Even on the highest throne in the world, we are still sitting on our ass.
—Michel de Montaigne
OLIMPIA AND INNOCENT STARTED OFF their papacy with an extremely dangerous enemy—Cardinal Mazarin, prime minister of France. Due to Olimpia’s conclave machinations, the good cardinal found himself in the unfortunate position of having to congratulate a pope who had been the only candidate he had expressly excluded from the papacy.
In a fury, Mazarin fired Ambassador Saint-Chamond, believing incorrectly that he had taken a bribe to allow Pamphili’s election. He then punished Cardinal Antonio Barberini’s betrayal by taking away his lucrative French protectorship and stripping him of all French honors, incomes, and titles.
Gazing from afar at the new pope and his family, Mazarin realized that he could not bare his fangs openly and covered them with an oily professional smile. In November 1644, Mazarin instructed the French ambassador to Venice, Nicolas de Gremonville, to travel to Rome to present Innocent X with the homage of six-year-old King Louis XIV. Mistakenly believing that the cardinal nephew would hold the greatest influence over the new pontiff, Mazarin instructed Gremonville to bestow on Camillo the abbey of Corbie, the second richest in France, with an annual income of twelve thousand scudi.
To win over Olimpia—whom Mazarin reckoned would always have some influence over Innocent—Gremonville was instructed to lose money at her card parties. The ambassador of Lucca observed that on certain evenings the Pamphili palazzo on the Piazza Navona became a gambling den, “where run princes, high prelates and other sorts of nobility, each believing himself greatly fortunate to have rotten luck in this gaming, as losing could acquire the protection of this signora in their interests and cause her to affectionately and efficaciously advance their causes to His Holiness.”1
Losing money to Olimpia was, of course, a form of bribery, but more fun for her than simply receiving a bag of money or a diamond necklace. At the card table she could truly win. It is amusing to picture the grandees of Rome and ambassadors of foreign powers racing to Olimpia’s house intent upon losing vast sums to her at the seventeenth-century equivalent of poker. Given the whims of Lady Luck, there must have been a few courtiers who won, despite their best efforts to lose, and walked away humiliated by the gold coins stuffing their pockets, knowing that now they would never get anywhere with the pope.
The courtly Gremonville managed to lose such great sums that Olimpia demonstrated “with words and a great expression of affection the desire to earn his approval, declaring herself his special servant, exaggerating that there would never be an occasion where she would not do her best to serve him.”2
Having cleverly lost a fortune to Olimpia at cards, the ambassador then informed the pope of Cardinal Mazarin’s dearest wish, the one tiny favor that would cement the friendship of France and the Papal States forever—a cardinal’s cap for Mazarin’s brother, the Dominican priest Father Michel. This request was not out of Mazarin’s love for Michel, whom he considered an idiot, but out of his dynastic ambitions.
By making some of his relatives high-level churchmen and marrying others into powerful European families, Mazarin could strengthen his tenuous hold on power. He was prime minister neither by election, nor by parliamentary approval, nor by the king’s personal appointment because the king was still a small child. Jules Mazarin held power because he was the queen mother’s lover.
While the French might have shrugged and winked when it came to taking the queen to bed, what they could not forgive was that the prime minister of France wasn’t even French. Though he dripped in opulent French lace and clipped his silky beard in the sharply pointed French fashion, beneath his overpowering French cologne there remained the annoying whiff of spaghetti sauce. The powerful nobles grumbled, and Mazarin lived uneasily, knowing that he could be toppled at any moment.
Unfortunately for the prime minister’s dearest wish, Innocent knew Michel Mazarin and despised him. In fact, many people wondered if Michel was all right in the head. He seemed to be a child, giggling one moment, stomping his foot in rage the next, apologizing after that. In addition to his impetuosity, Michel was known for his “indiscretions,” which we can presume to be sexual in nature.
Innocent had too great a respect for the church to make such a man a cardinal. When the pope’s list of cardinals was announced on March 6, 1645, it included Orazio Giustiniani, the brother of Andrea Giustiniani, who had married Olimpia’s older daughter, Maria. It also listed Niccolò Albergati, a cousin of Niccolò Ludovisi, who had married Olimpia’s younger daughter, Costanza. These creations were all well and good as etiquette demanded that the pope select a cardinal from each of the families that had married into his own. But of the five other cardinals, not one of them was named Michel Mazarin. Worse, all seven were known to be pro-Spanish.
