BORROMINI’S INVOLVEMENT WITH SANT’IVO lasted through three pontificates. He was given the post by Urban VIII, and he completed the church’s decoration under Alexander VII, but it was during the papacy of Innocent X that he enjoyed his greatest favor and greatest disappointments.
The Pamphili was a family with ambition—both for themselves and for Rome. Even before Giambattista Pamphili became Pope Innocent X, the family had aspirations for refashioning the city on their own terms—or at least the part that they lived in. It began with the family’s front yard, the Piazza Navona.
If the Piazza San Marco in Venice is, in Napoleon’s glib but accurate phrase, the drawing room of Europe, then the Piazza Navona is Rome’s gran salone, its most popular secular assembly room. It has been so for generations. Built on the spot where in A.D. 86 Emperor Domitian had constructed (out of brick, travertine, and concrete) a U-shaped stadium with a grandstand that seated fifteen thousand spectators, the long, nearly oval piazza has been the site of diversions of all kinds, from naumachias—mock sea battles—to medieval jousts to the more social but no less competitive amusement of parading in public wearing the finest that Rome’s dressmakers and tailors could supply. During the summer, when the heat of Rome can feel as oppressive and as everlasting as the fires of hell, the etiolated Piazza Navona—more than 300 yards long but less than 60 yards wide—was often flooded so the city’s nobility could find relief by riding their carriages through the knee-deep water that was known as the Lago di Piazza Navona. It was such a popular pastime that the Roman scene painter Giovanni Paolo Pannini portrayed the amusement in his 1756 painting The Piazza Navona Flooded.
The Pamphili had been a presence in Rome for centuries. The family had moved to Rome from Gubbio, one of the ancient towns of Umbria, in the 1400s. Over the years, its members began to buy property around the Piazza Navona and its neighboring square, the Piazza Pasquino. In 1501 an ancient stone statue was uncovered nearby, on which the Romans used to hang satiric, mocking commentary (often in verse) about the city’s great and powerful—a practice that irritated pope and prince alike and gave rise to the word “pasquinade.” When Innocent became pope, Pasquino was decked out as Neptune, the Roman god of the seas, holding a trident and riding in his chariot, an image culled from the Aeneid in which Neptune quiets the turbulent waves and winds and reestablishes peace and equilibrium—precisely what Innocent hoped to do after the turbulent Barberini years.
Even before Innocent became pope, the Pamphili began to consolidate their property holdings. In the autumn of 1644 Cardinal Giambattista Pamphili’s nephew Camillo Pamphili and his mother, Donna Olimpia, bought land next to the cardinal’s house with the idea of combining their properties in the sestiere into one large palace that fronted onto the Piazza Navona. They envisioned a magnificent showplace that would house one of Rome’s leading families in what was then the largest civic space in the city.
Perhaps the family member most interested in the structure was Donna Olimpia Maidalchini Pamphili, Innocent’s sister-in-law. This determined, formidable woman—whose first husband, Pamphilio (or Panfilo), Innocent’s older brother, had the good taste (and perhaps the good fortune) to die in 1639—became the palazzo’s most notorious resident, though not for her piety or her charitable works. Born in 1591 in Viterbo, she came from a relatively simple background and was known for being intelligent if not particularly refined. By the standards of the day she was thought somewhat mannish: One of her favorite diversions was hunting. Acquisitive, even ruthless, she was known for being di nauseante ingordigia, disgustingly greedy, and for craving wealth and power. And through the force of her personality and an advantageous marriage, she managed to achieve both, perhaps prompting Giovanni Giustiniani, the Venetian ambassador, who hated her, to call her a “latter-day Agrippina.”
Perhaps most important to the million and a half souls who lived in the Papal States, her influence over her brother-in-law was alarming and unpredictable. It was said that no one could get to the pope without first getting through her. A bust of Donna Olimpia, carved by Alessandro Algardi and now in the Doria-Pamphili collection in Rome, depicts her as a plain, unsmiling creature. Her round, jowled face is fleshy and dominated by a large, broad nose; her widely spaced eyes stare out at the world with resolution. Her headdress is carved to billow back from her head, giving her the appearance of a Venus flytrap ready to spring shut at any moment.
