BORROMINI’S HASTY EXIT FROM THE TWO most important building projects in Rome showed an almost breathtaking recklessness. It seemed rash, even self-destructive, for a man with so few prospects and connections to leave what was at the time two high-profile posts.
But if the world thought Borromini was foolish—precipitate and headstrong—he didn’t seem to care. Nothing in his or others’ writing about him gives any clue that he regretted his decision to leave Bernini’s employment. In fact, he had achieved what Paolo Portoghesi describes as “a relative economic independence”; his abstemious life as a stonemason at St. Peter’s and the Palazzo Barberini had given him the luxury of being choosy about where—and for whom—he worked.
Besides, Borromini would have found staying on at either site intolerable. Bernini’s dishonesty and his refusal to give him his proper credit offended Borromini’s fragile pride, lacerating his artist’s thin skin. For the rest of his life, his rancor toward Bernini was a wound that never healed.
Their rift appeared to be less of a problem for Bernini. He seemed immune to such emotional hypochondria. He had neither the time nor the temperament to wallow in such sanctimony. He had the Baldacchino to finish, a palazzo to complete, and a string of other commissions that the pope wanted him to start. Being the most successful artist in Italy inoculated him from the virus of artistic umbrage.
Pay records at the Vatican indicate that Borromini’s collaboration with Radi lasted until the end of 1632, and his final payment for his work at St. Peter’s was made on January 22, 1633. After that, he was on his own.
He had two options. One was to pray that a saint’s relics would be found—uncovered, perhaps, during a church renovation or the construction of a palazzo—and that he would be chosen to build (or rebuild) a shrine to house and display them. This was what happened to Bernini with his commission for Santa Bibiana. But there’s no way to prepare for such good luck, as it depends too heavily on the whims of the Almighty or the attentiveness of a ditchdigger to be reliable. Prayer could take Borromini’s career only so far. He needed an effort to start it.
The other alternative open to him was to offer his talents for free to a religious community that needed a new building but couldn’t afford to hire an architect to design one. This is the course that Borromini took. In 1633 he approached an order called the Sodalizio dei Piceni and volunteered his services to renovate the order’s church of Santa Casa di Loreto. Not much is known of what Borromini actually built, as the church has since been destroyed and Borromini’s efforts have been lost. But a happier outcome began the next year when Borromini offered to aid the Trinitarii Scalzi del Riscatto di Spagna, the Discalced (or Barefoot) Trinitarians.
This small community of friars seems a curiosity today, one of those religious orders peculiar to its time, like something out of Homer or the pages of Cervantes. It was founded in 1198 in France by Jean de Matha, a Provençal priest who during his first Mass had an extraordinary vision: Vidi majestatem Dei et Deum tenentem in manibus suis duos vires habentes cathenas in tibiis, quorum unus niger et deformis apparuit, alter macer et pallidus. Joseph Connors translates this as “He saw the Majesty of God, holding in his hands two men chained at the ankles, one black and deformed, the other white and thin.” Matha’s interpretation of this vision was clear: His purpose was to redeem Christians who had been captured by Moorish pirates that plundered the Mediterranean.
The order grew, and by 1611–12, one of the scalzi, or reformed sects, had established itself in Rome, in a cluster of modest houses near the Quattro Fontane, on the southwest corner of the intersection of what was then the Via Pia and the Via Felice, near the Quirinale Palace. These Barefoot Trinitarians—though this distinction was more symbolic than actual (they wore sandals)—acquired a house that they used as their church. They dedicated it to San Carlo Borromeo, the reforming archbishop of Milan who had been canonized in 1610. (It was the first church consecrated to the newly minted saint.) Across the intersection from the site was the palazzo of Cardinal Francesco Barberini, who was an early, if lackluster, contributor to the Trinitarians: Anthony Blunt notes that the cardinal “lost interest” in supporting the order, which may have contributed to the fact that construction on their site took the better part of four decades to complete.
