THE CHURCH OF SANT’ANDREA AL QUIRINALE is a brilliant piece of theater—“a masterpiece,” according to Sacheverell Sitwell. It’s not a large church, but its theatricality makes it seem as grand as a trumpet flourish. It’s perhaps the most innately dramatic building Bernini ever designed by himself; it’s certainly the structure he was most happy with, though it took a dozen years to complete. It’s also one of the few commissions for which Bernini refused payment. Instead, he asked that he receive a loaf of bread from the novitiate’s bakery every day—a request that was readily granted. Perhaps he knew that building the church would feed his soul so that he would need little enough to fill his belly.
But Domenico Bernini recounts a telling anecdote that reveals how the aging lion of Italian art—Bernini was by now nearing sixty—was learning the satisfactions of a job well done.
Domenico came across his father unexpectedly one day at Sant’Andrea.
“What are you doing here, all alone and silent?” he asked Bernini.
His father’s reply was unexpected—surprising for an artist known for being perpetually dissatisfied with his own creations.
“Son, I feel a special satisfaction at the bottom of my heart for this one work of architecture,” Bernini said. “I often come here as a relief from my duties to console myself with my work.”
Bernini’s approval of Sant’Andrea is understandable, springing as it does from the clever interplay of surprise and spectacle that he instilled in this church of modest dimensions on the Quirinale. This is a church of consequence, of great deeds memorialized, of great faith rewarded.
Sant’Andrea was begun in 1658, having been commissioned by the Society of Jesus—the Jesuits—to replace an old chapel attached to its novitiate across the street from the papal palace. Bernini had a long association with, and sympathy for, the Jesuits. He practiced the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, and was known to have owned a copy of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. He attended la divozione della buona morte, the devotion of the good death, at the church of the Gesù, every Friday for four decades and took communion once a week.
As Bernini aged, his early years of passionate self-indulgence gave way to a life of devotion and unshakable faith. So his involvement with Sant’Andrea is natural, particularly as he was appointed to the post at the suggestion—some might say the command—of Pope Alexander VII. His selection was one more snub to Borromini, because under Innocent X, Cardinal Francesco Adriano Ceva, the order’s protector, had commissioned Borromini to draw up plans for what Torgil Magnuson calls “a large and sumptuous church” to be built on the site. But Innocent soon changed his mind. He decided that he did not want such an imposing church near the papal palace. And so the proposal was tabled.
Alexander, however, had no such concerns. He also saw the opportunity to use a nearby church to accommodate his papal household, because the papal chapel in the Quirinale Palace was too small to hold the growing number of courtiers and attendants. But his aversion to Borromini and preference for Bernini ensured that the pope would choose another architect to build the Jesuits’ church dedicated to Saint Andrew.
In addition, Camillo Pamphili, at the pope’s request and his own ambition, had agreed to be the church’s patron and to pay 15,000 scudi to finance the interior decoration of the church. If anyone in Rome had a greater distaste for Borromini than Alexander, it was Camillo Pamphili.
And so, to no one’s surprise, the commission for Sant’Andrea was settled on Bernini. Borromini never had a chance.
Whether or not Bernini intended it to be, his design for Sant’Andrea—an ellipsis—is to a great extent reminiscent of his doomed oval chapel at the Propaganda Fide, which Borromini had unceremoniously torn down to make way for his own master-work (though, to be fair, he had initially tried to preserve it). While one of Bernini’s first ideas for Sant’Andrea was a pentagon—the Jesuits required five altars—he also submitted a proposal for an oval church whose main altar was on the short axis, just as he had built at the Propaganda Fide.
This was the proposal that Alexander approved—a small elliptical church with a main altar and two chapels on either side—and which the Jesuits commissioned. The pope noted in his diary entry for September 2, 1658, that Bernini had shown him the plan for Sant’Andrea, and he had directed him to move the church farther back from the Via Pia, “making it less visible from the Quirinale garden,” Magnuson says. The initial aim was to build an intimate chapel for the order to use, with occasional visits by papal courtiers.
Two weeks later, Bernini showed Alexander a model of the building, and shortly after workmen began digging the foundations. The pope formally approved the plans at the end of October, and on November 3, the foundations were laid. A year later, the dome was complete (though it was modified to its present form in the 1660s and 1670s, as were other aspects of the church).
The exterior is unexpectedly grave, even sober—a startling change for Bernini. It’s his most controlled façade since his designs for Santa Bibiana nearly three decades before. No windows are visible from the street. Instead, the major decorations are a simple semicircular portico festooned with the coat of arms of Camillo Pamphili (complete with crown—after all, he was a prince) and supported by two columns, which stand atop a cresting wave of stone steps, longer than what Bernini envisioned, but Sitwell still finds poetry in them, calling them “rings of water that seem to enlarge themselves as we look at them.” Two high curved walls, graceful if unwelcoming, spread out from either side of the narrow entrance like a theater’s curtain barring a glimpse of the mystery that lies behind.
