JUST AS BERNINI WAS GRAPPLING WITH HIS greatest personal crisis (or at least his most publicly personal one), he also found himself embroiled in the most potentially damaging dispute of his career. Its timing was deplorable, coming when Bernini was particularly vulnerable to criticism about his architecture.
And at the center of the tumult was Borromini.
The controversy could have ended Bernini’s career as an architect, and what Borromini said and did gave every indication that he hoped it would. And for a time Bernini was ousted from the summit of Rome’s artistic firmament and was plunged into a professional purgatory.
The beginning of Bernini’s problems can be pinpointed to January 1637, when he was directed by the Reverenda Fabbrica, at Urban’s instruction, to begin building two campanili, or bell towers, to stand at the northern and southern ends of Maderno’s much-lambasted façade of St. Peter’s. The bell towers were the first significant architectural commission at St. Peter’s that Bernini attempted on his own, and he became the latest in a litany of architects who had been directed by papal enthusiasm but hindered by the fickleness of Mother Earth.
Maderno’s initial plans in the early 1600s had called for lower, less obvious bell towers to be built above the chapels closest to the entrance of the church. But after Pope Paul V visited the construction site in September 1612, he revised the plans for the campanili. They would be built, according to a papal avviso, or bulletin, una di qua et l’altra di la della facciata—one at each end of the façade.
The pope’s decision to frame the façade with bell towers was made without consulting Maderno. Paul hoped that by moving the bell towers forward and extending the length of the church front, the façade would appear larger and in proportion.
Work began soon after the edict, and almost immediately problems arose with the south tower (on the left side of the façade). Art historian Sarah McPhee explains that in late 1618 Maderno stumbled across subterranean springs below where the foundations were to be built “that were dangerously destabilizing.” Giovanni Battista Costaguti, the pope’s majordomo, told the diarist Marc Antonio Valena: “The ground was so sandy, it gave way if you as much as looked at it.” It was particularly troublesome in the area where the south campanile was to be built.
In an attempt to ensure that the towers would stay where the pope wanted them, Maderno dug their foundations deeper than normal, more than 30 meters (almost 100 feet), and he ordered bricks and hay to be shoveled into the trenches to help bind the earth. Maderno also concocted a series of pilings in the ground, which he hoped would keep the soil from moving. He even had a foundation of travertine placed in the shaft to use as a base. In his history of St. Peter’s, Giovanni Battista Costaguti indicates that Maderno dug so deep that he ended up beneath the water level of the Tiber, “where a torrent of water revealed itself.”
When Pope Paul V died in 1621, both the north and south towers were under construction, but even then it was known that there were structural problems with the south tower. The immense, arched supports of the campanili that were built aboveground, which look like elaborate pylons for a bridge over a river that was drained long ago, were begun at Paul’s command and soon reached the height of the basilica’s roof, but Maderno built no higher. Their presence at each end of the façade made St. Peter’s look too wide. What the façade needed was something tall to dispel the sense that the church front was too broad.
Maderno had long been criticized for distorting the church’s proportions as he turned a centralized church into a longitudinal one. (He had finished the façade before the rest of the basilica so that it towered over the Borgo like a backdrop to a play.) He was castigated for designing a church that made it impossible for anyone, pope or pilgrim, to see the full outline of the dome when standing directly in front of the basilica. This unexpected consequence of lengthening the nave was a blunder whose irony lingers today, like the brackish odor of the sluggish Tiber, given that Michelangelo’s dome is visible from everywhere in Rome except in front of St. Peter’s.
Almost two decades after Maderno began, Bernini was called upon to build his campanili upon the foundations laid by his predecessor.
These problems came upon the heels of a rumor that circulated in April 1636 that Bernini’s work on the crossing piers of the dome had been substandard. They had weakened the dome, the critics said, and made an old crack in the dome even larger. There was even speculation that the spiral staircases he had installed inside the dome’s supports put the dome in such peril that they should be filled in immediately. “Bernini’s competence as an engineer and architect was already under attack,” McPhee notes.
Bernini had survived such ridicule before. He believed that it was only idle chitchat circulated by the jealous. He was so confident in the dome’s stability, in fact, that he wrote and mounted a comic play about the hubbub—though one observer noted, “[I]t is believed…that Bernini will retreat to Naples if the dome threatens to become more dangerous.” His was a cautious bravado.