Fra Juan de la Anunciación, the order’s leader in Rome, became Borromini’s first and most constant patron. A man of perplexing, even enigmatic, contradictions, he could be both reticent and dynamic, self-effacing and conceited. As procurator general, he exhorted his order to embrace, even revel in, an uncompromising level of poverty and humility, though he could be distracted by the trappings of power and position. When rumors circulated throughout the city that he was to be made a cardinal, Fra Juan could hardly contain his excitement. But when France vetoed the idea and the story turned out to be nothing more than idle gossip, he chastised himself bitterly for his arrogance and pride. From then on he wore a habit that was near rags and spent the rest of his life in his simple cell. The only time he left it was to travel to Urban’s deathbed.
If others found Fra Juan difficult to please, Borromini did not. He was able to satisfy Fra Juan’s vision for San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, fulfilling the abbot’s and his order’s need for economy, plainness, and austerity while giving them grandeur, intricacy, and drama. Fra Juan believed that just as man should be humbled on earth, God should be exalted; he thought in rich, even extravagant terms. If the Trinitarians had had the money for a large and grandly decorated church, Fra Juan would have gladly paid any price to build the most lavish house of worship in Europe: “as rich as Solomon’s temple, with a floor of emeralds and precious stones.” But he did not. By selecting Borromini as his architect, he achieved something rarer than emeralds, and more precious: a church that captures the unknowable face of God.
Borromini’s first project for them was more ordinary. He designed for the Trinitarians a quarto di dormitorio, the monks’ residence. This grave, practical, four-story wing stands at the rear of the complex away from the intersection, which was noisy even in the summer of 1634, when work began.
At first glance, Borromini’s plan is functional but hardly imaginative. He devoted each floor to a particular purpose. But it is in the decoration of the wing’s façade and in the rooms themselves where Borromini begins to find his architectural voice.
The façade is a clever manipulation of simple materials used to maximum effect. Along the center of the ground floor, Borromini planned a line of tall windows, set several feet off the ground, an arched doorway at both ends. The windows are framed by double bands of stucco, which create shallow arches around the windows and narrow pilasterlike vertical strips that trick the eye into thinking the space between the windows is wider than it really is. Between these faux pilasters Borromini placed slightly recessed panels, which look like spaces for paintings that had just been taken down.
Above the ground floor, against a wall empty of decoration, Borromini placed two stories of nine square windows. These spare, sober openings let light into the monks’ cells. At the top of the building, above the monks’ dormitory and the flurry of everyday life, Borromini placed the order’s library. It’s not as wide a floor as the ones below it, which allows Borromini the chance to place at either end of the library stone flourishes that curve up from the end of the building to the library’s roofline. These large, bracketlike supports—actually buttresses—are a surprising embellishment and an ornament that few would see; the wing, after all, isn’t visible to passersby.
Borromini devoted a great deal of attention and creativity to the rooms behind the façade. On the ground floor facing the garden, Borromini placed a dining room, called the refectory, a kitchen, and a washroom, with a small spiral staircase connecting to the floors above. Though the layout is practical, even run-of-the-mill, the details of the rooms are not. They have been thought out carefully. For Borromini, the delight was in the details.
This is particularly true in the refectory. At first glance, the largest room on the ground floor is little more than a tall, rectangular box painted white. Along the exterior wall three high windows open to the southeast, which allows Rome’s agreeable morning light to filter in. Its most prominent decoration is a shallow arched niche at the north end of the room, decorated along its curved top by two semicircles of stuccoed flowers, nine blossoms in each arc. They look like May Day decorations.
Yet such a description doesn’t do the room justice; its ornamentation is more ingenious than that. It takes a moment to realize that there is hardly a right angle in the room. The room’s four corners are concave, rounding into where the angle normally would be. Torgil Magnuson notes that Borromini is reputed to have claimed that “the corner is the enemy of all good architecture,” and this room offers credible evidence that he practiced what he preached.
Borromini’s ceiling decoration is also unusual for a room devoted to the task of feeding a religious community. Ringing the room, where the ceiling and walls meet, is a high molding (again decorated with stucco flowers) from which springs prominent vaults, fashioned in stucco, that follow the graceful coving of the ceiling. They meet in pointed, rather Gothic-looking arches that give an ecclesiastical feel to the room. At the flat center of the ceiling, Borromini planned a cross, though this may have never been completed. It certainly isn’t in the room now.
The effect is a room that surprises, but gently. It is grander than one expects in a monastery, and there’s an understated movement to it. It calls to mind Joseph Addison’s observation that “among all the figures in architecture, there are none that have a greater air than the concave and the convex…. [P]illars and vaulted roofs make a great part of those buildings which are designed for pomp and magnificence.” The room is an odd place to encounter such grandeur.
