BERNINI REESTABLISHED HIS REPUTATION AS the greatest artist in Rome on the slipperiest of foundations: water. The opportunity—which came from the most unlikely source, the pope—presented itself unexpectedly but not without some effort on his part.
As the Palazzo Pamphili began to take shape on the Piazza Navona, Innocent realized that the character of the piazza was changing. It was no longer just a jumbled open-air vegetable market or the site of haphazard neighborhood celebrations. It must look like what it was: one of the city’s most important squares and the home to the first family of Rome. As the buildings around the piazza were being built and refurbished—Innocent would soon commission the church of Sant’Agnese in Agone for the site north of the Palazzo Pamphili, making it the de facto family chapel—it became obvious that the piazza itself needed a unifying focal point.
Over the years the piazza had been improved somewhat arbitrarily and for utilitarian reasons rather than for artistic ones. During the late sixteenth century, Pope Gregory XIII had commissioned Giacomo della Porta to design a fountain at the southern end of the piazza, which would use water from the Acqua Vergine, the ancient Roman aqueduct that drew water from the outskirts of Rome into the city. Della Porta designed a foundation where the Fontana del Moro now stands, while at the center of the piazza he placed a rectangular stone trough that horses and donkeys could drink from.
By 1647, Innocent had decided that the center of his family’s piazza merited something more distinguished than a drinking trough. He wanted a glorious fountain in the center of the piazza and commanded that most of the water from the Acqua Vergine be diverted to the Piazza Navona instead of the Fontana di Trevi, a project that Urban VIII had championed when he was pope. Innocent appointed Borromini as overseer of the project to extend the aqueduct so that it could convey the greater amount of water to the piazza. He also made tin, lead, and other building materials available for the project, as well as money from the Camera apostolica—in other words, from the church, not from the Pamphili family fortune. Innocent was using both church resources and Borromini to finance the exaltation of the Pamphili, just as Urban had used Bernini to celebrate the Barberini.
Borromini suggested to Innocent that this new fountain should commemorate the four great rivers of the known world—the Nile, the Danube, the Ganges, and the Plata—which would in turn represent the four known continents of Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The idea intrigued Innocent, as did an obelisk carved in Egypt, which Filippo Baldinucci indicates had been brought to Rome by the emperor Antoninus Caracalla and which recently had been rediscovered lying in several salvageable pieces in the Circus Maxentius (also known as the Circo di Massenzio) on the Appian Way. On April 27, 1647, Innocent inspected the obelisk and then directed that it be reassembled and incorporated into the new fountain in the piazza.
Innocent asked Borromini and several other artists to come up with a design for the fountain. Bernini, the self-styled amico delle acque, friend of water, was not asked. This was a particularly public reproof, given that Bernini had already created several extraordinary fountains in Rome, including the Triton Fountain at the Piazza Barberini. This remarkable piece of sculpture, which literally effervesces with movement, depicts the muscular sea god Triton, his scaly tail-like legs curving back on either side of him from his waist, kneeling atop a large open shell that is supported by four angry-looking dolphins. Triton’s head is thrown back and he holds in two hands a massive conch shell, which he blows into and which throws a single jet of water into the air. It is, in Howard Hibbard’s memorable phrase, “an apotheosis of water, myth come to life.” Bernini has captured in stone the scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which Triton calls back the waters that have flooded the land: “He lifts his hollow shell…and sounded forth the retreat which had been ordered…and all the waters by which ’twas heard it held in check…. The world was indeed restored.”
That such a master manipulator of water wasn’t asked to submit a design for the new fountain at the Piazza Navona reveals more about the Pamphili’s capacity for holding a grudge than it does Bernini’s lack of skill as a designer.
Because of Borromini’s close association with the fountain—he designed the conduit for the water to reach it, and it was his idea to celebrate the four rivers—it was assumed along the corridors of the Vatican that he would win the commission. Yet the design that is thought to be Borromini’s (it is not signed) is remarkable for how uninspiring it is. (There are those experts who don’t believe it was his.) It is a far cry from the other, more ingenious designs he was working on at the time and from the extraordinary fountain that was eventually built. In this design, the repaired and reassembled obelisk stands atop a high base that is decorated with the pope’s coat of arms and inscription. Beneath that, on its four rectangular sides, shell-like apertures with grotesque, lionlike faces serve as spouts from which the water pours into a low stone basin.