Many of the pope’s colleagues in the College of Cardinals knew of the dangers that Donna Olimpia’s presence in Innocent’s sphere raised. They knew that she had loaned money to her brother-in-law from her personal fortune earlier in his career as a papal diplomat, and they warned him about his sister-in-law. But Innocent paid no attention. Upon his election, Donna Olimpia instantly became one of the most powerful people in Rome, certainly the city’s most powerful woman.
Some believed that she was the true controlling power behind the Throne of Saint Peter, a conviction that triggered some to refer to her as la popessa, the lady pope, or la Dominante, or even la Pimpaccia di Piazza Navona. Others were convinced that she was Innocent’s mistress. Her reputation was not helped by the inconvenient fact that her first name could be bastardized easily to “olim pia,” a phrase that translates as “once pious.”
For many in Rome, Donna Olimpia Pamphili was simply a new stanza added to an old aria: She was the Pamphili version of the sins of greed and self-interest that Innocent had punished the Barberini for. The new pope and his family were not, many thought, very different from the popes (and their families) who had come before them.
The Pamphili had high hopes for their new palazzo. To design and build it, the family selected Girolamo Rainaldi and his son Carlo, known for their cautious and correct approach to design. The family also appointed a commission to work with the Rainaldis to oversee the project.
Borromini was one of those selected to sit on the committee. Bernini was not.
The pope and his family chose a long and narrow site that ran along the southwestern side of the piazza, combining several smaller houses that the Pamphili owned. For the palazzo’s main façade facing the piazza, the Rainaldis designed a lugubrious, four-story structure with a belvedere that sits atop the center section of the building above the roofline, giving the whole front a vertiginous appearance. It looks as if it’s about to topple over into the piazza. Dozens of windows in a variety of sizes and shapes—rectangles, squares, and ovals; some wide; some narrow, some tucked under cornices like pigeons seeking shelter from the rain—march across the front of the building in straight lines, like army regiments in search of their commanding officers. Ornament is understated, even dull; other than the carved papal coat of arms, which hangs above the central window on the piano nobile, the only other decorative elements that draw the eye are the four columns supporting the palazzo’s central balcony above the main door, which are said to have been taken from St. Peter’s.
In 1646, perhaps because he was unhappy with how the palazzo was progressing, Innocent, probably on the advice of Virgilio Spada, called in Borromini. Every Thursday between April and June 1646 a committee consisting of Girolamo and Carlo Rainaldi, Borromini, a master mason named Ludovico, and Donna Olimpia’s representative met to discuss the details of the palazzo’s design and construction and how they were to be carried out. Whether he was asked to by the pope or his family, or whether he simply couldn’t help himself, Borromini designed several versions of the new palazzo. One of his ideas, Anthony Blunt says, was to arrange the palace around “a long court with apsed ends”—essentially an extended oval, which called to mind the shape of Piazza Navona. Such a concept, if it had been built, would also have drawn comparisons with the Sapienza, whose courtyard—just one street away from the Piazza Navona—also has an inviting, curving end, which Borromini had used as the façade for Sant’Ivo.
In the end, the pope opted for the Rainaldis’ more conventional approach to the palazzo. But Innocent’s prudence didn’t keep Borromini from having some influence in the interior. Innocent let him design the sala grande, the gallery, the palazzo’s most impressive room.
The gallery is a room of superlatives, of grandeur and invention. It is long, running from the front of the palazzo, and takes up much of the north wing’s piano nobile. It shares its outer wall with the southern edge of the complex of the church of Sant’Agnese, which the Pamphili also had built. Its decoration is splendid: strikingly opulent and gracefully elegant in equal measure. By the standards of other Roman palaces, the walls are austere, even plain: Painted a uniform color (at one time they were a rich crimson), they stand in serene contrast to the ornate, highly distinctive door casings of white and gold that frame the doors and statuary niches along the walls. At the far end of the gallery, underneath the barrel vaulting and looking out onto the piazza, Borromini placed a huge Serlian window. It is a tall arched center window flanked by two narrower, flat-topped windows half as wide as the center one. (Such a window was named after Sebastiano Serlio, the sixteenth-century Italian architect and theorist, and was popularized by the Venetian architect Andrea Palladio, which is why today they are also called Palladian windows.) Framing the windows are four small twisting stone columns on low bases, and topping the entire arrangement is an elaborate border with the pope’s crest perched above the central window, like an eagle waiting to pounce on an unsuspecting prey.