While the exterior is restrained, the interior is not. Built to impress rather than to welcome, it’s an attention-grabbing celebration of bravado and audacity in marble, stucco, and gilt, an ecclesiastical stage set unparalleled in Rome. Camillo Pamphili’s ambition for a lavish church was met—thanks in large part to the work of Giovanni Maria Baratta, the prince’s scarpellino. The church far exceeds expectations; indeed, it dazzles, like a series of carefully timed fireworks.
Arranged under a low elliptical dome of lavishly gilded florets set in hexagons of white and gold (which like the decorations in the dome at San Carlino diminish in size as they rise to the lantern) are four chapels and a main altar—two chapels on each side of the short axis between the entrance and the main altar. Two rings of figures—putti at the base of the lantern and fishermen (because Andrew was one) sitting on ledges just above the windows at the base of the dome—populate the upper part of the church between ten vividly decorated ribs, which flow down from the lantern’s oculus like rays of sunlight. The fishermen hold undulating rings of gilded garland while the putti peer down at the goings-on below.
Ringing the church’s walls are eight colossal square pilasters, which Bernini placed in an orderly rhythm around the church to nudge the eye inexorably toward the main altar, which stands in a high narrow niche behind four massive Corinthian columns. Between the pilasters, just below the beginning of the dome, are eight nearly square windows (they have a slight arch), which allow the church to be bathed in light.
The deeply colored reddish marble—in hues of rose, rust, and even dried blood, depending on the time of day—saturates the church, suffusing it with a feeling of overpowering, almost merciless splendor: It’s difficult to find a spot here that doesn’t overwhelm. The opulence is deliberate, as Camillo Pamphili was determined to finance a church that was rica e bella, rich and beautiful. It is both—and more.
Marble is everywhere in the church, from the tiles of white and gray bardiglio that cover the floor, to the white Carrara marble capitals of the chapel’s pilasters, to the four massive, marvelously veined pillars that mark out the main altar and frame the striking painting of the Crucifixion of St. Andrew by Guglielmo Cortese, who was known as Il Borgognone. It hangs above the altar and is set in a border of red breccia marble, which seems to be pulled up by a flurry of finely wrought (by Giovanni Rinaldi) angels and cherubs that flutter about the top of the painting in conscientious attendance.
One of Jesus’s first disciples, Andrew was, like his brother Peter, a fisherman. He, too, was crucified—in his case, on a saltire cross, essentially two pieces of wood arranged in a large X, to set his death apart from the crucifixion of Jesus. (According to the New Testament, it was Andrew who brought Peter, then called Simon, to meet Jesus. Andrew became known as one of the four Doctors of the Church and was, in the words of Saint John Chrysostom, “the Peter before Peter.”)
In Il Borgognone’s painting, Andrew is shown just before his death, looking heavenward, toward the paradise that the carpenter from Nazareth had promised him. If the visitor’s gaze follows Andrew’s, it rises up to the focal point of the church, Bernini’s enormous figure of Saint Andrew, which sits on a stucco cloud atop the center of the heavy semicircular pediment that caps the altar. This statue of an old man, his lanky arms outstretched in surrender, his knobby left knee bent out into the church as if he were about to stumble from his amorphous aerie, his simple face and euphoric gaze lifted toward the bliss of heaven, is full of emotion, almost quivering with the thrill of his ascent into paradise. It’s a study in rapture that is more accentuated and extroverted than Bernini’s Saint Teresa, which he had carved a decade earlier. Perhaps by his sixties, Bernini had begun to have a more pronounced sense of the joys of heaven.
Despite the pleasure that Bernini eventually derived from Sant’Andrea, there was considerable debate about whether it should be built at all. Some in the Jesuit community were concerned that the church Bernini envisioned was too grand, too ostentatious. Such sumptuousness, they believed, was at odds with the principles of poverty and simplicity the Jesuits were supposed to live by. In the end, since Camillo Pamphili, not the order, was paying for the church’s decoration, the majority decided that such splendor could be seen as the physical manifestation of the Jesuits’ motto, ad majorem Dei gloriam, for the greater glory of God. Such glory was Bernini’s glory, too.