It is a dutiful design, as correct and as careful as the pope himself, and it undoubtedly accomplishes precisely what Innocent had asked, by incorporating the obelisk into the fountain’s design. But it does nothing more. In fact, it is so pedestrian a design, so perfunctory and humdrum, that some believe that it isn’t Borromini’s design at all.
Others had been asked to submit designs—“Every artist worth the name was invited,” Howard Hibbard writes—including Alessandro Algardi, a sculptor whom Innocent preferred over Bernini early in his pontificate. Algardi proposed several ideas, one of which, Tod Marder writes, “features an allegorical figure, Roma, on a tall, squared base with four river gods perched on the corners”—a proposal that could well have influenced the design that was eventually chosen.
There was considerable consensus in the Vatican that Innocent would select Borromini to oversee the design for the Fountain of the Four Rivers. Even if Borromini had submitted the uninspired design, Innocent could have asked him for another. And he undoubtedly would have provided one. From such certainty the greatest surprises spring.
Several stories have circulated over the centuries explaining how Bernini managed to secure the commission for the Fountain of the Four Rivers and how he returned to papal favor. Perhaps the likeliest of the tales—or at least the one that relies on Bernini’s talents as an architect and a sculptor rather than on his skills as a courtier—is the one that both Baldinucci and Domenico Bernini recount. According to both, it is Nicolò (or Niccolò) Ludovisi, Prince of Piombino, who engineered the commission.
According to Domenico, the prince, a friend of Bernini’s who had recently married the pope’s niece, Donna Costanza Pamphili, decided that it was time for Innocent to forgive Bernini for his inauspicious association with the Barberini. “Attributing the aversion of the Pope more to the liabilities of those times than to any fault of the Cavalier,” Domenico writes, Ludovisi “made up his mind, for the good of Rome, to promote [Bernini] in every way.”
Such high-minded sentiments, however, didn’t alter the fact that Ludovisi’s “knowledge of the tenacious and steadfast nature of the Pope made him doubtful of a favorable outcome.” Still, he was willing to take a chance.
Domenico writes that Ludovisi persuaded Bernini to design and build a model for the fountain project, even though the pope hadn’t asked him for one. “Making up in ingenuity what he lacked in strength, [Ludovisi] sent for Bernini and, as if for an entirely different purpose than to show to the Pope, but, as he said, for his own enjoyment, he secretly asked him to make a design” for the fountain.
Bernini agreed, because he “could not deny to so praiseworthy a Prince a gratification which he believed to be private and which should not otherwise be made public,” Domenico writes. Perhaps. But since Bernini was also currently the architect of Ludovisi’s own palazzo, Bernini could well have wanted to keep his powerful patron happy; perhaps his interest in Bernini’s other work might help the architect capture Innocent’s goodwill.
Whatever the reason, when the model was finished, Bernini sent it to Ludovisi, who “received it with…much pleasure since the idea of it seemed beautiful and the design grand,” Domenico says. Ludovisi had the model taken to the Palazzo Pamphili, where his artistic ambush, using Bernini’s model as ammunition, was to take place. The prince was convinced that when the pope saw the model he “would at least demand to know by whom it had been done.”
On August 15, 1647, the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, Innocent dined with his sister-in-law Donna Olimpia and his nephew Camillo Pamphili at the Palazzo Pamphili. According to Domenico, Ludovisi “deliberately placed the model on a little table in a room through which the Pope had to pass after the meal.” According to Baldinucci, “Upon seeing such a noble creation and a design for such a vast monument,” the pope “was nearly ecstatic” with enthusiasm. He spent half an hour studying the model, “continuously admiring and praising it,” until at last he exclaimed: “This design cannot be by any other than Bernini, and this is a trick of Prince Ludovisi so that in spite of those who do not wish it, we will be forced to make use of Bernini, because whoever would not have his things executed must not see them.” That day, according to Domenico’s account, the pope summoned Bernini.