Ambassador Gremonville marched into the Vatican protesting loudly, and Innocent declared that he would never consider Michel Mazarin worthy of the honor of being a cardinal. When Jules Mazarin heard the news, he was so insulted that he loudly threatened to follow the ways of Henry VIII, creating an autonomous church of France and never paying another penny to Rome. He ordered his ambassador to leave Rome immediately. Nursing his wounded pride, Mazarin considered the best way to humiliate the stubborn pope.
Meanwhile, Cardinal Antonio Barberini found himself in a terrible situation. Having lost his French income, he called on his old enemies the Spaniards, who, in order to obtain his support in conclave for Cardinal Pamphili, had promised they would restore any loss of French funds. Now Spain apologetically backtracked, saying they could not offend their ally, the duke of Tuscany, who hated Antonio Barberini. Besides, they really couldn’t afford it. And so he was left with no money and no honors. In the streets of Rome, people hissed and hooted and threw dung at his carriage. Many cardinals avoided him, and Cardinal de’ Medici pretended not to see him at all, looking straight through him so he would not have to render his respects according to protocol.
Worse was to come. While Innocent was initially kind to the Barberinis, letting them know how much he appreciated their votes in conclave, he found himself increasingly besieged on all sides to investigate them for corruption. The Vatican treasury was nineteen million scudi in the red, and the useless Castro war alone had cost twelve million. There were, all in all, tens of millions of scudi missing. And much of it could be found in Barberini palaces and art collections.
Olimpia, too, was pressuring the pope to punish the Barberinis, who were furious at her. She had betrayed them, they complained, promising to marry her son to their niece, when all along she must have known Camillo was planning on becoming cardinal nephew. Fantastically rich, still powerful in their connections, the Barberinis could wreak the most excruciating revenge on Olimpia as soon as Innocent breathed his last. Better to have them poor, powerless, and exiled. The warm feeling of safety that Olimpia had enjoyed when Innocent was elected hadn’t lasted very long. The highest position in the land was not so much a sanctuary as a target. Now Olimpia had more enemies, who could do her more harm, than ever before.
Innocent was tortured by indecision. He was keenly aware that without the Barberini votes he would never have been elected pope, and he was always ready to show gratitude to those—like Olimpia—who had helped him. On the other hand, with his strict sense of justice and strong streak of parsimony, Innocent knew the Barberinis had had their hands in the till. Pressured by Olimpia, numerous cardinals, advisors, Pasquino, and the people of Rome, the pope named a commission to investigate the Barberini family for corruption. He wanted a detailed accounting of all monies the family had received from the Vatican and how they had been spent.
But the Barberinis had kept lousy account books and in many cases hadn’t kept any records at all. For the twenty-one years their uncle was pope, they had used the Vatican treasury as a personal bank account for building palaces, buying art, and helping the poor. Awash in money, they had seen no reason to keep a record of it. Waving away the Barberini excuses, the commission insisted loudly on getting the accounting records, and the family grew desperate.
Mazarin realized that he could become a thorn in the side of the pope by taking the Barberini family back under his protection as the persecuted victims of a cruel pontiff. Forgetting his fury and vengeance against them only months earlier, he secretly extended his welcome and promise of financial assistance if things got too hot in Rome.
As usual, Pasquino, with his psychic abilities, made an accurate prediction, crowing: “From what people are saying, I think that we will see Innocent chasing away from Rome the family of the bee.”3
Cardinal Antonio immediately took Mazarin up on his offer. Though all Barberinis had been guilty of corruption above and beyond the accepted level, Cardinal Antonio had possibly been guilty of murder as well. There had been that little matter in the early 1630s when he sent Olimpia’s young nephew to war and he died soon after, shot in the back, it was said, by a henchman of the good cardinal. Now Antonio felt he was in grave danger. In September, without obtaining the mandatory papal permission to travel, he fled Rome for France. Upon hearing the news, Innocent was shocked.
In December Prince Taddeo and Cardinal Francesco Barberini unearthed some records for the war of Castro, which they delivered to the commission. But the commissioners found the records highly irregular; the war had cost some twelve million scudi, but the entries had gaping holes, with large sums unaccounted for. As a result, all Barberini bank accounts were frozen and all Barberini family members were put under surveillance. Servants were taken away for questioning—a polite word for torture. Word on the street was that the Barberinis would be put in prison, perhaps a dank, dark cell in the dungeons of Castel Sant’Angelo, a place from which few people ever emerged.
Dressed as huntsmen, Cardinal Francesco, Prince Taddeo, and his children sailed away from Rome in January 1646, leaving the imperious Anna Colonna to defend what was left of the family property. Just when Olimpia thought she could take over the Palazzo Barberini, Anna Colonna defiantly raised the French flag over the entrance, declaring that she had given the house to Louis XIV, and brought in French soldiers to defend the property. It was a clever move, because now if Olimpia made any attempt to take it, France would have cause to wage war on the pope.