Urban was committed to proceeding with the bell towers. By restarting construction of the campanili, the pope believed that Bernini’s new designs would give St. Peter’s a more majestic appearance and bring a new noble dignity to the basilica.
But even at the Vatican, miracles are in short supply.
Bernini understandably abandoned Maderno’s plans for low towers topped by octagon-shaped tiers decorated by flags and crosses. He proposed (at the pope’s request) his own design: grand, three-story towers that would cost nearly 70,000 scudi to build—a breathtaking price and a far cry from the 30,000 scudi that Maderno’s towers would have cost. (Inflation was relatively low during the seventeenth century, so these numbers are roughly comparable.) Urban wanted—and Bernini obliged—an eye-catching addition to the skyline of St. Peter’s that reflected a newer, bolder taste.
According to Filippo Baldinucci, “Bernini not only made the design for [the campanili] but also a fine model which gained the approval of that learned pontiff [i.e., Urban] and the applause of the very eminent cardinals who were members of the Congregation of the Fabbrica of St. Peter’s.”
What is more, and perhaps part of the explanation for what happened later, “it was the Pope’s custom, whenever buildings were to be erected in places where foundations of other buildings might exist, to take necessary precautions in order to ascertain if, in fact, there were any such foundations. He therefore issued a specified order to the Congregation to call in two of the best master builders then in the city of Rome, who, since the time of Paul, had been employed in laying foundations.” These worthies, whom Baldinucci identifies as Giovanni Colarmeno and Pietro Paolo (he supplied no last name—perhaps it was Drei), “attested to the complete soundness and stability of the foundations so positively that the Pope and the Congregation were satisfied that it would be well to give new orders to Bernini to continue the construction of the bell towers.”
In other words, if there were problems in the future, others—the master builders, the Reverenda Fabbrica, and even Urban—would bear the responsibility.
After having the master builders determine that the foundations were stable enough for further construction—even though, as Joseph Connors notes, “Borromini, who knew Maderno’s façade and the capacity of its foundations from first-hand experience, warned that [Bernini’s campanili] would be too heavy”—Bernini proceeded. He had every reason to be confident, Baldinucci argues. “The prudent artist had reason to turn to the enterprise with security, not to mention the probability of the great honor that the work would bring him.”
On May 20, 1638, Bernini celebrated the laying of a new foundation stone for his dramatic and grandiose tower design. The 160 muratori (masons), scarpellini (stonecutters), and convicts who were to work on the project were treated to a special meal to mark the auspicious occasion.
The design Bernini settled on was an extravagant arrangement that used marble and travertine columns and deep recesses to contrast light and shadow as the eye moved 30 meters (about 100 feet) up the campanile. Baldinucci described the tower as “formed of two orders of columns and pilasters, the first order being Corinthian…. The second order was made up of a base…and in the middle of the archway opening ran a balustrade.” Pedestals, columns, and pilasters were “gracefully set” around the tower. The attic tier was “formed of pilasters and two columns on either side of the open archway in the center.” It was to be topped by what he called a “pyramidal finial” that was “made of the same stone as the other three orders.”
Bernini kept Maderno’s original bases, which had tall archways that allowed traffic to pass through them, and he placed above them a story of what Torgil Magnuson says were “no less than twenty-four columns, while above there were eight columns of bigio antico taken from Hadrian’s Villa.” Bernini used Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite columns and capitals arranged around three tiers decorated with the omnipresent Barberini bees that swarmed over Rome. Four statues of Victory were to be placed on each corner of the campanile; they were to hold the coat of arms of Urban VIII and were to be carved by an unexpected artist: the disgraced and lubricious Luigi Bernini. In October 1639, the Congregazione asked Luigi, still in exile in Bologna, to travel to the marble quarries of Carrara to personally select the most durable marble for the figures. Luigi agreed to go, on one condition: “only if his brother approved the request,” McPhee says. Apparently the younger brother was willing to let bygones be bygones as long as his elder brother was, too. Bernini agreed, and Luigi left for Carrara. Upon his return from exile, Luigi was promoted to soprastante of the project.
