ONCE AGAIN THE COLLEGE OF CARDINALS convened in Rome to choose a new pope. On January 20, 1655, the conclave met, with sixty-six cardinals attending—an impressive number, given the difficulties inherent in traveling in winter.
A number of cardinals jockeyed for position while the king of Spain and Cardinal Mazarin of France used their influence (and agents) to manipulate the voting. Neither faction had enough support to secure the papacy for its candidate, in part because several cardinals who had been appointed by Innocent publicly declared that they were in neither the French nor the Spanish camp. This faction, led by Cardinal Decio Azzolino, was dubbed the squadrone volante, the flying squadron. These men brought a refreshing, if inefficient, integrity to the process of selecting a new pope.
Deadlock was certain to occur, and it did—for months. By early April there still wasn’t a new pope, and the cardinals’ impatience was growing. Because of the crowded quarters and fetid air—the Sistine Chapel, where the conclave meets and votes, is not known for the charms of its cross-ventilation—a number of cardinals had fallen ill and left, while Cardinal Pier Luigi Carafa, one of the early contenders to be pope, died on February 17. Electing a pope was not, it seemed, for the faint of heart or body.
Finally, after weeks of discussion, negotiation, and even an occasional prayer, Mazarin agreed—by letter from Paris, where he had been banned by Innocent from returning to Rome without papal permission—not to block the selection of Cardinal Fabio Chigi of Siena, Innocent’s secretary of state, as pope. On April 7, Chigi was selected by a near-unanimous vote. Only Chigi cast his vote for another cardinal, Giulio Sacchetti.
Chigi chose the name Alexander VII in honor of Alexander V, whose papacy began in 1254 and who was called by his biographer Sforza Pallavicino “the defender of the papal dignity against the great of the world.”
Small and fine-boned, with intelligent eyes, elegant manners, and a well-known wit, Alexander was a conscientious if occasionally weak-willed pope who developed a reputation for looking too often to others for counsel and advice. Learned if not necessarily intellectual, and pious though not particularly humble, he was for his time a good example of priestly virtue and had a wide array of interests in religion, history, and the arts, particularly architecture. “Architecture…on a large scale was what Alexander passionately cared for,” the art historian Richard Krautheimer notes in a history of Alexander’s pontificate.
He was known to be vain and could be susceptible to flattery. Abate Francesco Buti told the Frenchman Paul Fréart de Chantelou that Alexander was “like a child who is won over with candy and apples; that is the way to achieve one’s aim—big things for small ones.” His health was always delicate and teetered on the precarious—even before he was elected pope he suffered from painful kidney stones—but he was known for his religious devotion and sincerity. As pope, he actually said his own masses and when he donned the papal robes for the first time after his election, his colleagues noted with some surprise that he wore a hair shirt next to his skin.
Alexander and Bernini had been friends for several years before his election, having become acquainted when Cardinal Chigi returned to Rome in 1651 from Cologne, where he had been papal nuncio. Chigi and Bernini were both men of accomplishment, and it was inevitable that Bernini would continue his friendship with a man as powerful as Chigi.
Alexander appreciated Bernini’s amusing intelligence, and according to Domenico Bernini, “The sun had not yet set on that happy day which saw the creation of a new Pontiff, when the Cavalier was summoned by the Pope and treated by him with demonstrations at once appropriate to his new dignity and to their old reciprocal affection.”
Filippo Baldinucci recounts a similar story, explaining that Alexander “encouraged Bernini to embark upon great things in order to carry out the vast plans that he had conceived for the greater embellishment of God’s temple, the glorification of the papacy, and the decoration of Rome.” What Alexander envisioned was nothing less than the completion of the final architectural chapter in the saga of St. Peter’s.
Alexander kept Bernini as architect of St. Peter’s, but the pope made him his personal architect as well as architect of the Camera—an unmatched sign of papal favor. According to Baldinucci, Alexander paid Bernini “a monthly provision of two hundred and sixty scudi.” Once again, Bernini became the undisputed artistic arbiter in Rome, and Borromini was effectively dismissed from papal service.
Although Borromini would continue to be involved in the commissions he had been given before Innocent’s death, he would never again enjoy the favor and attention he had received from the papal court. He had never been an intimate of Innocent’s the way Bernini had been for Urban and would be for Alexander; his provoking personality made such familiarity difficult, if not impossible. And while the breach wasn’t abrupt—Borromini still had friends in Alexander’s court—the tide that brought Bernini back to preeminence certainly was. And Bernini was impossible to hold back.