Baldinucci says that Innocent showered Bernini “with a thousand signs of esteem and love and with a majestic manner, almost apologizing, he explained to him the motives and various reasons for not having made use of him before, and he gave him the commission to make the fountain after his model.”
Another version of Bernini’s redemption comes from a letter by Francesco Mantovani, the Duke of Modena’s emissary in Rome. He wrote to his patron, Francesco d’Este, that Bernini won over the pope by presenting to Innocent’s grasping sister-in-law Donna Olimpia a model of the fountain cast in silver. The pope saw this miraculous piece of silversmithing and was suitably impressed—so awed, in fact, that he engaged Bernini to oversee the fountain.
The trouble with this story is that there is no record of the Pamphili ever owning such a remarkable object. According to Charles Avery, Cardinal Mazarin did own a version of this Fountain of the Four Rivers that was possibly presented to him by Bernini; however, the model is now lost.
Whatever method was used, Bernini was back in the good graces of the pontiff. The mortifying exile from papal favor was over. The prodigal architect had returned.
Domenico’s view on his father’s redemption was that it was inevitable: Genius cannot be ignored forever, particularly by the mighty.
Such enthusiasm wasn’t shared by everyone. On July 10, 1648, when the commission was formally awarded to Bernini, “Borromini stormed through a series of angry interviews with the pope, so agitated that to some observers he looked as though he might throw himself into the Tiber.” Incensed, he stalked off the construction site at San Giovanni in Laterano. He was furious that his rival had returned to such public—and papal—prominence at his expense. After all, the idea of using the fountain to celebrate the world’s four great rivers had been his, and at the pope’s command he had engineered the means to get the water to the piazza to make the fountain possible in the first place. To have the commission snatched from him—or at least the expectation of the commission—and given to Bernini was infuriating.
Though Borromini’s anger was genuine, his fit of pique was calculated, a self-indulgent tantrum to drive home what a blow to his honor Bernini’s selection was. He refused to return to San Giovanni, but Joseph Connors notes that he “allowed work to continue under the direction of his friend Pietro da Cortona.” After all, work on the basilica had to be completed before the Holy Year began. The efficient Virgilio Spada knew this better than Borromini, and while hurrying along the work he enraged Borromini further by engaging another band of stuccoists under a supervisor Borromini didn’t like. Such a misstep prompted a game of architectural brinkmanship, with potentially disastrous consequences: “Borromini called a general walkout, and the two rival capomaestri stuccatori stalked the work site wearing swords,” Connors explains. Violence seemed likely, perhaps inevitable.
But in the end, Borromini’s ruffled feathers were soothed, the replacement laborers were dismissed, and work continued.
None of this, of course, changed the pope’s mind about who should design the fountain. Nor should it have, for it is impossible to criticize Bernini on artistic grounds. The Fountain of the Four Rivers is a marvel, as impressive today as it must have been when he completed it in 1651. The graceful tapering obelisk—slender and elegant and topped by a dove, the symbol of the Pamphili, an olive branch in its beak—stands on an outcropping of travertine carved to look like the quarry from which the stone for the obelisk was taken. But to make this base even more dramatic and startling, and to astonish visitors even today, Bernini carved out a grotto-like space beneath the obelisk, so that one can see through the fountain’s base to the opposite side of the piazza, all the while wondering how the obelisk is supported at all.
Sitting at the corners of the obelisk, balanced precariously on the rocky outcrops of the base, are four colossal nude figures, each representing a different river. At the southwest corner, closest to the Palazzo Pamphili, Bernini placed the bearded Danube, who gestures with his right arm to the east, toward the figure representing the Ganges, whose head faces south as he straddles a large oar pitched into the water below.
In the northwest corner of the fountain is the figure representing the Rio de la Plata. It is the least suitable rendering of South America and reveals how little was known of the New World in the seventeenth century: A bald and bearded, Moorish-looking man, with a jeweled band circling his leg just above his right ankle, leans back on his right arm (so that, some think, he can see the dove on top of the obelisk), his left arm above his head, as if he might suddenly roll off the fountain to escape being crushed by an unseen avalanche.