Even during its construction, the bell tower was an impressive sight. During a trip to Rome in 1639, an English student known as Nicholas Stone the Younger saw the campanile and was struck by it enough to record a description, using somewhat erratic spelling. The pilasters, he wrote, were “cloath’d with white marble fluted, the little pillosters or pedestalls under the impost of the arches wrost and inlay’d with diverse coulours of marble. All the altars besydes the Maggior are made in one manner, each having 2 large collomes antique taken from Therma Dioclesiano [Baths of Diocletian], being in number 44; and to conclude absolutely it is the most marvelouse fabrike and best composed that is in the world of modern times.” Not precisely poetry, but the enthusiasm is obvious.
The laborers worked quickly, for by June 1641 a third story—made in wood to Bernini’s designs by Giovanni Battista Soria, a carpenter, and Guidobaldo Abbatini, a painter—was ready to be set in place in time for June 29, the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. The tier measured 60 palmi, which is nearly 13 meters (43 feet) high, and it was fashioned to appear from the ground as close to the completed story as possible. It was decorated, Tod Marder says, with “festoons and dolphins, shells and bees, and crossed keys of St. Peter, and eight candelabra issued carved flames.” The wood was painted to look like travertine, and the sculptural details were gilded. The tower rose 290 palmi in all, nearly 65 meters (more than 200 feet)—an extraordinary height.
When the pope inspected the progress just before the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul on June 28, 1641, to everyone’s surprise, including Bernini’s, he didn’t like what he saw. The bell tower wasn’t grand enough. Marc Antonio Valena recorded that the top tier “appeared too small,” while the diarist Giacinto Gigli wrote that it “did not give satisfaction.” Urban ordered it torn down—a decision that cost the papal treasury some 25,000 scudi and Bernini considerable embarrassment.
Bernini had modified his plan for the bell towers, making the top story lighter to ease the weight on the weak foundations below, because troubling cracks had been discovered in the towers’ foundations and inside St. Peter’s. The pope thought this modification lessened the grandeur of the campanili, which irritated him. Gigli wrote that Urban chastised Bernini, who was said to have fallen “gravely ill,” though he recovered when he later received the pope’s blessing.
In a set of directions that Bernini sent to Soria, he demanded that the painter be careful, as the tower “grows in such a manner that it is necessary to take away some parts” (another translation uses “intervene”). But Bernini knew the importance of getting these bell towers right: “[I]t is very important to my reputation…it is a most pressing matter to me.”
On the surface this seems logical enough: the careful, slightly querulous order of an obsessive artist. But it was more than that. This “pressing matter” Bernini spoke of takes on a new, darker meaning in September, when an avviso announces on the twenty-eighth: “The Cavaliere Bernini, who has undertaken to build a campanile at St. Peter’s, has failed and the great weight of the tower will bring the façade down. This having come to the notice of the pope, he called Bernini to him and severely reprimanded him for not having wanted to take the advice of anyone.”
Cracks had been found in the façade, and some feared that the campanile and the southern front of the church were in danger of collapse. Even more worrying, at least to Bernini, was the pope’s first public rebuke of his favored artist. Bernini’s reputation was under siege.
Yet once the pope and the Congregazione vented their disapproval, concern seems to have subsided for a while. Work on the north tower began in earnest, more travertine was delivered to the building site, and the workers were paid in December 1641. In March 1642 a model of one of the Victories that Luigi was sculpting was hoisted into place to see how it looked from the ground.
But the confidence was as temporary as Luigi’s statue. At a meeting of the Congregazione on July 28, 1642, a decree was signed that stopped all work on the towers above the roof.
For Bernini, the humiliation must have been profound. His reputation had been struck a severe blow and lay wounded for everyone to see.
He had blundered spectacularly. Whether it was his fault alone—after all, he had the initial support of Urban and the Congregazione, as well as the expertise of two capomaestri—the blame was placed squarely at his feet. Without Borromini’s technical expertise, or even Luigi’s pragmatism, Bernini had no one working for him who was reliable enough to tell him that the foundations were not strong enough to carry the weight of his ambitious upper stories; there was no one to point out, as someone had done during the design phase of the Baldacchino, that the ribbing wouldn’t support his statue of Christ the Redeemer.
In both the Baldacchino and the bell-tower projects, Bernini had been more interested in the drama of the architecture than in engineering stability. Now he was paying the price for his carelessness.
Work on the south tower was halted immediately. In August 1641, the wooden model was removed from the top of the campanile and the tower was stabilized. Work continued on the north tower, however; but on July 28, 1642, the workmen were directed to build no higher than the first story without first getting permission from the Congregazione. When they sought it, they were told to stop working.