The year 1655 would be the first one in a decade of disappointment and decline for Borromini as his professional fortunes waned. It was as inescapable as it must have been heartbreaking to witness, because he now entered a period in which he did precisely the opposite of what he should have done to return to favor.
Several projects were left unfinished at Innocent’s death, including Sant’Agnese, and the bickering over how they were to be completed only increased. Given the Pamphili’s disdain for Innocent’s memory—what the art historian Francesca Bottari calls “the sequence of envy, rancour, and rivalry that followed between his heirs and the artists involved in complying with their fancy”—it was hardly surprising. Camillo in particular had strong opinions, especially about the completion of Sant’Agnese. He had no love for Borromini or for his plans for the church, particularly when a section of the church being built collapsed, prompting a renewed round of finger-pointing and recrimination. His involvement in determining how Sant’Agnese should be finished—participation Borromini no doubt found meddlesome and in questionable taste—prompted Borromini to stomp off the work yard in a huff, vowing never to return—or at least not until an apology was offered. To irritate Camillo further and to make the prospect of Borromini’s return even more remote, the architect allowed himself to be seen wandering among the librerie, the bookstalls, in the Piazza Navona, literally under the noses of the church’s laborers and the Pamphili family.
On July 2, 1657, Borromini was dismissed from Sant’Agnese—or quit, depending on whose story one believes. But it wasn’t all conflict, Connors notes. “After Innocent X’s death Camillo Pamphili had expected to return the commission to old Rainaldi and his son Carlo, the family architects and his personal favorites. But against all expectation he was so satisfied with Borromini that he kept him on…. In the end it was Borromini’s desire to press on hard with work, ‘the way the late pope wanted and the present one, too,’ that came into conflict with Camillo Pamphili’s tendency to go slow.” Given the antagonism that flared on both sides, it was a wonder that Borromini lasted in the position for as long as he did after Innocent’s death. To replace him, Camillo selected a commission of six architects to oversee the church’s completion. The architects represented a more traditional, conservative approach to architecture and design, and the group included Carlo Rainaldi.
It was the second dismissal Borromini had to endure that year. Earlier, in April, the Oratorians disregarded Spada’s petition to engage Borromini to complete the final phase of the Casa dei Filippini, giving the job instead to Camillo Arcucci. Spada wrote at the time, “When I returned on the occasion of the death of His Majesty Innocent X to my nest at the Chiesa Nuova, I quickly noted what great esteem the architect Arcucci enjoyed, one might say, with everyone, and the disfavor surrounding the Cavaliere Borromini, but as this was something that mattered nothing to me I expended not a word in approval or disapproval of these thoughts.” Yet Spada couldn’t convince his fellow Oratorians to change their opinion of the difficult architect. “I discovered opinions that were so contrary to my own,” Spada admitted, “that I felt obliged to clarify this matter.” Despite his efforts, Spada was outvoted. On May 17, 1657, by a vote of twelve to four, the Oratorians determined to reject Borromini as their architect.
After the debacle at the hands of the Oratorians and on the heels of Borromini’s departure from Sant’Agnese came potentially more disturbing news, involving his masterpiece, Sant’Ivo. It was perhaps no surprise that stories began to circulate that Borromini suffered from a malattia, sickness. Cracks had begun to appear in the church’s vaulting, probably, Portoghesi suggests, “the result of uneven settling caused by the suspension of work” that had occurred after Urban’s death in 1644 and before Innocent X allowed construction to resume in 1651. This neglect had left the church in rustica, without proper support, and the consequences were now all too obvious.
With the cracks in Sant’Ivo came the criticism from Borromini’s enemies. To counteract the damaging gossip that skittered about Rome, the rector of Sant’Ivo, Monsignor Vizzani, asked Borromini to respond to the taunts about his incompetence, which must have rankled the architect’s touchy sense of honor.
Borromini rose to the challenge by issuing a challenge of his own:
I the undersigned, adhering to the obligation that architects have by law of maintaining for fifteen years the buildings made by them, and not intending to avoid this responsibility, but rather to add law to law, make liable my heirs and estate for all damages that may occur in the fabric of the chapel and cupola of the Sapienza, or that may be occasioned by such damages, in the said span of 15 years, desiring however, that the Sapienza on its part proceed to complete, through the height of the second storey, the loggia on the left hand side, that flanks the said chapel on the part toward the Dogana, up to the opening of the piazza of the Dogana.