Construction on the quarto took a little over a year and was nearly complete by the autumn of 1635. By that February, it was far enough along that Borromini could tackle his next project at San Carlo: the cloister.
The cloister is an anomaly, being both a public and a private space. Standing to the right of the church and built of travertine, it is actually a two-story courtyard, open to the sky, which connects to the passageway behind the church and to a staircase near the courtyard’s entrance to the street that leads upstairs to a chapter house, a room to store linen, and a loft. Like the refectory and the church itself, the cloister is tall and narrow, with two rows of arches and stone columns enclosing the space, creating colonnades on both the ground floor and the floor above.
But the cloister is more dynamic than that. Six high archways—one in the center of the rectangle’s short sides, two each on its long sides—are supported by pairs of refined but sturdy Tuscan columns, which ring the space. The arches dominate the cloister and give it a gravitas that its modest dimensions normally rule out. It’s a similar decorative rhythm that Borromini used throughout his career, and it would prove to be an inspired solution to the problems he would encounter at San Giovanni in Laterano twenty years later.
At San Carlo, Borromini is being inventive. He intentionally complicates his cloister design by not placing all of the columns side by side. He positions the outside column on each side at a 45-degree angle from its partner, again blunting the corners, but this time curving the line between the columns out into the cloister. As a result, Borromini has taken what should be a rectangle and turned it into a narrow octagon that feels energetic, dynamic, alive. He has made a space that is traditionally thought of as a quiet place into one that is vibrant and unexpected. He has surprised us.
Borromini was equally surprising with the cloister’s decorative details. On the upper story of the cloister, he designed pillars that are shorter and thinner than the ones below, and with octagonal capitals that skillfully mimic the shape of the courtyard. Perhaps the cloister’s most inventive detail is Borromini’s design for the balustrade that rings the upper floor. The balusters in it are pear-shaped—three-sided and wider at the bottom than they are at the top, their edges blunted and rounded. They look like a series of false noses, bulbous and pliable, as if they were made of putty instead of stone.
They may appear oddly shaped at first glance, but Borromini designed them for a particular reason of his own.
Borrowing from Michelangelo, who was the first architect to ignore the Renaissance tradition of centering the bulge of a baluster by lowering it to give the baluster a more solid profile, Borromini goes a step further. He alternates these oddly shaped balusters, flipping them top to bottom, so that, Blunt explains, “in one the bulge comes at the top and on the next at the bottom, thus producing an effect of movement rather than of stability”—what has been called “flickering movement.” It’s a small detail, easily overlooked, but it’s an ingenious, even daring, design decision, as it ran counter to every architectural convention of the time. It certainly went beyond anything Bernini was working on.
For Borromini, it was both an aesthetic and a practical decision. He is said to have explained later that the alternating balusters offered anyone sitting behind the balustrade the opportunity to see what was going on in the courtyard below more easily. That may or may not be true. What cannot be argued is that the unusual balustrade contributes to the cloister’s sense of arrested motion, of powerful forces frozen in time. Borromini’s cloister is a vigorous and original creation, simultaneously oversize and snug, precise and elastic, understated and overwhelming. With it, he begins to find his own architectural voice, which, with the church of San Carlo, he would modulate further into the most distinctive of his generation.
LA CHIESA DI San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane is a church of singular imagination and rare, perhaps disturbing, talent. The intelligence and passion that Borromini displays in this building, which is so small that it’s said it could fit into one of the piers supporting the dome of St. Peter’s, is obvious as soon as one enters it.
But if San Carlo’s size is overshadowed by St. Peter’s—prompting Romans to call it “San Carlino”—its inventiveness made it the talk of Rome when it was built. It was “perhaps discussed more than praised,” the British art historian Sacheverell Sitwell notes, but it’s nonetheless a remarkable achievement. Nothing else like it had been seen in Rome.
Borromini began work on San Carlo in February 1638, when he was thirty-eight and two years after he had finished the cloister, which by June 1636 was essentially complete. Over the next several years he worked on the church, creating something distinctive at a reasonable cost. Accounts indicate that in the end, the total cost of the church was 11,678 scudi—a bargain by the standards of the day.