The issue of the bell towers was at an impasse. No one was quite sure how to proceed.
A contemporary engraving by Carlo Fontana, who worked for Bernini and who after his death became architect of St. Peter’s, illustrates Bernini’s plans for the campanili. The bottom story is square, with heavy stone supports set at a diagonal at each corner, which blunt the corners the way Borromini had at the cloister at San Carlino. But here they look heavy, stolid. On each side of the tower are two pairs of freestanding columns, which support a smaller story above with similar decoration, though an arch stands in the center of each side. At the top, where the actual bells were to be hung, Bernini placed smaller openings—some arched, some not—that were surmounted by the Barberini crest and, perhaps in tribute to the Baldacchino, dolphin-shaped volutes, whose tails came together at the very apex of the tower to support an orb. On top of this sphere, two papal keys support a large cross that towers over the city. It’s a fussy combination of somber stone and restless ornament.
The bell towers were the talk of Rome. Nicholas Stone noted that “the upper part of the campanile or steple of St Peeters att Rome taken downe. In the same month the Cauellyer Bernine sicke to death and [at] once dead as itt was reported.” Another Englishman, Richard Lassels, writes that Bernini’s disgrace was caused by “a crack in the roof of the Portch of St. Peter’s” he had built.
What happened next seems, to modern sensibilities at least, odd:
Nothing.
Work stopped on the south tower and further work on the north tower slowed until June 1643, when it, too, stopped altogether.
The cause could well have been, as McPhee argues persuasively, that Urban was distracted by war. His attempts to wrest control of the small but prosperous Duchy of Castro from the Farnese family and place it in Barberini hands was ambitious, but it ended in disaster. The pope’s armies were routed, and hostilities between the pope and Odoardo Farnese, the duke of Parma and Piacenza, dragged on almost until Urban’s death in July 1644.
The papacy paid a high price for Urban’s ambition. The Castro war—la guerra di Castro—was incredibly expensive, draining 5 million scudi from the Vatican treasury. And it demanded as much attention as money, leaving little of either to solve the difficulties of the bell towers.
So no one did.
ON JULY 29, 1644, Urban VIII died. And in Rome, the world changed.
Urban’s passing wasn’t unexpected. In fact, Bernini had been preparing for it. Avery notes that on July 16, 1644, less than two weeks before the pope’s death, Bernini wrote to the powerful cardinal Jules Mazarin in France, whom he knew when Mazarin lived in Rome, to see how open the French would be to receiving him. It was, in essence, a request for asylum, and it’s clear Bernini thought that it was possible, even likely, that Urban’s death could topple him from his position as swiftly as it was expected to do for the Barberini.
Mazarin’s reply was swift and generous. The French, the cardinal assured Bernini, would welcome him with enthusiasm. He offered Bernini a salary and the promise of the title of Architect to the King.
Six weeks after Urban’s death, on September 15, Cardinal Giambattista Pamphili was elected pope. He chose the name Innocent X. A Roman by birth and a lawyer by training, Innocent wanted to rectify the excesses and ambitions of Urban’s near-devastating extravagance, even going so far as to choose a conciliatory verse from the Book of Kings as his papal motto: “Give thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people.” He would need all the wisdom and understanding he could muster, because the papacy had a debt of 8 million scudi and its political influence in Italy and beyond was waning. For the first time in nearly a thousand years, the pope was no longer the most powerful man in Europe.
But Innocent had little time to contemplate the decline in papal power. More pressing problems demanded his attention, literally outside his window. He focused almost immediately on completing St. Peter’s and the quandary of how to repair the cracks in its walls.
Innocent was blessed by a group of advisers who could help him with these challenges, particularly Father Virgilio Spada, the preposito of the Oratorians. This discriminating and conscientious priest, whom Innocent appointed his elemosiniere segreto, or secret almoner, a job that required Spada to manage and disburse papal money to charity, was much more than an accountant. As the pope’s closest, most trusted architectural adviser, he also became the man to whom Innocent, Borromini, and Bernini turned during the crisis of the bell towers.
Spada shunned the limelight, and at first he was reluctant to enter papal service. He was happy working with the Oratorians, content with a life of piety and service. But Innocent insisted, and after Spada’s brother, Cardinal Bernardino Spada, another of Innocent’s advisers, spoke to him, Spada gave in. By October 1644, he had left the comfortable confines Borromini had designed for the Oratorians and was living amid the papal retinue at the Vatican.
