DOMENICO BERNINI COULD HAVE BEEN DESCRIBING both his father and Borromini when he wrote, “When a man loses that which he is accustomed to having, or if he does not have that which he desires, he often gives way to his feelings, and like a city assailed by enemies, his peace is destroyed, and he is kept in continual torment to a degree commensurate with his longings.” For the fortunes of both men were about to change—in ways neither of them could have expected or anticipated.
As the campanile crisis came to a head, Bernini seemed confident that the Congregazione and the pope would accept his revised plans for the towers. While it is possible that he harbored some private misgivings—after all, Innocent was not a personal friend, as Urban had been—Bernini continued to play the role of uomo universale, giving the appearance of quiet conviction that the controversy over the towers would be resolved satisfactorily in his favor.
Bernini even wrote and produced a play (for carnival in 1646) that had the cheek to lampoon both the pope and Camillo Pamphili, the pope’s powerful nephew. “Even the great have been touched by the comedy of Bernini,” Francesco Mantovani wrote at the time. It was an understatement. “There was depicted [in the play] a youth who had good will but who never did anything and an old man who could never make up his mind”—traits that Rome’s gossips said were based on Camillo and Innocent.
The impertinence, the cheek, struck the Pamphili close to home, literally and figuratively, particularly because Bernini mounted the play at the residence of the pope’s sister-in-law (and Camillo’s mother), Donna Olimpia.
Producing the play (which has been lost) revealed more about Bernini’s self-assurance than his foresight—the serious Innocent was not known as a man who enjoyed laughing at himself. Gone were the days of Urban’s worldly acceptance of Bernini’s precocity. This was a sterner, less forgiving era, and the city was titillated by the play’s brazenness and audacity.
Cardinal Camillo Pamphili was enraged at the way Bernini portrayed him. Whether or not Bernini knew it, he had stumbled into a complicated and hostile tangle of family jealousies. Pamphili was particularly angered that the play had Donna Olimpia’s “tacit approval and reinforced the caricature of the cardinal nephew circulating at court.” He went to Innocent and railed against it, calling the play “foul.”
The pope was swayed by his nephew’s indignation and consulted Cardinal Giacomo Panziroli, his secretary of state, who managed to ease the pope’s concerns about the play, but the memory of it lingered. Mantovani could well have reflected the sentiments of many in Rome when he wrote reprovingly to the Duke of Modena, “It is a miracle that the Cavaliere [Bernini] has not been condemned to prison.”
Bernini may have escaped jail, but he was never again treated by the Pamphili with the deference he had been showered with by the Barberini. His punishment was to be ignored.
This was one more sign, and a convincing one, that a new day had dawned over the Vatican.
Bernini should have known this already. He was aware that several members of the Barberini clan had fled Rome—quietly and at night—to evade the Pamphili family’s wrath when the Pamphili discovered that the Holy See’s coffers had been emptied during Urban’s pontificate to pay for an ill-conceived war and to fill the pockets of the Barberini. Several of them, including Cardinal Antonio Barberini, ended up living comfortably, if perhaps unexpectedly, in Paris, under the protection of the French king. Taddeo Barberini died in Paris in 1647. But a year later, in a more forgiving climate, Cardinal Francesco returned to Rome, and the younger Cardinal Antonio returned five years later.
Bernini’s play was the last enterprise he created for the Pamphili family for four years: between the dilemma of the campanili and his very firm association with the Barberini, Bernini was viewed by the Pamphili with a certain amount of suspicion. And when the pope decided, perhaps goaded by his nephew, to have the bell towers demolished—much to Bernini’s surprise and embarrassment and to Borromini’s satisfaction—it was more evidence that his dominance of artistic life—or at least of architectural life—in Rome was at an end.
Perhaps consciously, perhaps not, the crisis returned Bernini to his first love, sculpture. Almost immediately he began work on a large sculptural allegory he called Truth Unveiled by Time. He envisioned a nude woman, as voluptuous as a Rubens, who is discovered by, as Charles Avery characterizes him, “a hoary old man” hovering above her in midair, seemingly without support. As he uses his right hand to pull back the drapery that covers her nakedness, Father Time holds in his left hand a scythe, the symbol of his station.