In the northeast corner, his head covered by a shroud of stone (to represent that its source was still unknown), sits the Nile, another beaded leg band circling his left thigh just above his knee. Surrounding these figures are symbols of the continents that the rivers flow through: the papal arms and a horse for Christian Europe; the oar for Asia (the Ganges is navigable across India); a snake, an armadillo (a creature unknown in seventeenth-century Rome but seen as native to South America), and scattered gold coins for the riches of the New World; a palm tree and lion for Africa.
Work on the fountain began soon after Bernini received official word of the commission. According to the diarist Giacinto Gigli, the obelisk was moved to the site at phenomenal cost: 12,000 scudi—a sum so high that Romans began to complain about Innocent’s expensive whims (though some scholars doubt this figure). While the pope was spending money to move broken pieces of old stone, they said, the city’s residents were going hungry. Such a state of affairs prompted an unknown and no doubt hungry wag to quip in rhyme:
Noi volemo altro che guglie e fontane;
pane volemo, pane, pane, pane.
We want more than just obelisks and fountains;
It’s bread we want; bread, bread, bread.
Despite these complaints, the work continued, using Bernini’s successful and long-established practice of overseeing a group of talented workmen. The stonemason G. M. Fracchi carved much of the travertine base, Bernini adding the finishing touches before the obelisk was placed in August 1649. During 1650–51, Bernini’s assistants carved the four river figures to Bernini’s designs. The accounts indicate that Antonio Raggi carved the Danube, Claude Poussin the Ganges, Francesco Baratta the Rio de la Plata, and Jacopo Antonio Fancelli the Nile. Nicolò Sale worked on the escutcheons and on the Pamphili dove, which was cast in bronze, and Guidantonio Abbatini was hired to paint the rock and detailing, which has long since faded.
In addition to completing the finishing touches of the rock, Bernini is credited with carving the palm tree, the lion, and the horse, which needed to be done on site—an impressive achievement, given the abundance of detail Bernini managed to incorporate and how constrained the working quarters must have been.
And while the three-dimensional qualities of the fountain are appealing—by turns witty and surprising—the proportions of some of Bernini’s work seem off. The horse in particular, which seems to be about to spring from the cleft in the rock between the Rio de la Plata and the Danube, appears incongruously long: Given the size of its head and front legs, the horse’s hindquarters shouldn’t be visible from any of the other arches in the base. Yet the rear legs and tail are visible between the Danube and the Ganges. Such a long creature seems to serve art more than nature. Or perhaps there is another horse hidden in the grotto, waiting to break out of its soggy stall.
Whatever the reason for the elongated equine, Bernini seemed more interested in the drama he could create than in preserving the details of natural proportions. And his instincts certainly proved correct, because the fountain has received almost universal praise. Even the fastidious Englishman Tobias Smollett in his 1766 guidebook, Travels Through France and Italy, described the Fountain of the Four Rivers as “perhaps the most magnificent in Europe,” though he complained that the Piazza Navona itself “is almost as dirty as West Smithfield, where the cattle are sold in London.”
Innocent was inordinately pleased with the result, particularly when he arrived a few days before the official unveiling on June 14, 1651 (the scaffolding was still up) as Bernini and his workmen were putting the final touches on the fountain.
The pontiff arrived with his entourage, including Cardinal Giovanni Giacomo Panziroli, the papal secretary of state. According to Baldinucci, the pope spent more than an hour inspecting the fountain and its details, delighting in what he saw.
After a while he asked Bernini when he could see the water flow through the fountain.
Bernini, Baldinucci writes, “replied that he could not say on such short notice, since some time was required to put everything in order.”
The pope, no doubt disappointed at such an answer, nevertheless gave his benediction and prepared to leave.
It was then that Bernini, who had been preparing for such a visit, gave the signal to turn on the water.
As Innocent was leaving, he heard a rush and turned toward the fountain to see water “gush forth on all sides in great abundance.”
The pope was enchanted.
Bernini understood, Baldinucci wrote, “that the more unexpected it was, the more pleasing it would be to the pope.” It was precisely the ploy he had used decades before when showing Cardinal Scipione Borghese his original, flawed bust. And it was as successful in the middle of the Piazza Navona as it had been in his sculpture studio.
