response was swift and unforgiving. In Passeri’s words, he “abandoned every [sculptural] impresa, the friendship of Bernini, and the fabbrica of San Pietro and gave himself over entirely to architecture.” Virgilio Spada wrote later of the dispute: “Despite the fact that they fell out with each other, that is, Bernini and Borromini, and their love changed into the greatest [canceled: mortal] hatred, but for other reasons than architecture.”
The breach had come; the outcome was as inevitable as it was irreparable. The honor of his labors came at a very high price.
Borromini left both the Palazzo Barberini and St. Peter’s for good. But seventeenth-century Rome was a very small town, and the two men’s professional and personal paths would cross again.