Above the doors are astonishing inventions—fantastic confections of sculpture and decor, panache and swagger. Curved, scroll-like pediments, painted and gilded, press up toward the ceiling like parachutes waiting for a breeze. Just below them are round recesses painted a luminous Byzantine gold. Standing in each niche is a white marble bust, which stares down reproachfully at anyone with the temerity to stroll the richly polished, honey-colored parquet floor below.
Such embellishments aren’t typical of Borromini; they look fussier than his other work. It’s possible that he may have incorporated into the design for the gallery’s door frames some of the flavor of the magnificent fresco on the ceiling of The Apotheosis of Aeneas by Pietro da Cortona, which is the room’s triumph and its treasure. Painted by the same artist whose fresco of The Triumph of Divine Providence draws the eye upward at the Palazzo Barberini, this huge painting is a stunning display of virtuoso technique and dynastic propaganda. At the emotional center of the fresco is Innocent himself, depicted as the god Neptune, who is, in the words of one historian, “quelling the tumult of the winds with consummate stillness of attitude and gesture, restoring calm, order and peace in his empire solely by the power of his speech.” If only that had been true.
Shortly after Innocent became pope, Borromini designed a suburban villa for Camillo Pamphili to house his impressive collection of antiques. Though many details about this project aren’t known, Borromini did include a letter with his plan in which he puts forth his ideas for the villa, which he calls “a study in practical mathematics.” His idea was for a rectangular villa “with four towers, or bastions, at the four corners, and…32 windows in the whole circuit of the building…[which] would be positioned so that the observer, placing himself in certain doors of the rooms…would have a view terminated at the horizon in the 32 divisions of the winds.” The center window of the two main façades “would be terminated at the beginning and end by the Tropic of Cancer on one side, and by the Tropic of Capricorn on the other.” A statue of Innocent would be placed in the villa so “that on the 15th of September the sun would kiss his feet with a ray in the hour in which he was created pope.”
With the Pamphili wielding so much power, Borromini saw his fortunes improve—so much so that during the early years of Innocent’s pontificate, he considered his decade-long rivalry with Bernini to be over, what Paolo Portoghesi described as “closed in his favor.” He had won.
Bernini, after all, was in disgrace, the catastrophe of the campanile’s razing was as public a rebuke as Rome had ever seen. And it was evident that Innocent wanted little to do with Bernini. With the Barberini out of power, everything associated with them was, too; in many ways Bernini was tainted by his association with Urban.
Although he did not lose his post as architect of St. Peter’s, Bernini nonetheless found himself no longer the pope’s preferred artist, either in architecture or in sculpture. Urban may have insisted that Bernini was the Michelangelo of his age, but Innocent found several other artists who looked the part.
Borromini was one of them.
Thanks in part to Virgilio Spada, who had become Innocent’s closest architectural adviser, and despite Innocent’s continued use of the Rainaldis, Borromini became the architect of choice for several of the major projects that the pope undertook. Perhaps Borromini’s greatest commission, at least in terms of its importance to the church and to Rome, was his selection as architect for the restoration of the church of San Giovanni in Laterano in time for the Holy Year of 1650. This job, second only in prestige to the reconstruction of St. Peter’s, was Borromini’s greatest public appointment.
The official seat of the pope as the bishop of Rome—omnium urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et caput—San Giovanni in Laterano is one of the traditional seven pilgrimage churches in the city. It stands at the eastern edge of the medieval city, just east of the Colosseum, and was for a thousand years the city’s preeminent church. Its history is as colorful as Rome’s. Sacked by invading barbarians, scorched in two separate fires, and battered by bad taste, through it all San Giovanni has maintained its connection to the papacy, a link that goes back further than that of St. Peter’s. Emperor Constantine gave the Lateran Palace to Pope Miltiades after he triumphed over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge in A.D. 312, and he directed that a church dedicated to Saint John be built next door. It is said that within San Giovanni’s main altar are the remains of the original table that Saint Peter used as an altar. It now stands under a square, Gothic-inspired baldachino—as different from St. Peter’s Baldacchino as it’s possible to be.
For centuries the Lateran was both the pope’s church and the church’s administrative home, and when the Roman Empire fell and the pope became the temporal head of Rome, the Lateran became the political and administrative center of Rome as well.