If the pope was pleased with the fountain before, he was doubly so now. Innocent exclaimed to Bernini, “In giving us this unexpected joy, you have added ten years to our life.” To show his enthusiasm and gratitude, Baldinucci says, the pope dispatched a servant to the Palazzo Pamphili to retrieve one hundred doubloons, which Innocent distributed to the grateful workmen. Bernini was more substantially rewarded: He received 3,000 scudi, nearly a tenth of the fountain’s entire 29,000 scudi cost, as his fee.
Despite the pope’s public approval of the fountain, there were lingering whispers about its construction and the sculptor’s technical proficiency. Bernini, the stories said, hadn’t constructed the obelisk properly. The tall arches weren’t strong enough to support such a heavy piece of stone. Bernini had again surrendered safety for spectacle; it was going to fall over.
As they had with the campanili at St. Peter’s, Bernini’s critics focused on his weakness as an architect. After a particularly strong thunderstorm, the speculation grew louder that the obelisk was in danger of toppling down at any moment.
To counter such criticism, Bernini decided to meet his critics head-on. According to Domenico, his father made a special trip to the fountain several days after the storm. A crowd had gathered. After making a show of painstakingly inspecting the fountain, Bernini took four pieces of twine that had previously been strung from nails hammered into the walls around the perimeter of the piazza and attached them carefully to the top of the obelisk. When he was finished, he gazed with approval at his handiwork and, satisfied, got back into his carriage and rode away—“amidst general hilarity” from the onlookers. Bernini’s elaborate pretense of giving the obelisk more support was a clever (if theatrical) public rebuke to those detractors who claimed the fountain was too weak to stand on its own without additional support. Bernini knew that the obelisk was in no danger of falling down. More than 350 years later, it still stands exactly where Bernini had placed it.
Such grandstanding doesn’t mean that Bernini didn’t take criticism to heart, even self-criticism. Domenico admits that as his father aged, he thought less and less of the Fountain of the Four Rivers, once even pulling the curtains of his carriage closed as he was driven through the Piazza Navona and exclaiming, “O come mi vergogno di haver operato così male.” How ashamed I am to have done so poorly.
This was not a sentiment Borromini was ever known to have expressed. If he did have regrets about how his architectural ideas turned out, they were more likely to be directed at the patrons or bureaucrats whose lack of imagination forced him to restrain his ingenuity than at himself for not being creative or resourceful enough. Such a situation arose at the church of Sant’Agnese in Agone, the Pamphili family chapel just north of the Palazzo Pamphili, whose splendid façade and dome dominate the Piazza Navona. Borromini’s work on this church, one of the most beautiful in Rome, is both brilliant and tragic, sparkling and sad. His involvement with it is, Anthony Blunt says, “the saddest in the whole of Borromini’s career.”
It could have ended so much more satisfactorily than it did. In 1652, after both the renovation of San Giovanni in Laterano and the Fountain of the Four Rivers had been completed, Innocent decided to pull down the small church of Sant’Agnese in Agone and rebuild it on a more sumptuous scale, turning the entrance toward the Piazza Navona. Though neither of them knew it, it would be Innocent’s last major building project and the beginning of the end of Borromini’s career as a papal architect.
The original Sant’Agnese was a tiny ninth-century church that fit snugly into the arcades of Domitian’s stadium and commemorated the refusal of Agnese, a young Christian, to succumb to the advances of a Roman. Her chastity angered her pursuer, who had her brought to a house of prostitution amid the stadium’s ruins, where she was to be stripped naked. Such was Agnese’s piety, however, that the Almighty protected her modesty by causing her hair to grow, thus concealing her nakedness from public view.
Unfortunately, such a display of the power of the Almighty did not keep the young Agnese from being tortured and killed. The original church was said to be built on the site of her martyrdom. Little else about the original church is recorded until the twelfth century, when Pope Calixtus II ordered a larger church constructed on the site.
