THREE OF ROME’S GREAT COMMISSIONS FROM the 1660s—the colonnades at the Piazza San Pietro, the Scala Regia, and the Cathedra Petri (a grand bronze reliquary housing the chair believed to have been the original Throne of Peter, which was placed at the center of a sophisticated sculptural group that stands on a huge altar along the western wall of St. Peter’s)—were Bernini’s. And he was in demand all over Europe. So highly regarded were his abilities and his reputation that Bernini was as popular during Alexander’s pontificate as he had been during Urban’s.
These were some of the busiest, most creative years of Bernini’s life. Now in his early sixties and still in robust health, he was the undisputed elder statesman of European art, able to draw upon decades of experience and a still-nimble creativity to rise to the challenge of any commission that intrigued him.
He was still young enough to live well, having amassed a sizable fortune—at his death in 1680 it was estimated at 400,000 scudi—and he had the resources to finance both his necessities and his fancies. He also had the satisfaction of seeing his children grown and settled satisfactorily. Some worked for their father, others joined the church. In short, he had been given the greatest of all gifts, the capacity to enjoy life.
Borromini’s later life wasn’t as agreeable. Although he continued to work during the 1660s, at places like the church of Sant’-Andrea delle Fratte (with its fascinating and still-unfinished brick dome, whose drumlike profile calls to mind an ancient Roman tomb near Capua known as the Conocchia, and its campanile, a tall, tapering tower that looks like an emaciated and overdecorated bowling pin) and at San Carlino (on his magnificent heraldic façade for the church), requests for his plans grew fewer and praise for his gifts fainter.
Alexander wanted little to do with him. Though he respected Borromini’s abilities—due in part to Virgilio Spada’s persistent cheerleading—the pope wanted him at arm’s length. It wasn’t an accident that during the eleven years he was pope, Alexander met with Borromini only twenty-seven times. By contrast, Alexander met with Bernini more than four hundred.
Most of Borromini’s work during this time came from the few friends he still had. Orazio Falconieri was one. His commissions to design and build the Falconieri chapel at San Giovanni dei Fiorentini and to add on to the Palazzo Falconieri, his rambling palace near the Tiber, offered Borromini the chance to continue to find expression for his inventiveness. The Lombard architect may have been out of favor, but he wasn’t out of ideas.
He worked on them slowly, painstakingly, perhaps because he knew that such commissions wouldn’t last forever.
During the years of 1664–65, as Borromini was beginning work on the façade of San Carlo, Rome heard the astonishing news that Bernini had been invited to Paris by Louis XIV to provide plans for adding on to the Louvre.
In March 1664 Louis’s minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert had written to Bernini, requesting that he present plans for finishing the medieval royal palace along the Seine. (Colbert could not find a French architect capable of the job.) He wrote similar letters to Carlo Rainaldi and Pietro da Cortona. After considerable back-and-forth between Bernini and Colbert, Bernini was selected because, Filippo Baldinucci writes, the French king “could only be satisfied with that which would be admired by all eyes.”
Louis was so intrigued by Bernini’s ideas for the Louvre that he wrote to the artist directly. In a letter dated April 11, 1665, Louis said: “I have a great desire to see and to know more closely a personage so illustrious…. My desire moves me to dispatch this special courier to Rome to ask you to give me the gratification of undertaking the journey to France” to confer about the plans in more detail.
Such a request was unprecedented—an unheard-of honor. It was also a political nightmare for Alexander.
Bernini was a national treasure, one of the few the Papal States possessed during this period. As the kingdoms of Spain and France grew in power and influence throughout the seventeenth century—they were the dominant nations in Europe at the time—the secular authority of the papacy fell into decline. Never again would the pope play a pivotal role on Europe’s political stage. The limelight had shifted, shining on others.
Still, Alexander would not be shunted off into the shadows without a fight. The papacy still held an unquestioned supremacy in the arts, and Rome was still the hub of European sculpture and architecture—due in large part to Bernini. Alexander had no intention of allowing this advantage, however slight, to be co-opted by Louis—and he didn’t want to allow Bernini to go to Paris.