Part of the church’s modest cost was defrayed by a donation that Francesco Barberini made to the order, but as the Trinitarians acted as their own builder, and as Borromini took no money for his designs or for overseeing construction, they saved money there as well. Even if the order had hired an overseer for the project, Borromini would still have to be involved, so complex and sophisticated were his plans. Even today it’s difficult to decipher on paper precisely what Borromini envisioned without seeing the finished church firsthand.
This is unquestionably Borromini’s church, as personal an expression of the divine as can be found in Rome. Like St. Peter’s, San Carlo is essentially a domed church, but that is where the similarity between them ends. Unlike St. Peter’s, which began as a centralized round-domed church, San Carlo was envisioned and built as an ellipsis, with the entrance and the altar at opposite ends of its long axis, neither of which is more than twenty paces from the center of the floor, where a small shield with a red cross at its center—the symbol of the Trinitarians—is placed. The church has no side aisles, no transept; instead, subtle undulations in the walls create indentations that would allow two shallow side altars to be placed in them.
Like other architects from northern Italy who were familiar with (and still used) Gothic building techniques, Borromini used geometry as the basis of his designs for San Carlo. He began by placing two equilateral triangles of the same size so that they shared a side, creating a diamond. Using the center of both triangles, he drew two circles, which in turn created the outer curves of an ellipsis.
It has been an exercise that geometry students have learned for centuries. But in Borromini’s hands, this technique becomes something more. His use of the circle and the triangle employed metaphor as well as mathematics: In addition to being two of the elemental shapes in geometry, they represent two of the most important images in Christianity. The triangle has long been a symbol of the Holy Trinity—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—while the circle represents the eternity of God, of a world without end.
These figures and images are everywhere in San Carlino, and they reach their figurative and literal zenith in the dome itself. Looking up from the center of the church, a visitor sees a dove, its wings outstretched, enclosed in a triangle, which in turn is surrounded by a circle. Borromini placed a potent symbol of God surrounded by the Trinity and the Infinite at the point in the church closest to heaven. It is a stirring reminder of the order’s, and Borromini’s, faith.
Nothing in San Carlino is there by accident, and nowhere is this truer than around the walls. Though the church’s plan is oval, its walls don’t strictly follow Borromini’s elliptical outline. Instead, they seem to surge out at, and pull back from, the visitor, like waves crashing against a jetty. They are almost completely free of color: The entire church is of white stucco, broken up by black, lightly gilded wrought-iron grillwork, the subtle red Trinitarian cross, a gray stone floor, and the altarpieces, including the painting by Pierre Mignard of Saints Carlo Borromeo, Jean de Matha, and Félix of Valois. Around the perimeter of the church, Borromini positioned sixteen tall columns with Composite capitals, which stand against the walls like trees at the edge of a clearing. The capitals have the same dolphin-backed supports found on the Baldacchino and jut out at an angle, just as the lintel does on Borromini’s window at the Palazzo Barberini.
Borromini arranged the columns in odd, ambiguous rhythms, which agitate rather than soothe. The eye struggles to group them, first in clusters of two, then three, then four, depending on where it’s looking. Between the columns, high up in the walls, Borromini placed a series of niches. Some are filled by statues, some lie empty; some have rounded tops carved to look like tongues of fire; others are shaped to look like three neatly arranged scallop shells. Beneath some of them, doorways lead out of the church (to the sacristy, the living quarters, to the stairway that descends to the chapel and crypt). More than two dozen angel heads, one of Borromini’s favorite motifs, gaze down absently. They look as if they have other things on their minds than who might be wandering through—or praying—here.
Even the floor didn’t escape Borromini’s attention. In an oval at the center of a small field of white marble, he placed gray stones that radiate from the center and that act as a counterpoint to the dome above, the church’s most elaborate, most magnificent feature.
The dome teems with detail. As with a theorem proven with exceptional ingenuity, every piece fits precisely in its place. For the dome, Borromini tossed aside simplicity and designed an intricately arranged series of octagons, hexagons, and crosses, each outlined in gold, to fit into the dome’s oval like the pieces of a puzzle.