In December 1651 the architect Giovanni Battista Mola measured the old church of Sant’Agnese—perhaps as a sign of what the pope had in mind for it. But the ever-cautious Innocent waited several months before resolving to rebuild the church. By February 1652 he had consulted other architects, eventually settling once again on the Rainaldis, the architetti di casa and the preferred architects of his nephew Camillo. It was a mistake he would regret.
The team of father and son went to work immediately on the project. They designed a centralized church that was an uneasy combination of an octagon and a Greek cross. The central space was dominated by a heavy, low dome. Four squat arms—one containing the entrance, one the main altar (directly across from the front door), the other two side chapels—extended out from it and were connected visually by four low, shallow niches, which faced the central space and cut off the angles of the arms, creating an octagon. Outside were two short bell towers at either end of a high, flat façade, which looked very much like Maderno’s at St. Peter’s and added little lightness to the lackluster design. What the Rainaldis envisioned seemed to employ all of the mistakes Maderno committed at St. Peter’s with none of his scope or vision.
In the spring of 1652 the Pamphili purchased the nearby Palazzo Mellini, the last obstacle to construction. The family now had enough land for the Rainaldis to begin to build. Work on the new Sant’Agnese began over the medieval church on August 14, 1652, when its foundation stone was laid by the five-year-old son of Don Camillo, the pope’s nephew, and Donna Olimpia Aldobrandini, the princess of Romano. (The pope had allowed his nephew, whom he had made a cardinal, to leave the church in order to marry.) It was a family celebration with a point: Innocent wanted his family and the people of Rome to consider the new Sant’Agnese as the Pamphili family chapel.
Though the church was not large—it is wide but not deep, like the piazza it stands in—it must be opulent enough, and important-looking enough, to house the tomb of a pope.
Though work on the church proceeded for nearly a year, there were problems almost immediately. Water in the subsoil made it impractical to use the old church as a family crypt, so that idea was abandoned. However, this did allow the Rainaldis to lower the floor of the new church, making it closer to the level of the piazza.
The entrance staircase proved to be a particularly trying problem, and it possibly contributed to the Rainaldis’ dismissal from the commission. The stairs that Girolamo designed and built were deemed too intrusive; they jutted out too far into the narrow piazza. They were eventually demolished, and Carlo Rainaldi offered a revised plan for the façade, which introduced the idea of a concave entrance front. It would be some time before this idea was adopted, and it would not be Carlo whose work would be built.
By the spring of 1653 it became clear that the aging Girolamo was not up to the task of designing and overseeing Sant’Agnese. Carlo was put in sole charge of the project, probably at the suggestion of Virgilio Spada.
By July 1653 problems with the church became public. They were less structural than aesthetic. The diarist Gigli notes that the architect Martino Longhi had openly criticized the church’s design and construction, condemning “a certain staircase that took up part of the piazza and hid Palazzo Pamphili”—in all probability Girolamo’s unfortunate entrance stairway. Perhaps because of this, or perhaps “because the pope was greatly enraged at having heard the design was not worthy of praise,” construction on the church halted.
The pope found himself in a quandary. He certainly must have approved the initial designs for the church, but Longhi’s loud condemnation of the designs and construction upset him. In addition, Innocent was now involved in the latest in a long line of squabbles that bubbled up from the Pamphili family. He had quarreled with Donna Olimpia and had turned to her son, Camillo, for support. But when Innocent reconciled with his cantankerous sister-in-law, Camillo found his influence with the pope waning. And when influence is taken away from a patron it usually is also taken away from the artist.
The Rainaldis’ designs for Sant’Agnese certainly would not generate much enthusiasm without a powerful advocate like Camillo Pamphili to advance them. Paolo Portoghesi calls the designs “absurd and unjustifiable,” and it’s clear why. The design’s most obvious flaw, then and now, seems to be that the tall, square front of the church hid a substantial part of the dome. It’s the same problem that Maderno had at St. Peter’s. But Maderno’s excuse was that he had to complete a church that was longer than it was supposed to be. At Sant’Agnese, the Rainaldis had had a free hand and the support of the pope’s nephew Camillo. And they botched it.
Now that Donna Olimpia was back as a papal favorite and once again had Innocent’s ear, it’s possible that she, together with Virgilio Spada, convinced the pope that the Rainaldis were not the architects for Sant’Agnese.