Bernini completed only the figure of Truth, who sits on a base of rock—calling to mind the quote from Psalms that “Truth shall spring for thee from the earth.” She reclines against a background of stone drapery, her naked body contorted as if startled by the marble’s icy temperature. Her left leg, elongated and ungainly, is bent at the knee, allowing her large left foot to rest on a globe. In her right hand she holds a stylized image of the sun, a face in its center, which is similar to the suns Bernini used in the Barcaccia fountain in the Piazza di Spagna. (This fountain depicts a sunken, waterlogged ship—whose name translates roughly as “the rotten old tub”—and uses two small suns at either end of the ship as spouts.) She gazes up at her invisible discoverer, her face a study in simpering awe. It is as far from the vibrant, unblushing earthiness of the bust of Costanza Bonarelli as the Baldacchino is from the cloister of San Carlino.
Perhaps most unsettling are Truth’s eyes. Unlike the eyes on most of his other sculptures, these are left unfinished. She has no pupils to give her face any expression or spark. Instead, they stare into the infinite, as blank and as empty as ignorance. She is, in essence, blind—as unseeing as her sister virtue Justice.
While the sculpture is not finished and its symbolism may seem obvious to modern eyes, Domenico writes warmly of it, describing her as “a most beautiful woman.” This is fortunate, as the figure remained in Bernini’s studio for the rest of his life, prompting someone to suggest that Truth in Rome was to be found only in Bernini’s house—a quip Bernini himself enjoyed repeating.
By contrast, Bernini’s sculpture of Father Time remained forever trapped in a block of marble that sat on the street outside his home. “Whether dissuaded from the work by the ire of that same Time, who, inconstant by nature, refused to be eternalized by the hand of Bernini, or for some other serious occupation, it remained excavated in vain, a useless stone,” Domenico notes, a hint of regret in his words. In his will, Bernini directed that Truth remain in the family home in perpetuity, bequeathing it to the firstborn son of succeeding generations to emphasize the artist’s belief that “the most beautiful virtue in the world is truth, because in the end it is always revealed by time.” (Since 1924 Truth has been at the Galleria Borghese and is now on display in the Room of the Gladiator.)
While there is a certain poetic propriety to Truth residing forever in Bernini’s house, Bernini nevertheless was willing to explore a less altruistic alternative for the sculpture’s destiny, by attempting to sell the entire completed group to the French. If he had succeeded, it would have been the second time that Bernini sent his work to France, and both instances were due to the efforts of Cardinal Mazarin.
Born Giulio Mazarini in Pescina, a town in the Abruzzi, on July 14, 1602, and brought up in Rome, Mazarini received his Jesuit education at the Collegio Romano and became a soldier in the papal army. He was appointed secretary to the papal legate in Valtellina and his efforts on behalf of the Holy See in France caught the attention of Cardinal Richelieu. In 1639 Mazarini left Urban VIII’s service (with the pope’s permission) to work for Richelieu and moved to Paris, where he became Jules Mazarin. In 1641, at Richelieu’s urging, Urban made Mazarin a cardinal (though he never took holy orders). After Richelieu’s death in 1642 the forty-year-old cardinal became chief minister, first to Louis XIII and then to Anne of Austria during the regency of Louis XIV, ruling the most powerful nation in Europe in fact if not in name.
Familiar with Bernini’s work in Rome, Mazarin had long wanted the sculptor to create for the French court. And thanks to canny negotiations on his part, he persuaded Bernini to do exactly that—though in Rome, not in Paris, and without the permission of either Urban or Cardinal Antonio Barberini, which further chilled already frosty relations between the Holy See and France. By January 1641 Bernini had completed a bust of Richelieu (which appeased the pope somewhat, since the original plan had been for Bernini to carve a life-size statue of Richelieu, an honor not normally bestowed on a mere French prelate). Rather than sculpting from life, Bernini probably used a triple portrait of the cardinal painted by Philippe de Champaigne, which had been brought to Rome by the French ambassador.