Spada did not have long to wait before Innocent called upon his building expertise. By early 1645, Innocent had chosen him to untangle the knotty problem of the bell towers. (There is even evidence to suggest that almost immediately after Innocent was elected, he asked Spada to write a report on the cracks in the façade.) For the next year, eight cardinals from the Reverenda Fabbrica met regularly to discuss, debate, and determine what—and perhaps even more important, who—caused the disturbing-looking cracks—McPhee calls them “fissures”—in the façade. They also addressed what Baldinucci describes as the “gilded stucco ornaments” of the vault in the benediction loggia, the long, arched mezzanine level above the main entrance of the church from which the pope issues his blessings to the multitudes who collect in St. Peter’s Square. Spada served as the inquiry’s facilitator, providing the cardinals with the documents and memoranda they needed to reach their conclusions and to determine the most prudent course of action. Such a strategy—meticulous and orderly, careful and attentive—suited Innocent’s cautious, legalistic sensibility and, it could be argued, the basilica itself.
The pope gave Bernini the opportunity to explain the cracks. The artist’s response was both honest and canny. The towers, he said, had been built on the foundations laid by Carlo Maderno—foundations, he reminded the pope, that the Congregazione had approved after two capomaestri judged it safe to build. The cracking, Bernini thought, was part of the basilica’s natural and inevitable settling, and nothing more. But if there was a problem with the campanile, it wasn’t solely Bernini’s fault; others were just as culpable. Bernini asserted that his tower was still sound and straight, but to placate the pope, notes McPhee, “Bernini suggested that soundings be made of the foundations” of the south tower as well as those of St. Peter’s.
It was a shrewd suggestion. The sounding, or tasto, began in early February 1645, and after a false start, a satisfactory vertical shaft was dug in front of the basilica near the southernmost door. Another shaft was dug perpendicular to the first one, McPhee writes, “straight back to through the mass of Maderno’s foundation ‘to find the crack and to identify the material surrounding it on one side and the other.’” In small groups of one or two, a number of clerics, architects, and builders descended the narrow shaft to inspect Maderno’s foundations, and several registered their findings in drawings, including the soprastante, Pietro Paolo Drei, and Francesco Borromini. At the end of March, the Congregazione convened a meeting to hear what the architects had concluded from their trips into the earth.
The cardinals met on March 27, 1645, at the residence of the Congregazione’s prefect, eighty-four-year-old Cardinal Marcello Lante, who lived in a palazzo on the Piazza di Caprettari, near Piazza San Eustachio.
The assembled cardinals heard from nine men, who in separate meetings detailed the problems they had seen and outlined their solutions. Several opinions were expressed, and two architects, Martino Longhi and Cipriano Artusini, argued that Maderno’s foundations were fundamentally flawed.
Borromini, who was one of the architects to give testimony, disagreed. If the foundations were as unsound as some claimed, he argued, St. Peter’s would have moved more drastically than it had. He believed that the basilica’s walls had cracked because of the extreme weight placed on them by Bernini’s bell towers: They were too heavy for Maderno’s foundation. Bernini had overbuilt.
Borromini drew a profile of the foundation near the tasto, which showed that a window on the western side of the base was leaning. On the other side of the sheet of paper he wrote: “The ruin of the campanile, which will drag the façade with it because they have been joined together, proceeds from nothing other than that the foundation of this campanile was made to support a single story above the façade, which was even rather narrow and open so as not to add a lot of weight.” According to Borromini, the tower was three times higher and six times heavier than it should have been. “The prudent architect,” he wrote, “does not first erect the building and then make a sounding to see if he finds a crack in the foundation.”
Bernini, of course, wasn’t present when Borromini spoke before the Congregazione, but it didn’t take long for the news of Borromini’s denunciation to reach him. The criticism by his former assistant must have been both professionally and personally galling, piercing his reputation as an architect at its weakest point—his lack of technical skill—and wounding his reputation as an artist known for always exceeding expectations.
In response, Bernini turned to the Spada brothers for help. When he heard that Cardinal Giambattista Pallotta, one of the Congregazione’s members investigating the controversy, wanted another look at the basilica’s foundations, he asked Bernardino Spada to prevail on his brother Virgilio to accompany Pallotta, to ensure that Bernini’s point of view was represented.