Though its history extends back to the very beginnings of the church, San Giovanni was not left in splendid isolation. Over the centuries the church has been refurbished and decorated to repair acts of God and reflect the change in taste. Two earthquakes—one in 896, the other in 1349—destroyed parts of the church, which were rebuilt. A fire in 1361 destroyed the original roof, which was replaced; between 1564 and 1566 Daniele da Volterra replaced it with a deeply coffered wooden ceiling that still covers the nave. In the early fourteenth century, when the papacy bowed to political pressure and decamped to Avignon, the Lateran fell into a gradual state of decline.
When the papacy returned to Rome—thanks in large part to the exhortations of Saint Catherine of Siena—Pope Gregory XI opted to move to the Vatican rather than the Lateran Palace, because he felt that St. Peter’s was better protected than the Lateran, Leo IV having constructed towering, sturdy walls. Though Popes Martin V and Eugene IV had parts of San Giovanni restored early in the fifteenth century, retiling the floor in the medieval style and adding Gothic tracery to the windows, the church went through no other major renovation. Which was just as well: It is perhaps one of the few churches in Rome that still has a faint Gothic flavor to it.
With the pope now ensconced in the Vatican, San Giovanni began to be eclipsed in papal attention by the building of the new St. Peter’s, which consumed the papacy’s attention and pocketbook for the next century. San Giovanni seemed to wither, and by the 1640s the church was in shocking disrepair.
Some of San Giovanni’s troubles were purely structural. The church’s upper walls, for example, were 2 feet out of plumb and were dangerously close to toppling over. It also had its share of aesthetic problems, including the ancient columns that extended the length of the nave, which weren’t strong enough to support the walls. They had been shored up by brick casings, which was expedient but unsightly.
Innocent was determined to change that and to return San Giovanni to its past glories in time for the Holy Year of 1650, when tens of thousands of pilgrims from all over Europe would descend upon Rome to be enriched spiritually by praying at the city’s important churches and shrines (and in turn enriching the church’s coffers with their alms and offerings). On April 15, 1646, the pope appointed Spada to oversee the renovation of San Giovanni, and he selected Borromini as the project’s architect.
But Innocent was nothing like Julius, who had ordered that the old St. Peter’s be dismantled to make way for a new, more magnificent church, thereby severing a tangible link to the church’s past. For some, this was an unforgivable sin. Innocent was determined not to discard the past in order to forge a new, more dynamic future.
He was not alone in this. Since the demolition of St. Peter’s, there had been a revival of interest in the roots of the ancient church, in early Christian art, and in archaeological finds from that era, all of which sparked a resurgence of interest in, and enthusiasm for, church tradition and history.
Beyond the artistic concerns at San Giovanni, Innocent needed an architect who could manage the technical issues of renovating an old, nearly decrepit building. The job called for more than just an artist or a theorist; it demanded a technician, an engineer, a problem solver—a realist, not a dreamer, someone who understood the secrets of stone and wood, the limits of travertine and tile; someone who could refurbish the pope’s church the way the pope wanted.
Innocent and Spada had seen firsthand how ably Borromini had presented his point of view during the crisis of the campanili, and though Borromini’s recommendations weren’t adopted, Innocent was impressed enough by the architect’s abilities—or was willing to be convinced of them by Spada—to offer him this papal prize. He was also surely aware of Borromini’s work at Sant’Ivo, of his having to design and build a church within the narrow confines of the courtyard that Giacomo della Porta had built in the 1560s. (Though it had been designed and built during Urban’s pontificate, Sant’Ivo’s lantern and spiral weren’t complete by the time Innocent became pope, prompting Borromini to ask Innocent in 1651 to fund their construction.)
Although Borromini got the job, Innocent did not give him free rein. Borromini would have to work with San Giovanni as it existed; he would not be allowed to alter the structure of the building. He could repair and restore, but he could not rebuild.
In a letter dated March 16, 1647, Innocent indicated that he wanted to mantenerla quanto sarà possibile nella sua primitiva forma e abbellirla (preserve as muchoftheold churchaspossible and embellish it).
This was not precisely what Borromini had in mind. His friend Fra Juan de San Bonaventura wrote that such restrictions ran counter to how Borromini worked best and contradicted his ideas for reimagining San Giovanni. Though Borromini’s work “gave great satisfaction to the Pope and to everyone in general,” in the end “the whole work did not give him satisfaction, even if it did so generally to everyone else.”