As it was elsewhere. While Sant’Andrea was being constructed, Bernini was called upon by Alexander to return to St. Peter’s. This time the pope wanted a new entrance for the Vatican Palace, which until Alexander’s pontificate had been an unimpressive series of staircases and courtyards—Howard Hibbard describes the stairs as “rickety”—that had led up to the Sala Regia, the ceremonial entrance hall of the palace.
One of the reasons Alexander wanted a new entrance was that the route from palace to basilica was circuitous at best. It could be a difficult trip, particularly during official processions when the popes, who were often elderly and not always in the best of health, were carried in the sedia gestatoria, the portable throne that twelve footmen bear on their shoulders, from the Vatican Palace to St. Peter’s. Previous popes had wanted a safer, more direct and impressive entrance to the Vatican Palace and a link between the palace and St. Peter’s.
Decades before, Maderno had tried—and failed—to devise a better route. But it wasn’t until Bernini further renovated the Vatican Palace, tearing down one tower and realigning the Portone di Bronzo, the official ceremonial entrance to the Vatican from the Piazza San Pietro, that he finally had enough space to create the mesmerizing cascade of stairs that is the Scala Regia.
Still, Bernini had enormous design and construction challenges: He was literally boxed in. He had to fit the stairway into a narrow, tapering triangle tucked in between the northern wall of St. Peter’s and the southern wall of the Sistine Chapel. The walls between the two buildings aren’t parallel, which made Bernini’s job trickier. In addition, he was further hampered by the limits imposed on the project by the stairway’s height. The stairway couldn’t be too tall because it began directly under the southern section of the Sala Regia.
Everywhere Bernini turned, he was confronted by restrictions and technical challenges that would flummox any architect. But instead of giving up, he used these limitations to his advantage, brilliantly overcoming them to create a remarkable fusion of architecture and art, drama and utility.
The Scala Regia is actually a tall, barrel-vaulted tunnel that rises from a square landing adjoining the porch of St. Peter’s and (via an impressive corridor of marble) the Portone di Bronzo. It begins with a massive triumphal opening—really a Serlian arch—supported by two huge stone columns and bracketed by smaller rectangular openings between the columns and the staircase walls. It looks like a larger, grander version of the window Borromini designed for the gallery of the Palazzo Pamphili. Alexander’s coat of arms hangs above the arch, and two stone angels trumpet his magnificence from both sides.
As the stairway ascends, it narrows—a deficiency in the site that Bernini used to canny advantage. He actually lowered the heights of the columns and the ceiling as the stairs climb to the piano nobile, which creates a false, but dramatic, perspective looking up the stairs. He also used light (from a hidden window along the way) to soften the stairway’s darkness, and placed on the main landing, visible from the bottom, a window that acts as a beacon, beckoning visitors higher. (To complete the spectacle, Alexander later commissioned from Bernini a huge equestrian statue of Constantine, who sits on horseback and gazes in stunned wonder at the vision of the cross that appeared to him on the eve of battle, to stand at the landing between St. Peter’s and the entrance to the Vatican Palace.)
Bernini told admirers that the Scala Regia “was the most daring operation” he had ever attempted, and that if he had heard that another artist had completed it, “he would not have believed it possible.” But it certainly was a magnificent example of his turning what others saw as limitations into advantages. What appears to be a stately, majestic staircase is in fact a cunning trick of the eye.
It’s a very similar kind of optical trick that Borromini helped to create at the Palazzo Spada, the Roman palazzo that Cardinal Bernardino Spada had purchased in 1632. The scale of the Scala Regia is grander, but the intent is the same.
As a diversion for Cardinal Bernardino’s garden, Borromini designed and built in 1652–53 a short colonnade visible from the palazzo’s main room. Though only 8.82 meters (less then 30 feet) long, it appears much longer and more impressive—due to the intentional deceptions inherent in the plan. Basing his designs on mathematical calculations made by Fra Giovanni Maria da Bitonto (or Bitonti), an Augustinian friar who was fascinated by perspective, Borromini constructed a barrel-vaulted corridor lined by two rows of Doric columns that are purposely shortened the farther away they are from the corridor’s opening. The entire effect calls to mind the Scala Regia. Only the size is different.
Bernini probably was familiar with Borromini’s colonnade at Palazzo Spada. Given that both of the Spada brothers were part of Alexander’s inner circle and that Bernini was always ready to modify good ideas to suit his own creativity, it’s possible that Borromini’s witty entertainment in Cardinal Bernardino’s garden might have inspired, even in a small way, the imposing and impressive Scala Regia. But Bernini had used similar scenic illusions for his own plays, this sort of perspective trick is certainly something Bernini knew how to use to advantage.
Borromini never complained that his ideas for the Spada Colonnade had been used by Bernini—at least not to anyone who recorded such grievances. By then, few people would have listened.