The Congregazione met again on June 8, 1645, and this time Innocent was present, as were several architects and engineers, including both Bernini and Borromini. It was an important meeting, because Spada had concluded that the façade of St. Peter’s was in no danger of collapse. In a comprehensive and well-researched report, drawing from expert testimony, including that of Giacomo Grimaldi, a former canon and archivist at St. Peter’s, Spada presented a lucid account of the façade’s construction, pointing out that Maderno had been aware of the congenitally poor construction conditions at the basilica’s southeastern end even before he began building the campanili. In fact, the Constantinian basilica had had problems in the same area. In addition, Grimaldi mentions that an ancient quarry may have been on the site and that clay could have been removed from the area to create bricks for buildings during the reigns of Nero and Gaius. The creation of Imperial Rome may have contributed to Bernini’s ruin at St. Peter’s.
Spada reminded the Congregazione that in 1618 Maderno had forty-two deep wells dug, which were then filled in with stones, flint, and lime. The hope was that this would help support the basilica’s enormous weight. As a result, Maderno’s façade, and later Bernini’s south tower, were built on two different foundations, and Spada concluded that this was the cause of the current crisis.
While the report may be read as an indictment of Bernini’s competence in building such a heavy bell tower on such flimsy foundations, Spada comes to the architect’s defense in subtle, precise ways. McPhee describes how Spada employed a metaphor used by the architect Leon Battista Alberti: “When an ox and a deer run across the same stretch of muddy land, the footsteps of the deer will be deeper and more visible, even though the ox may weigh six times as much as the deer. This occurs because of the concentration of the deer’s weight on the small points of its hooves.” Spada’s point was that weight concentrated in one area pushes deeper into the ground than a greater weight on a broader area. His example of the ox’s weight—six times that of the deer’s—was not accidental. It was an artful rebuttal to Borromini’s contention that the tower was six times heavier than it should be.
Bernini’s mistake, Spada concluded, was building a heavy tower on top of two foundations that had settled at different rates. The flaw was in the tower’s location, not its construction. His recommendation was to leave the towers alone. Let them settle, he advised, as they naturally will. Repair or replace the sections of the façade and tower when it’s necessary, but neither is in any danger of collapse.
This advice was in complete disagreement with Borromini’s conclusions. Though the two were friends and had actually worked together to collect data and information about the problem, they had reached diametric conclusions.
As Spada was the pope’s architectural adviser, it would take either a fool or a zealot to contradict him before Innocent himself. Yet that is precisely what Borromini did.
At the meeting, Borromini presented four drawings, three of the south tower and one of the north. He used these to argue that the size and scope of Bernini’s towers were indeed too big. He claimed they relied too heavily on the wall and supports of St. Peter’s. In addition, he placed (on paper) a duplicate of the flawed south tower over the spot where its twin would be built to the north and pointed out that if it was constructed over the Cappella Paolina, which is actually in the base of the north tower, the tower would devastate it.
It was a clever, audacious argument. Even if the Congregazione accepted Spada’s contention that the south tower was fundamentally sound, the construction of the north tower as envisioned by Bernini posed another series of worries. Borromini attacked Bernini on two fronts: the instability of the south tower and the potential problems with the north.
Figuring out who to believe in this disagreement was a function of whom you listened to: Spada, Borromini, or Bernini. Domenico Bernini, as expected, claims that Borromini was driven by spite: “He declared publicly against Bernini in the pope’s presence, with all of his heart and all his strength.”
Baldinucci’s position was equally sympathetic toward Bernini. He criticized Bernini’s critics who, in his opinion, “quickly took up arms and said more against him than ever before. They reiterated constantly that the bell tower had shifted its position and that this had caused the cracks in the vault as in the outer façade. They said that these were the ruinous results visited on Rome by those popes who were pleased to give all the work to one man alone, although there was an abundance of meritorious men in the city.” With Urban’s death, the carping against Bernini grew bolder, fiercer. “People whom Pope Innocent X trusted and who, though he thought them very experienced, were on the contrary little informed concerning these arts, were made use of”—that is, Borromini and others like him. The iron grip Bernini had on Vatican patronage had been broken.