Still, the architect abided by the restrictions Innocent placed on the project, despite his opposition.
Spada and Borromini began work immediately—in fact, they started so soon after their appointments that it’s possible that Borromini had already worked up designs for San Giovanni before he was given the post.
What Borromini did at San Giovanni is to rethink a Constantinian church on his own terms. His approach at first seems straightforward, even obvious, but in its own way it was revolutionary. Carefully, painstakingly thought through, the renovation shows how Borromini could fuse his own ideas with an existing building, creating something entirely original. Using the lessons he had learned at St. Peter’s and drawing from his work at San Carlo, the Oratory, and Sant’Ivo, he turned San Giovanni into an ingeniously arranged space that now celebrates the founders of the church, the Apostles. The result is a very personal statement in a very public church.
The original San Giovanni was much like the original St. Peter’s, with a tall, rectangular nave and two lower aisles on each side of it—similar, in fact, to other public buildings in Rome during the time of Constantine, from civil courts to pagan shrines. A chain of columns plodded dully down the nave like prisoners marching to their fate. A series of nondescript windows along the outer walls admitted some light, but sunshine made it to the nave itself only intermittently; the low, dark aisles seemed to consume it, as if hungry for illumination. (Even today, despite Borromini’s improvements, the church can seem dark and unwelcoming.) This, apparently, was the way Innocent wanted it to remain.
Borromini focused most of his attention on the nave, which over the years had become a disorganized muddle. To replace the monotonous sequence of columns, Borromini combined them, fusing two columns into one support. This innovation served both to simplify the lines of San Giovanni’s interior and to strengthen the columns. It also allowed Borromini the chance to broaden the open spaces between the columns; in them, he placed tall, wide archways, five along each side of the nave. Above the arches he placed high, clear windows, also arched, which allow light to cascade down into the church. Next to each arch he placed soaring, square pilasters of white marble, their bases light gray, which begin at the floor and stretch to the very top of the wall. They seem to grow out of the floor like thick trees, just as the pilasters do at Sant’Ivo. Between these towering pilasters, Borromini placed twelve rectangular statuary niches, called tabernacles, which now display statues of the Apostles who are memorialized in white marble carved in the eighteenth century and are a noteworthy decorative detail of what Henry James called “that cold clean temple” of San Giovanni. Framing each statue and supporting a stone pediment that bows out into the nave as if it were too big for the space it was designed for are two verde antico, green marble columns about 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) high, which had stood originally between the two outer aisles (and which Borromini moved to decorate the niches) and now stand upon bases of dark gray marble with the name of the saint carved into each one, surrounded by crisply rendered laurels and palm fronds.
The sequence of taller, rounded arch and lower, rectangular openings—combined with the two outside corners of the nave curving into the church—calls to mind details from Borromini’s other works: the Serlian window at the Palazzo Pamphili and the lively, logical cloister at San Carlino.
Perhaps Borromini’s greatest disappointment at San Giovanni was the ceiling. He had wanted to vault it, probably using either a barrel or a coved vault (his surviving papers aren’t clear about this) with diagonal ribbing that would reach out across the ceiling from one side of the nave to the other at angles, linking the different parts of the church by weaving a meticulous matrix over them. But Innocent couldn’t bring himself to tear down the remarkable (if gloomy) carved wooden ceiling that Pius IV had had installed in the sixteenth century. When work on San Giovanni reached the top of the pilasters, the pope told Spada and Borromini that he would not allow them to proceed with the vaulting. Though Borromini may have been more comfortable with the huge arched ceiling Michelangelo had designed for St. Peter’s, the pope, Joseph Connors explains, had been schooled in “the teachings of Baronius and the Oratorians, who promoted the cult of early Christian antiquity, and his slogan of conservation with embellishment (et vetustas servareter, et venustas addereter) was incompatible” with Borromini’s ideas.
Borromini had greater success with the side aisles, where he had a freer hand and a better chance of seeing his inventiveness take shape. He both simplified and enlivened these long, constricted passages, giving them physical and spiritual illumination they hadn’t had before. Because the inner and outer aisles were of different heights, Borromini was able to insert windows between the aisles, which gave him the opportunity to play with light and shadow. He also took every opportunity to use cherubs’ and angels’ heads as decoration, motifs he had used liberally at San Carlino and Sant’Ivo. He placed them above arches and along support beams, their tranquil faces and graceful wings (either folded in repose or spread wide as if ready for flight) a soothing detail in a church bursting with embellishment.