In other words, Borromini guaranteed his work, publicly and with more than a hint of bluster, if the building was completed according to his design. It was a daring, self-important pledge, and it had about it a hint of injured desperation.
It succeeded. Alexander, though no admirer of Borromini, agreed to allow Sant’Ivo to be finished after he saw a scale model of the chapel that Vizzani had brought to the papal apartments. (It’s possible that Spada could have been consulted on this.)
As a result, the work proceeded quickly, with Alexander allotting money to finish the floor (Borromini installed rhomboid-shaped gray and white marble tiles throughout the church, creating a honeycomb of hexagons over the star-shaped space), the altarpiece (Alexander commanded that there be one altar, not three, as Borromini had originally planned), and the stuccowork inside and outside the church (including the Chigi emblem of six crowned mountains topped by an eight-pointed star, winged cherubs, and belts of alternating six-and eight-pointed stars that garnish the ribs of the dome).
On November 13, 1660, the church was consecrated, and the next day Cardinal Antonio Barberini celebrated the consecration of the altar, so that Alexander himself could say Mass there on November 15 to commemorate the university’s official opening.
AS BORROMINI STRUGGLED to complete commissions that he had begun years before, fighting to maintain his patrons’ interest and open purse, Bernini was embarking on his last, and perhaps his greatest, creative period. Even before Alexander became pope, Bernini had been working on the Chigi family chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, the first church that pilgrims encounter when they entered the Porta del Popolo, the traditional northern gate of Rome. In the early months of Alexander’s reign, Bernini returned to sculpture, carving two statues, Daniel and Habbakuk, for the chapel he had been engaged to finish. The statues stand in two of the four niches in the chapel across the circular shrine from each other, and they are linked visually by Bernini because of the story they tell.
According to an apocryphal book of the Bible called “Bel and the Dragon,” as Daniel prayed for deliverance from the lions, into whose den he had been thrown by the Babylonians, an angel appeared to the prophet Habbakuk in Judea. Habbakuk was delivering bread to workers in the fields when God called to him and said, “Carry the dinner which thou has into Babylon to Daniel, who is in the lions’ den.”
Habbakuk naturally replied that he knew neither Daniel nor the den. It was then, according to the story, that an angel took matters into his own hands, grabbing Habbakuk “by the top of his head and carried him by the forelock and set him in Babylon.”
With these two statues, Bernini attempts to capture these events at the moment of their highest drama. In one niche to the right of the altar, the angel has Habbakuk by the hair and leans out into the chapel toward the viewer while he points across the chapel to the statue of Daniel, whose blank, featureless eyes gaze heavenward, his clasped hands extended in submission and thanks to the Lord who saved him, as indicated by the enormous head of a lion peering out from behind his right leg, gently licking his foot.
Infinitely more impressive, and vastly more important, than either Daniel or Habbakuk are the architectural sculptures Bernini began during this period—the monumental colonnade of St. Peter’s Square and the Cathedra Petri, the Throne of Peter. Taken together, these two works by Bernini represent the alpha and omega of St. Peter’s, its eye-catching overture, thrilling in its scope and spectacle, and its dramatic finale, a profoundly moving blending of art, history, and drama that fortifies man’s connection to God.
When Alexander became pope, the space in front of St. Peter’s was much the same as it had been for decades: a disorganized open area hemmed in on three sides by cramped little houses and dirty, tangled streets. Innocent had asked Carlo Rainaldi to propose a plan for reorganizing the piazza, with arcades and church offices built along its perimeter.
According to Baldinucci, Rainaldi proposed four different shapes—a hexagon, a square, a circle, and an oval—for the piazza. Nothing was done with the proposals, however, during Innocent’s pontificate. But it clearly was a priority for Alexander, because just three months after he became pope, he convened a meeting of the Congregazione on July 31, 1656, at which its members agreed with the pope that a piazza should be built in front of St. Peter’s and that Bernini, as Architect of St. Peter’s, should offer suggestions on how the Congregazione should proceed. A month later, on August 19, Bernini did precisely that.