Cipriano Artusini, a Camaldolese monk and one of the men who had inspected the foundations by descending into the shaft, thought that Maderno had laid the south tower’s foundations improperly, but he also criticized Bernini for building on them in the first place: “If it were me, I would not have had the daring to erect such a heavy tower as one sees,” he said.
Amid the turmoil and contention, Bernini remained curiously silent, his normally confident voice muted. Whether it was by intention or by happenstance, very little of what Bernini said about this very public problem was recorded. It is Borromini’s voice that is heard above all—clear, penetrating, unequivocal. Borromini the technician, the confidant of Maderno, knew what he was talking about. Bernini, the well-connected protégé of a now-dead pope, was out of his element.
Instead of fighting back publicly, Bernini tried to save himself and his reputation quietly, behind the scenes.
He appealed to Virgilio Spada to entreat his brother not to leave town and to attend the next meeting of the Congregazione “to do him the favor of intervening” for him with the pope. Bernini was trying to use the time-tested ploy of relying on one’s most powerful and well-placed allies to come to his aid. Apparently he feared that his arguments, like his foundation, needed further buttressing.
In a letter to his brother Virgilio, Bernardino writes that he had met with Bernini and “told him that Borromini is coming with me [to Tivoli] and that consequently there will be no competition” at the next meeting. It was obvious that Bernardino thought Bernini was worried that Borromini would sway Innocent.
Perhaps Bernini was right. But Innocent was a prudent man, inclined to take a cautious approach to resolving the problem of the towers. Despite Borromini’s warnings about the instability of the south campanile, McPhee notes, “the pope did not wish to abandon the tower project. In fact, at this point, his objective seems to have been deliberate perseverance and the pursuit of further information.” At the conclusion of the June 8 meeting, the pope directed the architects to draw up their design solutions and present them at the next meeting, which was to be held on October 9, again at the palazzo of Cardinal Lante. The pope wanted to know what each man thought about keeping the bell towers as they were, and if so, how to repair them. If not, what did they propose instead?
It was, in essence, a competition.
The rivalry between Bernini and Borromini was about to intensify.
FOUR MONTHS LATER, on October 9, eight artists and architects, including Bernini, presented their solutions. As the official Architect of St. Peter’s, Bernini also was expected to put forward his proposals for decorating the nave. According to a discorso, or official report, written about the contest, the Congregazione received campanile designs from Bernini, Andrea Bolgi, Pietro Paolo Drei, Martino Longhi, Giovanni Battista Mola, Santi Moschetti, and the father-and-son duo of Carlo and Girolamo Rainaldi.
The anonymous author of the discorso, who could have been Virgilio Spada, indicates that designs by Borromini and Paolo Maruscelli, the architect Borromini had replaced at the Oratory, had been expected by the Congregazione but did not appear, though Borromini is known to have at least mused on paper about an alternative to Bernini’s towers. His proposed towers were lighter, less cumbersome-looking alternatives to Bernini’s and were more in keeping with the towers Maderno originally had in mind. Instead of two rows of columns, Borromini envisioned one row, which he situated firmly above Maderno’s foundations, answering Longhi’s stinging charge that Bernini’s were “situate in falso,” placed over a void. McPhee believes that Borromini drew up these plans prior to the meeting of the Congregazione “but then thought better of it…. His sketches remained private thoughts”—a personal solution to a public problem.
Perhaps Borromini expected the Congregazione to turn to him in desperate appeal: Please fix the problem, please solve our dilemma. Perhaps he wasn’t convinced that his designs were worthy to adorn the façade of St. Peter’s. Perhaps he was simply too busy with other projects to turn his full attention to the problem. Or perhaps he just wasn’t willing to let others have input on his own work—or receive credit for his brilliance. Whatever the reason, Borromini stood on the sidelines, ready to critique and to crucify.
Some of his detractors even believed that he had the ear of the pope and was whispering denunciations of Bernini’s towers and the artist himself into it—a kind of Iago of architecture.
Once the drawings were presented to the Congregazione, they were shown to several architects for their opinion and input, including Borromini, Maruscelli, and Bernini. According to Martino Longhi, who was also shown the drawings—he was “given the right not to approve a single design”—there was no clear winner. However, Longhi did agree with Borromini’s assertion that the south tower’s weight must be lightened to ease the strain on the foundations (though Longhi also wanted the foundations reinforced). Borromini’s point of view was gaining credence.