It is based on a Christian mosaic from another Roman church, Santa Costanza, but Blunt notes that “Borromini was the first architect to use it in three dimensions and on a dome rather than on a barrel-vault.” The design suggests a honeycomb. If he intended it—and Borromini was fascinated by the symbolic—it’s a witty homage to Cardinal Barberini’s family and patronage.
The dome is also an optical trick: The sizes of the shapes in it diminish as they get closer to the pinnacle, making the dome seem taller and deeper than it actually is. Like the tall columns that ring San Carlo, the dome was another visual trick Borromini employed to make the church seem larger and more imposing than its size would suggest. He managed all of this by not providing a single window in the church (most of the light enters from the lantern atop the dome and from octagonal windows invisible from the floor that nestle behind a ring of stone leaves at the base of the dome). The result is a space rich with light, even though its source is mysterious and unknown, like the existence of God.
While Borromini worked at San Carlo, other patrons began to take notice. One was Ascanio Filomarino, a protégé of Urban VIII whom the pope appointed archbishop of Naples. Filomarino engaged Borromini to design an altar for the church of Santissimi Apostoli in Naples. Borromini planned and built the altar—a restrained, rather tentative concoction in white marble (Portoghesi calls it “subtly aristocratic”) that displays relatively little of the power and passion of his later work—in Rome and shipped it south, where it was installed in the church’s transept, possibly by Borromini himself. Blunt contends that the architect’s demanding personality and work habits made his traveling to Naples to oversee its construction and placement likely. He argues that it would be “completely out of character for Borromini to produce a work without knowing the setting for which it was destined, the architecture of the church in which it was to stand, the lighting and all the other pre-existing factors which were always for him the starting-point for any design.”
In addition, “the altar fits the transept…so harmoniously that it seems unthinkable that it should have been designed by someone who had not actually seen the setting in which it was to be placed.” It is a tall, slightly concave marble screen anchored by two Corinthian columns on each side of a marble altar that bows out toward the viewer. The columns support a heavy cornice and an unusual pediment of two quarter-circles that support a triangle above—a smaller, earlier version of the pediment over the entrance to the Oratorio di San Filippo Neri in Rome, which Borromini also designed. This altar is one of Borromini’s few works outside Rome and his only commission in Bernini’s birth city.
Count Ambrogio Carpegna was another early Borromini patron. In 1638 he chose Borromini to enlarge a palazzo on the northeastern side of the Piazza Trevi (where the Trevi Fountain is today), but he died suddenly in 1643 before Borromini could make much headway on the project, managing only some stucco work at the entryway and an unusual curving ramp.
The count’s brother, Cardinal Ulderico Carpegna, proved to be a more constant—and longer-lived—supporter. In 1644 he engaged Borromini to turn his talents to the altar at Sant’Anastasia, a church that stands not far from the Tiber near the bottom of the south side of the Palatine Hill. One of Rome’s first tituli, or parish churches, which Urban rebuilt when he became pope, Sant’Anastasia has a long history. A church was built on the site in the fourth century A.D., where it emerged as one of the upstart religion’s first public places of worship in Rome. Saint Jerome, called one of the Doctors of the Church, is reputed to have been its first parish priest. (Nothing of Borromini’s work currently exists at the church.)
By May 1641 the interior of San Carlo was essentially complete. It was hailed as a success immediately, a brilliant synthesis of talent and execution. According to Fra Juan de San Bonaventura, who closely followed the work at San Carlino, the church was “judged by all to be of an art so rare that it seems that nothing similar exists in all the world for its rare and extraordinary artifice and fantasy.” Proof of the achievement, Bonaventura said, was “those of different countries who continually, as they arrive in Rome, beg for drawings of it. Very often we receive such requests from Germans, Flemings, Frenchmen, Italians, Spaniards and even Indians, who would give anything to have a drawing of this church, which when they see it desire to have it even more than when they had heard it praised in their country.”
Borromini, the cleric wrote, “is continually harassed by both foreigners and natives who wish to have the drawing. Signor Francesco would have given great satisfaction and pleasure to the world and to cultured and curious intellects if he had printed a drawing of his church which is so intensely desired by so many.” It would have been shrewd of Signor Francesco to have done precisely that. Yet he didn’t.