Though Anna Colonna kept her palace, it was cold and empty. All the exquisite furnishings had been hidden from the pope. The princess, who had used only utensils of pure gold and silver, was seen waving a rusty tin fork in the air as lamentable proof of how far the family fortunes had fallen due to the vengeance of the Pamphilis. Many who knew her, however, said she still had the gold and silver utensils safely hidden in a palace wall and used the rusty tin forks to make herself look pitiful.
Mazarin welcomed the fugitive Barberinis in triumph, greeting them outside Paris with a cavalcade of more than a hundred carriages. He held lavish banquets for them and restored their French incomes. The French government decried the unjust persecution of the poor innocent cardinals.
Documents indicated that when Innocent heard of Mazarin’s exuberant welcome of the Barberinis to Paris, he threw a temper tantrum, screaming and jumping up and down in his white robes. “The heretics are laughing,” he said, “and the Catholics are scandalized to see a pope so scorned as I am.” 4
While the pope was fretting about his loss of dignity, Olimpia was not above having a good laugh at the situation. For the Carnival of 1646 she gave a play in her palazzo, attended by Rome’s elite, in which a staggering drunk (Francesco Barberini) was held up by a man dressed half-French, half-Italian (Mazarin), who picked him off the ground each time he fell. Those with more delicate sensibilities thought the play in very poor taste given the dangerous international situation. But Olimpia’s cackles rang out loudly at this earthy scene. Word of the Carnival comedy winged its way swiftly to Paris, where her humor didn’t translate very well into French.
Mazarin considered his next step. Though he couldn’t very well attack the Vicar of Christ, he could wage war on the pope’s ally, Spain, in territories uncomfortably close to the Papal States. In the spring of 1646, a French fleet left port in Provence, captured the Spanish isle of Elba, and raided principalities along the Italian coast. To show the pope that the war was, indeed, a personal vendetta, France captured the Spanish territory of Piombino, owned by Olimpia’s son-in-law Prince Ludovisi.
But French successes were short-lived. Plagued by military setbacks, Mazarin suddenly looked ridiculous, waging a stupid war against Spain just because his idiot brother was not given a cardinal’s cap. Some called it a tyrannical abuse of power.
In addition to his reverses in the war, Mazarin soon discovered that he did not like the Barberini brothers, who had become a thorn in his side. They seemed ungrateful for the income he had given them, whining that it was not nearly as much as they had enjoyed in Rome. They were reduced to such a disgraceful state, they lamented, that they couldn’t even throw decent dinner parties. They wanted to go home. They wanted their Roman titles, honors, commissions, positions, and properties restored. Surely the all-powerful Mazarin could make this happen.
Given the lost battles, huge costs, political unrest, and the Barberini complaints, the beleaguered prime minister couldn’t stand it anymore. What had seemed like a political stroke of genius was quickly turning into a disaster. Mazarin sent a new ambassador to Rome, the abbot Saint-Nicolas, to negotiate the Barberinis’ return in a manner that would allow both France and the Holy See to keep face. On June 20, Saint-Nicolas was received by the pope, who insisted that the Barberinis write him a letter of apology and pay a hefty fine of 600,000 scudi. When Saint-Nicolas spoke of reducing the amount, the pope inveighed against “the consummate dissimulation” of the family that cried poverty “while from the dust of their palace you could get a fortune, and that Donna Anna used the same lies when eating on earthen plates.”5
As negotiations proceeded, Olimpia was also having second thoughts about the Barberini exile. If she brought them back, they would be extremely grateful to her. Perhaps it was not too late to arrange a marriage between the families, and all would be forgotten. She told Innocent it was time to let bygones be bygones and sweep the whole untidy affair under the rug. On September 12, Innocent acquitted the Barberinis of criminal intent and did not impose his threatened fine, but he stubbornly insisted on receiving letters of apology before he permitted their return. And the matter of their confiscated property would have to be attended to later.