Four months passed until the next general meeting of the Congregazione on February 20, 1646, when the designs were formally presented to the pope at the Vatican (though there are indications that discussions had occurred in the interim). Bernini had revised his designs based on Carlo Rainaldi’s radical notion of lopping off the heavy attic tier of the façade and building the bell towers directly on their foundations, an idea that was greeted with enthusiasm by architect and cleric alike.
At the meeting, which was attended by six architects, Longhi again argued for keeping Bernini’s existing towers if their foundations could be repaired and supported. One of Bernini’s new designs was pronounced the most appropriate because, as the discorso notes, its elements were “most proportionate to the whole, and most natural, and is more solid and of greater magnificence.” The pope agreed, Baldinucci said: “It seemed a good idea to him that the weight of the bell tower should be lightened by removing the attic story and that then the foundations could be strengthened.” Consensus seemed about to blow through the Vatican like a warm spring breeze after a long, difficult winter.
Three days later, on February 23, the Congregazione met again and learned the pope’s decision.
“A campanile that has recently been constructed above the façade of the Vatican basilica is to be totally demolished down to the level of the Apostles [i.e., the roofline] and the dismantled stone placed above the flanks of the church in order to be used in the construction of new towers on the same site, built according to a design currently being studied and considered.”
Such an abrupt announcement was surprising enough, given the collective agreement that had been reached only a few days before and the general endorsement that Bernini’s revised design had received. But when the south tower was dismantled, stone by stone over eleven months, ending in February 1647, the pieces, called spolia, were stored above the nave, like out-of-fashion furniture banished to the attic, and no new construction was begun. The denigration of Bernini and his reputation began anew.
Even more startling, some evidence suggests that Bernini’s investments were seized by the Vatican to recoup the Congregazione’s expenses. Carlo Cartari, one of the pope’s advisers, wrote in a letter that “for the claims of damages for the campanile Pope Innocent sequestered about 30,000 scudi” that was due Bernini.
Innocent never declared his reasons for his abrupt about-face, and his silence on the topic prompted speculation to bubble forth, like foul-smelling water from a sulfur spring. According to Baldinucci, Innocent and his entourage left Rome to visit one of his estates “for repose,” and during his time there “enemies of Bernini and the Barberini family, especially a certain person semiskilled in art whom the Pope greatly trusted, were also present.” Baldinucci explains that these people “knew how to use such opportunities to persuade the Pope by intensive arguments” to change his mind about the campanile and prevailed upon him to have it torn down instead of trying to save it.
Baldinucci’s criticism of Borromini is even bolder than that of the shadowy figure in the pope’s entourage. “It was the opinion of many that this war against Bernini was waged not so much because of dislike of the artist personally and of the memory of Urban VIII as because of the desire that, when it happened that the Pope for some reason would become displeased with Bernini, he would then appoint Borromini to succeed him in the office of architect of St. Peter’s. Borromini had been Bernini’s disciple, but, in truth, had little gratitude toward him.” For evidence of this, Baldinucci points out that Borromini condemned Bernini’s towers “without esteem or respect. He alone inveighed against Bernini with his whole heart and soul.”
Domenico Bernini is more circumspect, alluding to the reality that “since from the unexpected novelty of hostile encounters not even the innocent can escape, it easily happened that the Cavalier also remained exposed to the blows of that storm which for many years disturbed the court of Rome and Italy…. During all of those four years, which briefly gave scope to his rivals, he bore that fate, not with continual dissimulation, nor with useless laments—which are wont neither to offend nor defend—but by finding in his virtue the consolation and remedy for those misfortunes.”
The historian Rudolf Wittkower also acknowledges that Borromini “came forward as Bernini’s most dangerous critic and adversary” in the debate over the bell tower. “His guns were directed against technical inefficiency, the very point where—he knew—Bernini was most vulnerable.”
Bernini fired back with money, the best weapon he had. In a 1646 letter to the Duke of Modena, his agent Francesco Mantovani writes from Rome that Bernini gave money to Donna Olimpia Pamphili, Innocent’s powerful (and overpowering) sister-in-law, and a diamond given him by Henrietta Maria of England to Cardinal Camillo Pamphili, Innocent’s nephew and perhaps the “certain person semiskilled in art whom the Pope greatly trusted” in order to “ensure that the campanile would not be removed.”
It was money not particularly well spent.