Bonaventura offers two explanations. One is that Borromini was too generous. He “worked on his buildings and labored without any concern for economic gain, a fact that can be affirmed with many examples, but particularly with the case of our building, for which he has never wished to receive a giulio.” If Borromini didn’t accept money for designing San Carlino, the argument goes, why should he accept money for copies of the plans?
The other is that by the time San Carlino was complete, Borromini had established himself as an architect and had other commissions elsewhere.
A third possibility is his anxiety that others would take credit for his church’s inventiveness and creativity. Given how he reacted to his treatment at St. Peter’s, Borromini could have feared that another architect would call Borromini’s work his own. One way to prevent it would be to keep the plans away from others.
He needn’t have worried. At the time that the interior of San Carlino was completed, Borromini received all the admiration he could have hoped for. Giovanni Baglione, in his Le vite de’ pittori, scultori, architetti, ed intagliatori (1642), wrote that San Carlino was a “bella chiesetta, la quale è leggiadra, e capricciosa architettura di Francesco Bor[r]omini Lombardo” (“beautiful little church, from the fantastic architecture of the Lombard Francesco Borromini”). Bonaventura wrote that the church had been “well founded on the antique and on the writings of the best architects.” It was, he said, “a work so excellent that just as it was the first that Signor Francesco had made in his life, so was it first for its design.”
The Discalced Trinitarians were pleased: Their church’s renown prompted Urban to grant them full independence from the other sects of Trinitarians. When the church was consecrated in 1646, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the nephew of the pope, performed the ceremony.
Borromini’s future as an independent architect seemed hopeful, even rosy—a surprising turn of events in the life of a man known for being neither of these. Sitwell notes that Giovanni Battista Passeri, Borromini’s contemporary, understood that Bernini and Borromini were “set apart by instinct, [Borromini] being cerebral more than sensual, silent by nature, celibate, deeply religious, and difficult to know. He frightened people, was dressed in funeral black like a Spaniard, and only sported red garters and rosettes in his shoes.” But sometimes even misfits can succeed—or at least be offered the opportunity to succeed.
FOR MOST OF the time that Borromini was toiling as an architect for a small religious order, Bernini was working as a sculptor for the great. At least during the early years of Borromini’s independent career, the two didn’t compete head-to-head. In fact, Bernini is known to have assisted Borromini in trying to obtain a post. In 1632, as one of the last favors he did for his former assistant, Bernini wrote a letter recommending that Borromini be offered the position of architect of La Sapienza, Rome’s university.
Bernini’s motives for such a collegial gesture aren’t precisely clear. Perhaps he wanted to keep Borromini from leaving St. Peter’s (the logic being that if Borromini had another post he owed to Bernini, he might be willing to stay on at St. Peter’s). Perhaps it was a quid pro quo, a reward for Borromini’s silence concerning Bernini’s questionable activities at St. Peter’s and the credit he took for Borromini’s work there. Or perhaps Bernini honestly felt that Borromini was the best man for the post.
Whatever the reason, Bernini’s letter secured the papal appointment for Borromini and provided Borromini with the opportunity to create his other great ecclesiastical masterpiece, Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza.
But Sant’Ivo was several years in the future. While Borromini was at San Carlino, Bernini was working on Urban’s tomb. Even before Borromini had left St. Peter’s, Urban had assigned Bernini the task of carving his monument, which would be placed on the main floor of the basilica. What Bernini fashioned over the next twenty years—completing it four years after Urban’s death—was a reinterpretation of Michelangelo’s Medici tomb in Florence. Sitting atop a marble plinth a dozen feet in the air and garnished with a handful of bronze Barberini bees is a huge statue of Urban. Twice life-size and made of gilded bronze, the statue depicts the pope dressed in the heavy, formal garments of his office, his right hand raised in a final, eternal benediction. The sculpture has a dark, brooding presence, at once sober and sobering, and is in sharp contrast to what is set beneath it, closer to the ground. Arranged on either side of a bronzed and gilded sarcophagus are statues of two women, both of white marble. On the left is Divine Love or Charity, who holds in her arms (rather awkwardly—it looks as if she’s about to drop it) an overlarge and unwieldy baby. Her attention is distracted by a crying toddler at her knee, who reaches up to her for attention. Across from her is Justice, who gazes heavenward, as if pondering the inequities of man’s brief time on earth. Her head leans on her right hand, while her left holds loosely a stone Sword of Truth, which leans almost casually against her upper arm.