But Louis insisted. Writing to Alexander himself, the king put pressure on the pope. “[I] entreat you then, if [Bernini’s] duty to you permits it, to command the Cavalier to come here in order to finish his work. Your Holiness could not grant me a greater favor in the present set of circumstances.”
The pope tried to resist, but in the end, he had no choice. France was too mighty a nation, and Louis was too formidable a king, to defy. With great reluctance, Alexander agreed to Louis’s request. The pope allowed Bernini to go to Paris for six months.
Baldinucci says that on April 25, 1665—Domenico Bernini says it was the twenty-ninth—sixty-six-year-old Gianlorenzo Bernini, together with his retinue, which included his eighteen-year-old son Paolo and his longtime assistant Mattia de’ Rossi, left for Paris.
The trip north to Paris lasted about a month. This was typical of the time and took into account the comfort and strength of the elderly dignitary. Bernini’s entourage traveled through Florence, Bologna, Siena, Milan, Turin, and several cities in France; at each city he was met by local dignitaries, and the townspeople lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the famous cavaliere from Rome. Bernini is said to have joked that the curious crowds were acting “as though he were a traveling elephant.” In early June, after a month of travel, Bernini arrived at the outskirts of Paris and was met by Paul Fréart de Chantelou, a courtier who would serve as Bernini’s attendant and guide during the artist’s sojourn in France. Chantelou, chosen because he had spent several years in Rome and spoke Italian—Bernini could speak no other language—kept a meticulous diary of the great man’s visit, which gives a fascinating insight into the life and opinions of the greatest artist of his time.
Chantelou described Bernini as “a man of medium height but well-proportioned and rather thin. His temperament is all fire. His face resembles an eagle’s, particularly the eyes…. He is rather bald, but what hair he has is white and frizzy…. I consider his character to be one of the finest formed by nature, for without having studied he has nearly all the advantages with which learning can endow a man.”
Knowledgeable though he may have been about artistic matters, Bernini proved to be tone-deaf to the social niceties of visiting a foreign country. He suffered from the malady that often plagues neophyte travelers who believe that their ways and their lifestyles are far superior to foreign ones. It was not long before Bernini’s pronouncements and opinions began to irritate his French hosts. He loathed the now-gone Tuileries Palace, calling it una grande picciola cosa, “a big little thing.” He criticized the dome of the Val-de-Grâce, the church started by François Mansart and completed by Gabriel Le Duc, observing that “a little cap had been placed on a very large head,” and he commented that “Paris seemed nothing but a mass of chimneys, standing up like teeth of a carding comb.” Bernini further annoyed the French by declaring that “art should be disguised with an appearance of naturalness; in France, just the opposite generally happened.” Such a point of view was unlikely to endear the speaker to his hosts. Nor was his proclamation that he uttered in his first speech to Louis: “Let no one speak to me of little things.”
But Louis was captivated by Bernini, as he was by the madrigal that Abbé Buti wrote (in Italian) for Bernini’s visit: “The question hangs in doubt whether it is a more fortunate destiny for Bernini to have found Louis or Louis, Bernini.”
Despite his opinions, Bernini’s time in Paris was fruitful. In the end, he designed four different plans and elevations for the Louvre, each time in response to critiques—or criticisms—from his hosts, particularly by Colbert, who wanted rooms for his king that were both convenient and handsome. The two men, the architect and physician Claude Perrault wrote, were polar opposites: “The Cavaliere never went into detail. He was only concerned with planning huge rooms for theatricals and fêtes, and would not bother himself over practical considerations…. Monsieur Colbert, on the other hand, wanted precision. He thought, rightly, that it was not merely a question of housing the persons of the King and the royal family well, but also of providing convenient lodgings for all the officials.” Bernini, Perrault said, thought “it was beneath the dignity of a great architect such as himself to have to bother about such details.”