However he reached such a conclusion, Innocent dismissed Carlo Rainaldi, and even though Bernini had been rehabilitated in the pope’s eyes, Borromini was called in to take charge of Sant’Agnese’s design and construction.
The pope had become, if not favorably disposed toward Borromini, at least confident in his abilities and talents as an architect. After all, the architect had satisfactorily completed San Giovanni in time for the Holy Year (though the pope had to intervene personally to keep Borromini from going to jail) and had proven himself to be both creative and willing to work to fulfill the pope’s wishes. In addition, Borromini had the support of both Donna Olimpia and Virgilio Spada, two powerful allies. According to Spada, “Even though the pope was fed up with him, because he abandoned [San Giovanni] at its peak, and lamented having given execution of the marvelous Piazza Navona fountain to others after he had piped in the water, nonetheless the pope reckoned that the façade of Sant’Agnese was distorted—it seemed too tall from the ground—he handed it over for correction to him, and he created that beautiful façade, which cannot be criticized except by [here Spada canceled “hatred”] envy.”
At Sant’Agnese, Borromini took over a complicated commission. He inherited a half-finished church: The façade was about 3 meters (10 feet) high and the interior walls had been completed to the tops of the tall niches that decorate the church along the sides of the octagon. And any changes he wanted to make in the church’s plan or design had to be approved by the family member in charge of the building project: first Camillo Pamphili, then Donna Olimpia, and then after her death Camillo again.
Despite this, the pope wanted the church completed and was reluctant to modify much of it. Despite having Spada’s support—and Spada knew how to influence Donna Olimpia as well—Borromini had little actual opportunity to change the church. Instead of rethinking what should be built on the site, Borromini attempted to repeat the trick he had mastered at San Giovanni: to please the pope by making the church look better.
Borromini began overseeing work at Sant’Agnese on August 7, 1653. He had drawn up new plans (possibly before he even took over the commission) that maintained the church’s size and scope as the Rainaldis had envisioned it, but he proposed modifying the angled sides of the central space to make them convex, so that they curved into the church—a technique he also used at Sant’Ivo—which would have given Sant’Agnese a greater sense of movement, of drama and momentum, instead of the austere, unadventurous dignity the Rainaldis envisioned and Camillo preferred. He also proposed reconfiguring the courtyard behind the northern chapel, turning it into an arcaded square with rounded corners—an intimate quadrangle similar to the large courtyard he had designed at the Oratory.
Most of his attention, however, was expended on the façade, where the family gave him a free hand. One of the jabs that had been leveled against the Rainaldis’ front for Sant’Agnese was that the original set of stairs that led to the main doors protruded too far into the piazza. They were considered awkward and inconvenient. Borromini ordered the original façade torn down and began to build a new one.
His new design was both imaginative and vigorous. He continued to use the motif of a concave front—which Carlo Rainaldi had suggested when the initial charges against the steps were aired—to subtly embrace a visitor. Eight tall, sturdy columns framed three large doorways, the center one taller. Above the columns Borromini placed a striking pediment whose outline is reminiscent of the complex overdoors in the gallery at Palazzo Pamphili; this time, however, the outline frames not a statuary niche but a large, nearly semicircular window that had it been built would have allowed the morning sun to suffuse the church with light. The pediment would also have drawn the viewer’s eye up to the dome, which Borromini framed with two low but dramatic bell towers, one at each end of the church, which were to be topped by intricate groupings of columns and embellishments (stone lilies, another emblem of the Pamphili family, were to stand above the columns as if they had sprung from fertile ground beneath). A set of low, curved steps ended at an oval landing that was high enough to perhaps prompt a visitor to try to catch the eye of the statue of Rio de la Plata in Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers, which stood a few yards away.
In his design, Borromini managed to do what many thought was impossible: to provide a harmonious architectural counterpoint to the sculptural melody that had been played first by Bernini in the Piazza Navona. Borromini, Portoghesi said, was “generous enough to make his façade suggest an embracing movement in relation to the fountain,” which produced “an accentuated dynamic rapport” between the work of these two artists.