The bust Bernini carved, now in the Louvre, depicts a proud and disdainful man who looks slightly startled—discomfited, as if he had been discovered doing something he shouldn’t be doing. It was considered a triumph in Rome, but in Paris it met a less enthusiastic reception. Richelieu didn’t like it, complaining to Mazarin that it didn’t look like him. Mazarin quietly agreed and told his brother that the bust was nothing like Richelieu.
But Mazarin persisted in his wooing of Bernini, and his patience seemed to be rewarded. Six years later, in July 1647, barely a year after the campanile ordeal, Bernini had crafted a model of Truth Unveiled by Time and asked the Duke of Bracciano to inquire of Mazarin how such a sculpture might be received in Paris.
“The figure of Time carrying and revealing Truth is not finished,” Bernini said. “My idea is to show him carrying her through the air, and at the same time show the effects of time wasting and consuming everything in the end. In the model I have set columns, obelisks, and mausoleums, and these things, which are shown overwhelmed and destroyed by time, are the very things that support time in the air, without which he could not fly even if he had wings.” In the duke’s letter to Mazarin, he extolled the virtues of the piece, calling it “a jewel.”
In a reply every bit as ingenious as Bernini hoped Truth would turn out to be, the sly Mazarin wrote that “if Bernini were to decide to let himself be seen” in Paris, the Cavaliere “would learn the high estimation in which both he and his works are held in France.” In other words, Mazarin wanted both the art and the artist in France—Truth and the artist who had created it.
Bernini balked at such a demand. Even at this low point in his career, he was not really ready to leave Rome—nor would the pope allow it. After all, even during his disgrace he remained Architect of St. Peter’s and was responsible for overseeing the dozens of sculptors carving marble busts of more than fifty former popes, from Peter to Benedict I, which would be set into the pillars of the nave, as well as supervising the fashioning of countless angels and larger-than-life-size doves that ornament the church. He had more than enough work to keep himself busy.
And there were still men in Rome ready to employ his talents, even if they weren’t the Pamphili. One such man was Cardinal Federico Cornaro, the former cardinal patriarch of Venice, who commissioned Bernini to create what became his most famous fusion of architecture and sculpture, the Cappella Cornaro, the Cornaro Chapel, at the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, whose centerpiece is the astonishingly theatrical Ecstasy of St. Teresa.
In this dramatic, unrestrained work, which fills the entire shallow transept of this small and otherwise unexceptional church at the corner of the Via XX Settembre and the Largo di Santa Susanna, Bernini blurred the distinctions between architecture and sculpture and between sacred and physical love to form a new kind of devotional space, where the love of God—what Teresa called the unión mistica—becomes a palpable, physical thing.
The core of Bernini’s chapel is Saint Teresa herself. In her autobiography she recounts the moment of her rapture in words that today would raise eyebrows:
I saw beside me, on my left, an angel in bodily form…. He was not tall, but short, and very beautiful…. In his hands I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing them out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love for God. The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans, and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to lose it.
In the chapel, Bernini illustrates this precise moment, calling upon his talents in sculpture, architecture, and theater. Suspended above the altar, an angel—young, empyreal, and otherworldly (the one leg Bernini carved is too long to be human)—holds in his right hand an iron-tipped arrow that he has just withdrawn from Teresa’s breast. With his left hand, he delicately holds back a piece of her robe so that he may plunge the arrow in again. He is smiling, his expression one of gentle understanding at the rapture she’s experiencing.
Teresa herself lies back, away from the angel as if in a swoon, her eyes closed, her mouth open slightly in a half-gasp, as if her body cannot sustain the rapture her soul is experiencing. Her body is almost completely covered in drapery. Only her hands and feet are visible (her left hand lies limp against her side, and her bare left foot—the symbol of her order—extends off an escarpment of stone just behind the altar’s tall central crucifix and candles). Behind Saint Teresa and the angel, gilded shafts of bronze, golden sunlight made tangible, rain down upon them, as does the natural light that enters through a hidden window and bathes the sculpture in radiance and illuminates the smooth, sleek surfaces of the two figures in this extraordinary tableau.