While in France, Bernini agreed to carve a bust of Louis; the king, Baldinucci says, “was often happy to serve as a living model.” Such regal generosity had its price, however. Louis never went anywhere without a considerable entourage of courtiers, ladies, and hangers-on, some of whom felt compelled to offer comments to Bernini on his handling of the marble and the progress of the bust.
During one modeling session, in which the king was still for an hour, Bernini threw down his chisel “in admiration and loudly exclaimed, ‘Miracle, miracle that a king so meritorious, youthful and French should remain immobile for an hour.’” During another sitting, as the king was arranging himself, Bernini, according to Baldinucci, “gently parted the locks of hair which were arranged, as was the fashion, over the brow. He exposed the forehead somewhat and in an almost authoritative manner said, ‘Your Majesty is a king who must show his forehead to one and all.’” This surprise prompted a new hairstyle at the French court that became known as “the Bernini modification.”
The finished bust of Louis is a dignified and stately study of the authority of monarchy. Bernini portrayed Louis as proud, imperial, completely in command. When critics told Bernini that he erred in some of the details of Louis’s face—the king had rather smaller eyes and a lower forehead than Bernini portrayed—Bernini replied astutely, “My king will last longer than yours.” He understood that what he had carved could be both art and propaganda.
By autumn, Bernini’s time in France drew to a close. “I must return to Rome,” Bernini told his hosts. “Some of my children that I cannot bring here, the Cathedra Petri and the Piazza, are pressing me to go back.” According to Chantelou, “no one dared to write to him about [them] and thinking of [them] brought tears to his eyes.” He thought about them incessantly, pondering their details and how they were progressing in his absence.
It was just as well: Bernini was as eager to return to Rome as the French were for him to leave. Though the foundation stone to the new Louvre had been laid amid suitable ceremony in the king’s presence on October 17, Colbert had no intention of allowing an Italian palazzo, in all of its inconvenient splendor, to be built along the Seine. So when Bernini departed—after receiving from Louis 20,000 scudi and a life pension of another 2,000—it was with negligible regret on either side. (What Colbert and his architects did build at the Louvre—the east front, the so-called Grand Colonnade—is a masterpiece of French classical architecture, completely at odds with Bernini’s Baroque.)
Bernini left Paris on October 20, 1665, arriving back in Rome in early December—no doubt relieved to have returned to a place that understood and appreciated him. Alexander, too, was pleased to have him back. There was always the concern that the allures of the French court might draw Bernini to it permanently. After all, Leonardo da Vinci had lived at Francis I’s court for several years, eventually dying in his service of the first of the great French kings of the Renaissance. Alexander wanted to avoid that at all costs, and fortunately, Bernini remained in Rome and in papal service until the pope’s death on May 22, 1667.
Less than three months after Alexander died, Borromini did, too.
AFTER BORROMINI HAD thrown himself on his sword, a surgeon from the Ospedale di San Spirito, which was nearby, was sent for, though hopes for the architect’s recovery were slim. But to everyone’s surprise, Borromini did not die at once. He lingered for almost a day, lucid enough to give a detailed account of what he had done and to dictate another will in the presence of seven witnesses.
He also had a change of heart about his burial place. He asked to be placed not in the crypt at San Carlino, which he had designed and for which he had obtained permission from the Trinitarians a year before, but instead at San Giovanni next door, in the tomb of Carlo Maderno, “in return for a generous recompense to the architect’s daughter Giovanna,” Joseph Connors notes.
His request was granted, and Borromini was buried next to his kinsman and master, close to the third column on the left of the nave, without ceremony and without a grave marker. All that indicates the spot today is a small plaque.
Borromini’s estate was much smaller than Bernini’s: approximately 10,000 scudi. But though he had lived simply in the same house for decades, he nevertheless managed to acquire an impressive array of hundreds of books and nearly 150 paintings, including portraits of Virgilio Spada and Innocent X. He owned at least two stucco busts—of Michelangelo and Seneca—several swords, a dozen compasses and even more ancient medals, and a variety of specimens from the natural world: snakes’ heads, frogs, and shells. It was, in short, the collection of a connoisseur, a man captivated by the life of the mind and the lives of the world around him.