Bernini first envisioned the piazza as a large trapezoid (a four-sided figure with only one set of parallel sides) bounded by long, straight arcades that included buildings behind them. The avviso for August 19 described it as “covered loggias with offices and dwellings for the Canons and penitentiaries.” The trapezoid may seem an odd choice for such a public space, but its pedigree was impeccable: Michelangelo had used it for the Piazza del Campidoglio atop the Capitoline Hill, which has been hailed as a brilliant piece of urban planning ever since. Bernini was attempting to do for sacred Roman life what Michelangelo had done for political Rome.
Though “Bernini’s trapezoidal piazza was conspicuously modest,” the art historian Timothy Kitao notes in his study of the design and construction of the piazza, “it was nevertheless a very efficient solution.”
From the outset there was concern about the enormous expense that such a large project would demand. One critic, Cardinal Giambattista Pallotta, submitted a written critique of the proposal (he wasn’t at the meeting of the Reverenda Fabbrica), arguing that the piazza was too large and too expensive for a church in such dire financial straits to tackle at present. But Alexander disagreed. He wanted the piazza built, despite the cost, which some estimates placed at 1 million scudi, an enormous sum at the time. (Angelo Correr, the Venetian ambassador to Rome, wrote in 1660 that the Reverenda Fabbrica would bear all of the building costs for the colonnades, though Torgil Magnuson posits that “it seems likely that the pope must have obtained additional funds elsewhere.”)
Such an astronomical expense worried the pope’s aides, including Spada. But Alexander countered Pallotta’s and others’ criticism by arguing that the piazza’s construction would benefit the city’s poor by employing them; the money would circulate through the city’s economy and would benefit more people than just the workers who were paid. It was a seventeenth-century forerunner to the trickle-down theory of economics.
With what must have been profound reluctance, the Reverenda Fabbrica acceded to the pope’s wishes and voted in favor of having a wooden model of the piazza built based on Bernini’s designs, and a temporary wooden section of the design constructed along the northern side of the piazza to see what it would look like—much as Urban had directed with Bernini’s bell towers. One of the questions a temporary structure would answer was whether Bernini’s design would obscure or hide completely the view of the pope’s window in the Vatican Palace from which he blessed the assembled crowds on feast days and other special occasions.
According to Bernini, when a full-scale model was built, Alexander “immediately…saw the drawbacks in giving the portico a square plan, in that the height of the portico would block the view of the Palace from the people and from the Palace the prospect of the piazza.”
Clearing the site began on September 29, 1656, even though the exact shape and dimensions of the piazza had yet to be decided. According to Bernini’s giustificazione, or official summary, the pope proposed an oval piazza, though some historians believe that Bernini may have planted the idea in the pope’s mind and used the pontiff’s pronounced preference for an oval piazza to silence criticism against his own inclination.
Bernini continued to work on revising his ideas, and toward the end of 1656 he proposed a new plan for the piazza, this time an oval. It was actually two semicircles on either side of a square with a short, straight arcade between the outer ends of the curves, what became known as the terzo braccio, the third arm. Such a departure took some members of the Reverenda Fabbrica by surprise when Bernini presented this idea on March 17, 1657, and there was considerable criticism surrounding Bernini’s new proposal—so much, in fact, that Carlo Rainaldi submitted a counterproposal for the piazza.
Eventually Bernini proposed an elegant alternative to his more prosaic oval, the ovato tondo. It was more of an ellipsis than an oval and was based on the geometric relationship between two overlapping circles—a system akin to what Borromini used when finalizing the shape of San Carlino. By August 1657 Bernini replaced his proposed arcades with simple colonnades. The result was a plan that spreads out from St. Peter’s more gracefully than his previous proposals had done. It is this scheme that in large part was adopted (though without the terzo braccio) and became the Piazza San Pietro that exists today.
It is a magnificent, monumental space, at once spectacular and welcoming, elegant and surprisingly functional—what one historian called “the most successful piece of architecture on earth.” The graceful sweep of three hundred massive Doric columns of travertine, which Émile Zola once described as “a forest of gigantic stone trunks,” and the ninety-six colossal statues of saints that adorn the colonnade’s roofline (overseen, though not carved, by Bernini) enclose an arena (really an amphitheater; Alexander himself referred to it in his diaries as a teatro) nearly 200 meters (650 feet) across at its widest point. It can hold three hundred thousand souls in its embrace at one time.
In fact, that is precisely the image Bernini was thinking of when he designed the piazza: the welcoming, maternal arms of Holy Mother Church. According to Howard Hibbard, “The image of the piazza was likened by Bernini to the outstretched arms of the Church welcoming the faithful, so that even this seemingly pure architectural creation has an anthropomorphic, and even quite sculptural, connotation and function. Paul Fréart de Chantelou wrote in his diary that Bernini compared the piazza to a head and arms because “architecture consisted in proportions drawn from the human body.”