The statues of Saint Teresa and the angel are placed between two pairs of blue marble pillars topped by Corinthian capitals, which support a convex broken pediment of carved white marble that curves out into the church like the altar in Borromini’s Filomarino Chapel—the first time since the Baldacchino that Bernini used such a curved form. Along the side walls of the chapel, in two arched enclosures that look like church transepts, Bernini placed stone silhouettes of Federigo Cornèr, his father the doge, and the family’s six cardinals. Their position is for dramatic, even propagandistic effect, Avery explains. As a visitor walks down the aisle toward the church’s main altar, “it is the gentlemen carved out of white marble in the right-hand balcony who first catch one’s eye in the gloom.” The eye falls first on Federigo, who stares down the nave as if in greeting. He seems to be standing at the end of a long, barrel-vaulted corridor or room, with Ionic columns along its sides and a put to sitting atop one corner of a pediment in the background that looks very much like the one above Saint Teresa and the angel. These strangely fashioned openings look deeper than they actually are—their backgrounds of gray marble are carved in false perspective to give the illusion of depth and seem to give the men a splendid view of Saint Teresa’s spiritual climax, though this isn’t possible, because the convex, columned space of the altar extends too far out for them to see what is actually happening. Still, the men seem happy, reading, praying, and talking to one another as if they are witnessing the miracle unfolding here. The point is to commemorate the Cornèr family and Federigo’s celebration of Saint Teresa’s life and work, and Bernini succeeds at this—much more so than he had done with Truth.
The chapel’s completion in 1652 was greeted with acclaim. “In the opinion of all, no marble made by hands was worked with greater tenderness and design than this one,” Domenico wrote. “In that group the Cavalier has surpassed himself and vanquished art with a rare object of wonder.” Even Bernini was willing to admit, “This is the least bad work that I have done.” One of Bernini’s other sons, Monsignor Pier Filippo Bernini, had a more spiritual reaction to it. He wrote of the chapel:
So fair a swoon
Should be immortal;
But since pain does not ascend
To the Divine Presence
In this stone Bernini made it eternal.
But tastes change. Victor-L Tapié notes that when the French scholar and politician Charles des Brosses visited the chapel he was reminded of a bedroom scene, commenting, “If this is Divine Love, I know all about it.”
BORROMINI ALSO WANTED to capture the divine presence in his work, but his battleground was the University of Rome, La Sapienza, where he built his masterpiece and one of Rome’s most remarkable churches, Sant’Ivo.
The seeds for this masterpiece had been planted years before by a most unlikely sower: Gianlorenzo Bernini.
In 1632, while Borromini was still working with Bernini at St. Peter’s and the Palazzo Barberini, Urban VIII, at Bernini’s instigation, selected Borromini to be the architect of the Archiginnasio—later the University—of Rome, one of the two public posts Borromini held during his lifetime.
A letter from the lawyer Montecatini recounts how Borromini came to get the job: “Cavalier Bernini has made known through the Cardinal Patron Barberini that, on behalf of the people of Rome, he has appointed as architect of the Sapienza, the most illustrious Francesco Borromini, nephew of Carlo Maderno, and that he desires that this post not remain an inactive one, but that he contribute his work for all that is necessary.”
How active or inactive the position would be remained an open question, as the construction by Pirro Ligorio and Giacomo della Porta at the end of the sixteenth century severely limited Borromini’s choices of where to build a church that would fit into the overall scheme of the Sapienza. In addition, work at the site had been halted since Paul V’s pontificate. Borromini’s task was to build a Chapel of Wisdom to balance the so-called Palazzo della Sapienza, the Palace of Wisdom that stood just east of the Piazza Navona.