Today San Giovanni is not visited by many tourists, having neither impressive size nor sublime art nor dramatic history to place it on most itineraries. It is better known as the only church in Rome that welcomes parishioners’ pets than as the burial place of Maderno and Borromini.
Yet almost four centuries after the sword plunged into Borromini’s side, perhaps the greatest irony of his chosen resting place is that across the nave from his grave marker, high on a dimly lighted space on the right side of the church near the entrance to the sacristy, is a memorial portrait bust of Antonio Coppola, the surgeon and benefactor of the hospital of San Giovanni. The bust is small and severe. The strong nose and deeply set eyes, while impressive, cannot draw the viewer’s attention away from the sunken cheeks and the high, tight cheekbones.
The bust was discovered in the basement of the church in 1966 by the American art historian Irving Lavin, and it was not long after that he determined it had been carved in 1612 by a young artist whose fame and success eclipsed both of the architects who are buried at San Giovanni: Gianlorenzo Bernini.
FOR THE REST of his life, Bernini—who would live another thirteen years after both Alexander and Borromini—devoted his attention to sculpture. From overseeing the work on the massive angels that adorn the Ponte Sant’Angelo to completing the colossal statue of Constantine, which was so large that a wall needed to be taken out of his studio to remove it, Bernini was intent on leaving his stamp on Rome through the glories of his sculpture.
But scandal continued to plague him, even into his seventies. One of the worst occurred during the papacy of Clement X Altieri, who became pope in 1670. That same year, Bernini found himself once again having to save his brother Luigi from his own excesses.
As Bernini was completing his statue of Constantine on the landing of the Scala Regia at the Vatican, Luigi was caught brutally sodomizing a young boy behind it. Such a desecration was scandal enough, but the fact that the perpetrator was Bernini’s own brother and assistant was a further stain on the family honor. Bernini was forced to pay a substantial fine, and Luigi was once again banished from Rome. Perhaps as a way of clearing his family’s reputation, Bernini agreed to design for free the Altieri Chapel at San Francesco a Ripa and to carve the magnificent and mysterious reclining statue of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni that is the chapel’s centerpiece.
In 1680 Bernini fell ill with what Domenico calls “a slow fever, to which was added at the end an attack of apoplexy.” It was more likely a stroke, as he soon lost the use of his right arm. He was remarkably accepting about it; he wasn’t bothered that his arm, the tool that he had used for decades to create, was now useless. “It is only right that even before death that arm rest a little which worked so much in life,” he said philosophically.
Over the next two weeks, he grew progressively worse. During one of his visits, Bernini’s nephew, an Oratorian priest, Father Filippo (Domenico says Francesco) Marchese, asked him about the state of his soul and whether he was afraid to die. Baldinucci indicates that Bernini replied, “Father, I must render account to a Lord who in his goodness does not count in farthings.”
Eventually, as he faded, Bernini lost the ability to speak. However, he had planned for such a likelihood, having figured out with Father Marchese ways to make himself understood if he couldn’t speak. “It astonished everyone how well he made himself understood with only the movement of his left hand and eyes—a clear sign of that great vivacity of spirits, which did not yield even though life withdrew,” Domenico writes.
Bernini received the pope’s blessing—by now, the pope was Innocent XI; he had lived through ten pontificates—and on November 28, 1680, he died at his home.
He was buried at Santa Maria Maggiore, across the street from the house he grew up in. The crowds attending the body were “so numerous,” Baldinucci reports, “that it was necessary to postpone somewhat the time for the interment of the body.” Eulogies were heaped on him, praising his talents and his qualities. But Bernini himself was right when he told Chantelou during his time in France that he owed his success “to a lucky star that made his contemporaries admire him, but when he was no longer alive that influence would have no further effect and therefore his reputation would be diminished or decline altogether.”
It was a perceptive comment, as both Bernini and Borromini fell out of fashion as new, more classical tastes took hold. It would be generations before the world learned to appreciate again the work of these two men.