Though there were critics of the elliptical plan and the cost concerned everyone but Alexander, there is no question that the piazza is one of the world’s great man-made open spaces, It’s a place, George Eliot wrote, “where all small and shabby things were unknown.” Charles Dickens found that “nothing can exaggerate” the piazza’s splendor, “with its clusters of exquisite columns and its gushing fountains—so fresh, so broad, and free, and beautiful.”
The colonnade provided a subtle but deliberate improvement to the space in front of St. Peter’s by adding an equilibrium to the façade of St. Peter’s that it lacked. The colonnades are relatively low, and they narrow as they extend away from the church, which persuades the viewer that the church front is actually taller and not as wide as it appears—a flaw in the façade’s design that Maderno’s critics complained about for more than a century. By keeping the colonnades relatively low and pulling them toward each other (rather than keeping them parallel), Bernini solved (or at least diminished) the problem of an ill-proportioned church front.
Construction on the colonnades proceeded soon after the pope had agreed on the elliptical design in 1657. The foundations for the mammoth project were laid on August 28, 1657, in a small ceremony attended by both the pope and Bernini, and the architect was kept busy, Magnuson says, “with the exacting preparations and the technical difficulties of laying the foundations in the marshy terrain”—Bernini didn’t want to make the same mistake he had made earlier with the campanili. By the next summer, forty-seven columns were standing, and by 1662 the northern side of the colonnade was complete.
As Bernini was working on the largest public works project Rome had ever seen, Borromini was struggling through his last important commission, one that he had held for the better part of a decade and which truly got under way only when Alexander became pope: architect of the Collegio di Propaganda Fide. The post was an important one, since the Propaganda Fide enjoyed a long, auspicious association with the papacy.
Gregory XV created the Congregazione di Propaganda Fide on June 22, 1622, as the administrative center for Christian missionaries that the church was sending out into the world to combat the rise of Protestantism. This was also the era of exploration, and the church wanted to make sure that the new civilizations that were being conquered embraced Catholicism.
On August 1, 1627, Urban VIII founded the Collegium Urbanum, a seminary dedicated to educating young missionaries and turning them into devoted soldiers for God and church. What became the Collegio di Propaganda Fide was housed in the congregation’s headquarters, which were in a small palazzo at the southern end of the Piazza di Spagna originally called the Palazzo Ferratini (or Farratini), which sits in the wedge between the Via di Propaganda Fide and the Via Due Macelli. The building had been given to the group by Juan Bautista Vives, a Spanish priest, and such was the attention Urban showered on the congregation that in 1634 Bernini was commissioned to build a chapel for it.
Bernini envisioned a small oval chapel, which he placed along the western wall of the congregation building, just across the narrow Via di Propaganda Fide from the house he would eventually buy and live in until his death. The chapel was dedicated to the Three Kings and became known as the Re Magi.
By 1646 the congregation owned all of the land in its triangular-shaped block, and it was decided that befitting its growing influence within the church and the increasing number of missionaries, its headquarters should be expanded. After the death of Urban’s brother Cardinal Antonio Barberini in September 1646—Urban’s apolitical brother didn’t flee to Paris as Urban’s nephews Antonio and Taddeo had—Pope Innocent nominated Borromini as architect of the congregation.
But Borromini didn’t begin work immediately. A litany of false starts, a rethinking of what should be done and where the money should come from to build it, dragged work on well into Innocent’s papacy. Finally, in 1654, Innocent decided to allow the expansion of the congregation’s home to go forward and gave Borromini the time to turn his thoughts seriously to a design.
“Very likely it was at this time that the chapel of the Re Magi built by Bernini was torn down,” Portoghesi notes, which must have given Borromini a certain satisfaction. Having been nudged out of the commission for the Fountain of the Four Rivers by Bernini, he may have felt that the scales had been balanced somewhat by the pope’s allowing him the chance to demolish one of Bernini’s creations.
But before he turned his attention to rebuilding the chapel, Borromini designed the façade for the new construction along the Via di Propaganda Fide. It’s a long expanse of wall and its very size and setting make it a knotty design problem. The street is narrow, so it was impossible to engineer a façade that could be appreciated head-on. A visitor must approach it obliquely, from an angle, as if sneaking into the building unnoticed.