Nearly two decades after Borromini began Sant’Ivo, Fioravante Martinelli extolled the church’s virtues in his unpublished guidebook. The pope chose Borromini, Martinelli said, “because of the liveliness of his talent, his familiarity with the Vitruvian rules, and his habit of imitating the work of the greatest ancient Greek and Roman practitioners of architecture.” He wasn’t bothered by a constrained site, Martinelli says. “Neither the mixture of corners, nor of straight and crooked lines, nor the lack of direct light posed a setback, knowing as he did that the trophy of excellence for an architect comes from the difficulties by which his talent has been challenged and exercised.”
Borromini’s goal was to design a church that fit satisfactorily in the unpromising space allotted it. That is precisely what he did.
In January 1643, only a year after the interior of San Carlino was finished, the foundation stone for Sant’Ivo was laid, and by 1648 the dome was covered with lead and the cross and globe that topped the lantern were gilded. Once again Borromini returned to the circle and the triangle for inspiration, but this time he used them to concoct a design that is at once more complex and less deceptive, more dramatic and less theatrical, than San Carlino.
Borromini understood that the church he was building at San Carlino was for a small group of the devoted; at La Sapienza, he was designing a public church that celebrates the mind and the spirit.
Situated at the end of a rectangular courtyard framed on three sides by two tiers of arcades, the church from the outside is a curious hybrid drum of convex and concave, of rational curves and surprising protrusions, like a mass of clouds floating across the Roman sky. Built of the flattened Roman brick that Borromini favored and decorated with shallow pilasters, the façade looks like an absurd, even contradictory medley of curves thrown together on impulse. On every level the church advances toward the viewer or recedes from him, as if it were expanding and contracting, like a beating heart. Part snare drum, part beehive, part biblical ziggurat, Sant’Ivo’s exterior is as exotic-looking as anything Borromini ever designed.
Inside, at its heart, Sant’Ivo is a triangle, the enduring symbol of the Trinity. But Borromini wasn’t satisfied with using just one image—or one triangle. He placed two equilateral triangles (one inverted) on top of each other. At each corner, Borromini carved arcs into and out of the angles. The result is a jarring but potent collision of concave and convex, filling the space with a staccato intensity that even Borromini could scarcely contain. The church seems to swell in surging waves, like the ebb and flow of a divine tide.
“Never perhaps did the Baroque ideal of movement attain more complete and perfect expression” than at Sant’Ivo, Anthony Blunt notes—an observation that rings as true today as it did when the altar was consecrated by Cardinal Antonio Barberini on November 14, 1660. It is a place that throbs with a passion that can barely keep back the forces behind it: nature, man, or God. It is every bit as dynamic as the intelligence and the faith that created it.
As Paolo Portoghesi and others noticed, “the stylized figure of a bee” is at the heart of Sant’Ivo’s design. It is both the symbol of Charity and Prudence and of the Barberini family, which Borromini may have done consciously. In an account preserved in the Archivio di Stato, Monsignor Carlo Cartari seconds this conclusion. But it’s possible, even likely, that a deeper symbolism is involved, one that according to Cartari was a true inspiration for the plan. Blunt argues that Borromini “must also have had in mind the idea that the six-pointed star is the star of David, the accepted symbol of wisdom.” Indeed, the motif of wisdom plays an important role in the design and layout of Sant’Ivo; it was at the heart of how Borromini approached the project.
On one of his early drawings for Sant’Ivo, he copied down three verses from the ninth chapter of Proverbs, which he indicated were to be carved above the church’s altar, above its entrance door, and on a statue pedestal. The three lines from Proverbs are Sapientia aedificavit sibi domum (Wisdom has built herself a home), Excidit columnas septem (She has erected her seven pillars), and Proposuit mensam suam (She has set her table). The phrase Excidit columnas septem also served as inspiration: Borromini considered placing a semicircle of seven columns of yellow marble behind Sant’Ivo’s main altar—an idea Andreo Palladio used to impressive effect in Il Redentore, his Church of the Redeemer on the Giudecca in Venice. (He seemed not to have been concerned that the odd number of columns would cause one pillar to be placed directly behind the altar—a violation of classic architectural design and a problem Palladio avoided in the Redentore by using only four columns in his church.) Though Borromini abandoned the idea in subsequent versions of the plan, that he considered it at all reveals the attention he brought to the design of Sant’Ivo, how he struggled to inform it with an intelligence, with his intelligence.