Work on Sant’Agnese progressed quickly. The dome’s drum was complete by the summer of 1654, even though Borromini insisted that only the best brick would do. Such haste didn’t come without a price: Supervision and safety measures got lax, and an accident—what Torgil Magnuson calls “a collapse”—occurred, causing considerable injuries and finger-pointing, some of it at Borromini. It was the second recorded instance that an accident had happened on a building site overseen by Borromini.
Yet Innocent didn’t seem to care. He made monthly visits to the site, exhorting the laborers to work faster and clashing with Borromini over building details and the speed with which the work was progressing; the pope was not the most patient of men. Nor was Borromini known as the most congenial architect in Rome. So their arguments could have been caused by either man. As he aged, the pope was becoming more querulous and ill-tempered. By the autumn of 1654 Innocent fell ill, and it became apparent that he was sinking.
“The senile decay that accompanies arteriosclerosis seems to have become more marked, and he grew increasingly restive and irritable,” Magnuson notes. The pope became more argumentative and even dismissed his physician Gabriele Fonseca from his service. The concern for the octogenarian pope’s health consumed Rome; at any moment, the Throne of Peter could fall vacant, throwing the future into doubt.
Such turmoil prompted nearly everyone to take precautions. Gigli notes that the rich began to bar their doors and posted armed guards at them. Humbler Romans resorted to carrying weapons to defend themselves if they were attacked.
In such a state of heightened uneasiness, it was hardly surprising that some of life’s details were overlooked, which is exactly what happened at Sant’Agnese. Someone forgot to pay the workers. And, not unexpectedly, they quit.
Such behavior further angered the Pamphili family, particularly Camillo, who thought that Borromini should be attending to his duties and details like paying his workmen. He had had enough, he said, of the architect’s capricci inutili e modellature triangolari, his useless caprices and triangular ornaments. A quarrel was inevitable.
From Borromini’s point of view, he had much to be pleased about. As Innocent lay dying in early January 1655, the church of Sant’Agnese was nearing completion. The façade was nearly finished, the dome was waiting for its lantern, and much of the work inside the church had been finished. Borromini had done exemplary work in a very short period. The church now dominated the piazza, as it has done ever since.
But the pope who commissioned it wouldn’t live to see it completed. While the bedridden pope edged toward death—and while Donna Olimpia snuck away from the pope’s room to rifle through her brother-in-law’s apartments, stealing as much plunder as she could—Innocent asked Father Gian Paolo Oliva, his confessor, to support him as he begged the assembled company’s forgiveness for his sins.
When Cardinal Fabio Chigi, the papal secretary of state, arrived, he banished Donna Olimpia from the room, which did little but push her away from the bed itself. “She still continued to hover in the doorway,” Magnuson says, until “Father Oliva told her curtly that this was no place for a woman and she would do better to mind her own business.” On January 7, 1655, Innocent died.
With Innocent’s passing, Donna Olimpia’s power vanished. But the ill feeling that his personality and policies fostered did not. Such was the bitterness and acrimony among the members of the Pamphili family that no one was willing to pay for the traditional papal coffins of lead and wood. Donna Olimpia pleaded poverty—a shocking lie, given that at her death two years later, she left an estate worth 2 million scudi—and neither Camillo nor his sister’s husband (and Bernini’s friend), Prince Nicolò Ludovisi, expressed any willingness to be generous to the memory of the man who had enriched the family so handsomely.
As the family bickered for weeks, the pope’s body lay ignominiously in a masons’ storage shed behind the sacristy at St. Peter’s. The masons themselves proved more attentive to Innocent’s memory than was his family: One placed a lighted candle in the shed; another stood vigil at night to keep the rats from nibbling at the dead pope’s decomposing body.
Finally, Gigli says, in an act of charity, a canon at St. Peter’s—a Pamphili relation—agreed to pay for the funeral and burial at Sant’Agnese.
When Camillo took over as head of the Pamphili, Borromini found himself without allies in the family. With Donna Olimpia gone and Spada (at least for the moment) out of power, Camillo had complete authority over all of the family’s holdings. And he was not one who would forgive Borromini for his past actions.
It was the beginning of the end of Borromini’s career.