Borromini managed to turn an indirect prospect to advantage, creating a silent, graceful undulation stone. From its outer beveled corner, the façade pulls the eye across it. As with his façades for the Oratory and Sant’Ivo, the outer wall of the Propaganda Fide moves logically but in contradiction: wherever one expects to see, Borromini presents precisely the opposite.
Even the entrance portal is a surprise. Instead of being a traditional doorjamb, two square pilasters flank the door. They are narrower at the bottom than they are at the top and look like two pairs of striped stirrup pants stretched out to dry. Borromini placed them at 45-degree angles to the wall so that each one’s outer corner projects from its center, as if they are turning on a hidden winch. Above the door, nestled into its own convex, altar-like space, Borromini placed a large window between two sets of Doric columns that support a nearly elliptical stone roof. Under the roof, barely visible from the street but no doubt plain to someone looking out the window, Borromini placed his ever-present cherub’s head, with four wings folded around it. It is a detail he used extensively throughout the latter part of his career, and its presence at the Propaganda Fide illustrates how involved he was with all of the details of the design.
By 1656 the façade of the Propaganda Fide was complete. It stood in marked contrast to the somber buildings around it, particularly across the Via di Propaganda Fide—including the west wall of Bernini’s own house, a large, drab-looking square building. Over the next two years, Borromini turned his attention to the Cappella dei Re Magi (the Chapel of the Three Kings), giving it a distinct, poignant character all its own and in the process creating his last sacred masterpiece.
Unlike Bernini’s oval chapel, Borromini’s Re Magi is a rectangle with rounded corners, though as is typical with Borromini, it’s much subtler and more complicated than that. It is small—there are only two diminutive altar niches on each long side—but Borromini has managed to instill in the space a sense of contemplation missing in San Carlo or even Sant’Ivo; here the spirit can catch its breath. It knows how difficult, and how wearing, the world can be.
The Re Magi is the most soothing of Borromini’s churches because of the harmony of its proportions. The chapel’s height, depth, and width are all in balance, giving it a sense of equilibrium that Borromini’s other works don’t have. This is a place of poise and controlled grandeur.
There is relatively little color in the chapel itself, but the effect is far from austere. The walls are a soft off-white with twelve monumental pilasters ringing the space—four on the long sides of the rectangle and two each framing the main altar and the entrance. Bands of gray marble are inlaid along the insides of the niches’ openings and black and white marble are arranged in bands that connect the bases of the pilasters to each other.
Embedded in each of the twelve pilasters just above eye level is an eight-pointed star, the symbol of the Jesuits, who founded the Propaganda Fide College, its Greek cross and sunburst outlined in colors of white, gold, red, and green. Between the pilasters halfway up the wall are niches of white and gray marble that display busts of past congregation members. The busts stand atop oval bases of smooth black marble, which seem to mimic the shape of the oval windows high above.
The windows are the very heart of what makes the chapel extraordinary, because they are, like the windows in the refectory at San Carlo, the wellsprings from which originates the ceiling’s cross ribbing. The windows are arranged at the very top of the chapel and alternate between oval and square windows with shallow arched tops. Some of the windows are real, some are false, but their ability to let in light is almost beside the point: The eye is drawn to all of them, and they become the origins for the ceiling’s complex ribbing, which is arranged on the diagonal.
The ribs are complex but logical, as meticulous and as rational as a proof by Newton. The ribbing flows across the ceiling at acute angles. One rib begins at the side of one window and streams across the ceiling like a comet, ending its journey at the center point of the top edge of another window. The pattern works its way around the room, creating a series of diamond-shaped figures and cross-hatching that produces a hexagon in the center of the ceiling. In the middle of this central form is a dove, the symbol of the Holy Spirit, which rains its rays of golden light—its blessings—down upon us all.
The Chapel of the Three Kings is a kind of hushed triumph, a model of Borromini’s unmatched ability to synthesize the ancient and modern into a building that is completely new and wholly his own.
But Borromini couldn’t rest on the triumph of the Three Kings for very long—if he ever did. Even though the façade for the Propaganda Fide was essentially complete by 1662 and the interior of the chapel by 1665 (though the stuccoing wasn’t finished until after Borromini’s death), Bernini had embarked on his own great small church—one that has the audacity to stand right next door to Borromini’s own masterpiece, San Carlino.