The silent, solemn centerpiece of the monument itself, the figure that commands attention, is the shrouded bronze skeleton that lies on top of the sarcophagus, its gilded wings resting lightly along it, as if it were there only long enough to record in the Book of Life the passing of Urbanus VIII Barberinus Pont. Max. It is a pointed reminder of the transience of power, fame, and life itself.
In 1632, while he worked on Urban’s tomb, Bernini began his most extraordinary ecclesiastical bust, that of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, Bernini’s first patron.
Given the amount of work that Urban was pressing on Bernini, it is remarkable that the pope allowed his prodigy time to carve the bust for a private patron, powerful though Cardinal Borghese was. But the cardinal was a friend of both Urban’s and Bernini’s, so it’s possible that the commission was pressed upon Bernini by the pope himself.
It was a propitious choice, as Bernini carved a bust that Howard Hibbard called “a milestone in the history of sculpture and one of the finest portraits of all time.” This is doubly true, perhaps, because there are actually two busts of Borghese, and the story behind their creation is as extraordinary as the existence of the busts themselves.
According to Filippo Baldinucci, Bernini had been working on the bust of Cardinal Borghese and “was almost completed when a mishap occurred. A crack appeared in the marble across the whole of the forehead.” Bernini, who, Baldinucci said, was “very bold,” decided not to scrap the bust, as most sculptors undoubtedly would have. Instead, he ordered another piece of marble and, “without telling a soul,” began to carve another, nearly identical bust.
“In order to free himself, and even more the Cardinal, from the embarrassment resulting from bringing such news [of the imperfect bust], he completed the bust in a little more than two weeks,” though there is some question about the actual time it took him to complete it. The second one was, Baldinucci notes, “not one jot less in beauty.”
When the cardinal arrived at Bernini’s studio to see the finished work, Bernini blithely showed him the first bust, “whose defect in the polished state appeared even more prominent and disfiguring.” Such was the cardinal’s esteem for Bernini that the cardinal hid his anguish “in order not to distress” the sculptor, Baldinucci says.
The sly Bernini—in one version of the story, the translator used the word “astute”—feigned ignorance at the cardinal’s disappointment. Instead, Bernini chatted amiably with him, never acknowledging or even mentioning the defect in the bust, which is obvious even today, marring the forehead like a gash.
A few minutes passed, the story goes, and Bernini finally took pity on his disillusioned friend. Without warning the cardinal, he uncovered the second bust. The response, Baldinucci says, was immediate and enthusiastic, “since relief is more satisfying when the suffering has been most severe.” The joy that Borghese “displayed upon seeing the second portrait without defect made very evident how much pain he had felt when he beheld the first one,” Baldinucci explains. “The diligent care that Bernini employed to avoid offending him pleased the cardinal so much.”
In both busts Bernini managed to capture the essence of Borghese. Even though there are subtle differences—the two are on view at the Galleria Borghese—they achieve a verisimilitude, a vitality, that other busts of the time lack.
Bernini once described how he approached trying to capture his subjects in stone by using a metaphor of light and shadow: “If of an evening you put a candle behind a person so that his shadow is thrown onto a wall, you will recognize the person from the shadow, for it is a true saying that no one has his head on his shoulders in the same way as anyone else, and the same is true of the rest. The first thing to keep in mind, to achieve resemblance in a portrait, is the whole person before the details.”
But in the busts of Borghese, Bernini accomplished more than just capturing the shadow of a man. What he did was involve Borghese in the drama. Perhaps better than any other artist of his time, Bernini understood the psychological impact that surprise has on a viewer and his reaction; it can be everything. Bernini understood how to manage a person’s response, be it in front of a sculpted piece of marble or inside a church.
It is this skill, this intuitive ability to control, even manipulate, a person’s reaction, that was one of Bernini’s great gifts. Few of his contemporaries understood it; fewer still shared it, least of all Borromini. Bernini was an exceptional artist who was also a master showman. He was a conjurer par excellence, the Houdini of his age. Throughout his career he used this genius for surprise, and always to his advantage.
Borromini had no such aptitude. It was a talent he could never hope to learn. He would pay the price for such a deficiency throughout his career.
But first he would enjoy the triumph of seeing a rival stumble.