IT TOOK A PAINTER, NOT AN ARCHITECT OR a sculptor, to properly illustrate how profoundly Bernini and Borromini changed Rome. In his famous (and famously impressive) painting of eighteenth-century Rome, Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome (2.5 meters [more than 8 feet] long and nearly 1.75 meters [5.5 feet] tall), Giovanni Paolo Pannini depicts the city’s myriad glories—the remarkable churches, palazzi, fountains, and sculptures known all over Europe for their beauty and inventiveness. At the center of the painting (one of four that the duc de Choiseul commissioned) Pannini placed several well-dressed connoisseurs, who are inspecting some of the canvases in an enormous and fanciful gallery or artist’s studio. Perhaps the men (there are no women in the painting) are wealthy tourists on their Grand Tour who have stopped in Rome to acquire the requisite number of paintings and sculpture to take back with them.
But the men aren’t really the point of the painting. They are simply artistic details dwarfed by the beauty that surrounds them. What draws the eye past the high archways supported by pink marble columns and decorated by elaborate ceiling frescoes are the dozens of paintings and statues that line the cool white walls of the gallery.
Rome’s usual tourist attractions are commemorated here: the Spanish Steps, the Castel Sant’Angelo, even Michelangelo’s Moses. But most of the other works of art illustrated are of more recent creation. The Fountain of the Four Rivers and the church of Sant’Agnese in Agone. La Sapienza and the dome of Sant’Ivo. St. Peter’s Square with its colonnade. San Giovanni in Laterano. Apollo and Daphne. David. Sant’Andrea al Quirinale. The Propaganda Fide.
It’s clear to Pannini, and to anyone who sees this painting—or to anyone who has ever walked the twisting streets of Rome and stumbled across one of these marvels—that the city Pannini knew in 1757 when he painted Picture Gallery and the city today both bear the indelible stamps of Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini.
Despite their differences—in their work, their characters, and their behavior—they shared a deep love of their adopted city that never waned. Urban VIII once told Bernini, “You are made for Rome and Rome for you.” The same could be said of Borromini. Even Virgilio Spada’s insight into Borromini’s personality—“He is by nature of such a temperament that he does not stand up well to the wrongs that others do him and for that reason he has broken with many, but where he has been treated with that respect that his love and loyalty deserve, he is like a puppy”—has parallels to Bernini’s own character. “He [Bernini] could not bear to be laughed at…as the pupils at the Collegio Clementino learnt to their cost when they dared to make fun of the papal favourite,” Magnuson notes. “Bernini used his influence to have their play stopped.”
They both also shared a lifelong passion for creativity, for the new, and they reached heights that few artists have achieved since. Even the American architect Frank Gehry, whose own work has been praised and lambasted for its rule-breaking individuality, told a television interviewer that the greatest building ever designed is Borromini’s San Carlino. “It’s got all the moves in it that I’ve made,” he said. “I’ve done nothing new since then.”
It’s the individual approach to their work that truly distinguishes these men, through the way they lived and the way they worked. Bernini succeeded by surpassing expectations; Borromini startled by defying them. Bernini’s artistic vision was persuasive, impressive, precocious, and emotional. Borromini’s sensibility was personal, intuitive, logical, and incorruptible. Together and apart, they worked to the best of their abilities to produce art that would last. They succeeded. And in the process they became immortal.
Sebastiano Serlio, the great Italian architect and historian, wrote in 1537, “Bella cosa è ne l’architetto l’esser abbondante d’inventioni.” It is a good thing in an architect to abound in invention. Both Bernini and Borromini understood this, and each in his own way lived by that principle. Their legacy is a city that is an infinitely more beautiful place because of them.