At San Giovanni, Borromini elaborated on the architectural ideas he began at San Carlo and expanded them on a grander scale for the pope’s home church, turning what had been an overlooked place of worship into a rival of St. Peter’s.
Innocent had set aside 70,000 scudi for the renovations, and the work proceeded quickly. By the end of 1647, the major structural work was finished; by the next year, the roof was done; by October 1649, the interior stucco decoration was complete—two months before the Holy Year was to begin.
One of the reasons the renovations proceeded so rapidly—beyond the need to complete them before the Holy Year began—was Innocent’s keen personal interest in the project. Torgil Magnuson indicates that the Venetian nobleman Alvise Contarini wrote the Venetian senate that the pope had his agents visit San Giovanni every day. The pope would even “look in personally to see what stage had been reached and to urge the workers on to greater efforts.”
Innocent’s interference turned out to be a blessing for Borromini—in fact, it saved his reputation and possibly even his life.
As with many things about Borromini’s life, the details of the tragedy at San Giovanni are sketchy and contradictory. What is known is that on December 6, 1649, just a few weeks before the Holy Year was to begin, the body of a young man, Marco Antonio Bussone (or Bussoni), was discovered at San Giovanni (either in a room or in the building yard; sources differ on this detail). He appeared to have been bound and severely, even ruthlessly, beaten—and had died from his injuries.
An official investigation began, and it was determined that the youth had been caught by workmen in the basilica’s building yard trying to damage some of the marble that was being prepared for the basilica. On instructions from their supervisor, the laborers gave him a brutal beating.
Their supervisor was Francesco Borromini.
There is no evidence that Borromini wanted the youth killed, but it is clear that events, once they began, quickly spun out of control. The workmen, at Borromini’s prompting, vented their anger at the young vandal, and Borromini either couldn’t or wouldn’t restrain them.
Even more damning was the discovery, according to Connors, that the men had tried to dispose of Bussone’s body by burying it in the porch itself at San Giovanni—a shocking tactic. Either they failed or they thought better of it, because the body was discovered elsewhere.
Despite efforts to hush up the crime, the news got out. Even in seventeenth-century Rome, a murder is a murder. The matter went before the Roman courts, and it appeared that the laborers and Borromini were in serious trouble. The situation was so severe, the circumstances so damning, that the pope himself was required to intervene personally in the case to save Borromini from substantial punishment.
Because of Innocent’s intervention, Borromini was given a relatively light sentence. “He was remanded to temporary banishment at the pope’s pleasure,” Connors explains, with the disconcerting prospect of a three-year expulsion from Rome to Orvieto, a hill town some seventy miles northwest of the city, if he misbehaved further. (Another version of the story places Borromini’s banishment in Viterbo, some fifty miles from Rome.) However, nothing indicates that Borromini was ever forced to leave Rome, though he may have been.
Despite the scandal, Borromini completed the renovations of San Giovanni in Laterano to Innocent’s satisfaction. The pope was pleased with Borromini’s ingenuity, though by then he had grown tired of the demanding, difficult architect. Innocent awarded Borromini a knighthood, the croce di Cristo, in July 1652—an honor Bernini had received three decades (and three popes) earlier. Finally, there was official public recognition of Borromini’s work.
Yet even at this moment of triumph, the apex of his career, neither the pope nor his closest aides could bear being in the presence of the wearisome Borromini long enough to confer this great honor on him. So they arranged for the traditional symbols given to a cavaliere, a cross and heavy chain, to be delivered to him by an intermediary, the only papal courtier who seemed to be able to stand Borromini, Virgilio Spada.
The pope’s interest in renovating and restoring Rome extended beyond San Giovanni and the sacred. Even after he commissioned the work on the Palazzo Pamphili, he and his family continued to work at turning the Piazza Navona into the family’s personal courtyard. At about the same time Innocent commissioned Borromini to renovate the Lateran, the pope directed that an ancient damaged obelisk—discovered in pieces originally on the Via Appia and now in the Circus Maxentius—would be moved to the Piazza Navona, where it would be reassembled to stand at the center of a fountain.
It was a task that Borromini would begin but someone else would complete—much to his aggravation.