As Borromini matured as an architect, symbolism became an even more important aspect of his architecture. He wanted the parts of his buildings to mean something, to express emotions and ideas that are simultaneously universal and deeply personal. Much of Borromini’s inspiration came from his faith, from his soul, from his intellect. In this he differed from Bernini, whose creativity, though deeply emotional and religious, was expressed theatrically. Bernini, though a devout Catholic, wanted to impress the observer with the sentiments he expressed and the brilliance that produced it. He was a showman every bit as dazzling as Michelangelo or Raphael.
Borromini, by contrast, wanted to express his belief in God and his passion for his art by containing it in a rational, geometric form. Bernini astounded by letting his talent spring from his heart; Borromini by arranging and controlling the wonders of the infinite. Bernini, at heart, was a sculptor who manipulated space. Borromini was an architect who sculpted it.
And no other church in Rome has such a sense of sculpted space than Sant’Ivo. It’s pure Borromini. Martinelli pointed out nearly four hundred years ago that it looks like a tent, which it does. But it is so much more subtle and ingenious than that.
The ingenuity begins literally with the floor and climbs up the straight walls into the dome, pulsing like a living organism as it curves up to the lantern. The movement is almost palpable: forceful and inexorable. It feels preordained. The decoration of the church is restrained—minimal when compared with other masterpieces of the Baroque. There are no magnificent frescoes or multicolored marble columns. Instead, Borromini had the walls painted in light tones—whites and grays—with gold embellishments of angels, stars, and papal coats of arms (though by the time Sant’Ivo was completed, the church honored Pope Alexander VII, not Urban; his crest was a pyramid of six crowned mountains). The result is a layout of intermingling triangles whose points bow into the church as the circles along each side push out, creating an undulating space that looks like a billowing parachute or that deceptively simple ice crystal, the snowflake. It is a restrained and sophisticated exercise in mathematics that uses—as Borromini often did—geometry to venerate God.
Borromini extended this sensibility to the church’s dome and lantern—or tempietto, as it was then called—which are unlike any others in Rome. Ribbed like the Pantheon, the dome of Sant’Ivo is low, but rises in twelve curving stages to the lantern, like steps to an altar. And an altar is what the lantern appears to be—or rather a tabernacle, the ceremonial resting place of the Host. Six sets of double Corinthian columns ring the lantern; between them Borromini placed narrow pedimented windows to admit light. Each set of columns is topped by stone sculptures of torches of fire, another symbol of knowledge, which resemble torches held by Olympic runners. At the center of the dome sits an extraordinary spiral cupola of carved stone that can be climbed, a tiny ziggurat that calls to mind the Tower of Babel, another ancient (if counterintuitive) symbol of wisdom. Sacheverell Sitwell referred to this spiral as “the twisting spire which has been said to resemble ‘the horn of a Sicilian goat,’” and it twists up to the very zenith of Sant’Ivo: four curving metal bars, forged into a metal flame symbolizing the unquenchable thirst for knowledge, support a golden orb and an ornate cross.
The lantern is, as the art historian Livia Velani points out, “a brilliant and free interpretation of the Gothic forms [Borromini] had studied in Milan Cathedral.” Indeed, Sant’Ivo’s lantern has been compared to the Tiburio, the dramatic tower that stands on the Duomo’s roof and from which it’s possible to see the Matter-horn. But Borromini’s lantern, while less ornate than the Tiburio, is more intricate as it combines ancient symbols with natural forms.
The spiral is a form that Borromini resonated with. He is known to have collected conch shells during his life. When he died and an inventory of his possessions was taken, one of the pieces identified, Joseph Connors notes, was a large shell “mounted on a pedestal in the shape of an eagle’s claw.”