On December 16, Cardinal Antonio wrote three letters asking pardon, one to Innocent, one to Olimpia, and one to Camillo. On the same day, not by coincidence, Saint-Nicolas called on Olimpia, who welcomed him with a great show of friendship. Saint-Nicolas, knowing exactly what to say to win her over, thanked her obsequiously for using her immense influence with the pope on behalf of the Barberinis. When Olimpia demurred, saying she hadn’t really done anything, he assured her of her great power. Later that day the ambassador wrote to Mazarin, “She would have been plenty mad if we believed she didn’t have any.”6
Mazarin, having finally put away his warships, felt increasingly well disposed toward the pope. First of all, he was going to get the troublesome Barberinis off his hands. Second, Mazarin felt that Innocent was not in a position to refuse a cardinal’s hat to his idiot brother, Michel. And now he truly understood who had the power to obtain it for him—Olimpia. Saint-Nicolas had informed Mazarin that all efforts should be concentrated on Olimpia, and that it was perfectly useless to speak with the cardinal nephew. “It is better not to go there at all,” he advised, “because he only responds with compliments.”7
“’Tis a tedious thing to Princes’ Ministers who are old Stagers in Councils and Affairs, to have to do with raw unexperienced Persons,” wrote Gregorio Leti about the cardinal nephew.8 And indeed, Camillo’s favorite part of his vaunted position was the honor, precedence, and income he received, along with those dazzling red robes. We can picture him trying them on in front of a full-length mirror, tilting his biretta rakishly and admiring the result. The only thing he hated about his job was the work.
Camillo was horrified that his uncle expected him to sit in an office all day and meet with ambassadors and other cardinals who talked about the most boring subjects—politics, finance, defense, and trade agreements. His visitors, for their part, were insulted that as they spoke about matters of international urgency, the cardinal nephew was doodling on a piece of paper—sketching gardens and designs for his new villa.
As soon as his uncle became pope in 1644, Camillo decided to build a villa on a large property his father had bought in 1630. Located on the top of Janiculum Hill, with a magnificent view of Saint Peter’s dome, the land was just begging for a pleasure house with extensive gardens. As cardinal nephew, Camillo now had unlimited funds to build his dream villa, which he called Bel Respiro for its fresh, bracing air. He hired the sculptor Alessandro Algardi to work with him, and soon the villa began to rise.
While digging the foundations, Algardi realized he was actually building on an extensive ancient Roman cemetery that included the tomb of Nero’s bodyguard. This was a happy turn of events because the excavators unearthed quantities of statuary that Camillo wanted to use on the façade. Unfortunately, many torsos were lacking heads, and the heads they found were missing torsos; and arms and legs had disappeared during destruction by Goths, Vandals, and Saracens. Camillo solved this problem by having Algardi glue available heads on available bodies and sculpt the parts that were missing, then strew the finished product all across the façade.
At first glimpse the villa is an impressive confection, pale blue, covered with white statues and friezes that look like elaborate frosting on an ornate wedding cake. But upon closer inspection, the heads and bodies clearly don’t match—the heads are too big, or too small—and there seems to be no rhyme or reason for these statue parts and their placement. The overall impression is that the villa, while lovely, is also inexplicably strange. But Camillo thought it was wonderful, and during his meetings with high-level officials his mind wandered off from war with France to marble body parts for his villa.
Complaints about Camillo’s uselessness began to percolate up to the pope, who lectured him sternly. He must stop sketching and do something useful. When Camillo told Innocent that he had always been interested in the military—probably because he looked so dashing on a horse—his uncle gave him the commission of building ships for the papal navy. In his avvisi of August 5, 1645, Teodoro Amayden reported that Camillo’s first vessel was launched in a great ceremony attended by his mother and the pope. But the boat had been built so badly that it immediately listed to one side and was in danger of sinking. It was sent back to the boatyard, where it was probably scuttled.
Innocent, who had always worked diligently for the church, was furious over his nephew’s indolence. Leti explained, “The Pope, having created his Cardinal Nephew, had no other design than to instruct him bit by bit to render him capable of administering political affairs, already being aware of the little wit he had. But the Nephew, instead of advancing, seemed rather to reverse. So much so that, not profiting at all from the good instruction of his Uncle, he was incapable of managing the smallest negotiation, so that every day he was poorly treated by the pope who made always a thousand reproaches for his ignorance.”9
Some days the Vatican corridors echoed with the pope’s shouting at Camillo, tearing into him for being a lazy bum, leaving all the hard work to his poor elderly uncle. In response, the cardinal nephew locked himself in his rooms on the Piazza Navona and took to his bed for days on end, claiming illness.
Olimpia graciously offered to read those petitions that Camillo found too boring to bother with, and to write his answers. But Camillo certainly didn’t want his mother telling him what to do. One day after a particularly bitter argument with her, he raced in his carriage to the Vatican and begged the pope to lock Olimpia up in a convent, the proper place for meddling women.
There it was again, the sound of the bolt grinding shut behind her. She would never forgive Camillo for that. She would make him pay for that.
Seeing Camillo’s uselessness, Olimpia’s son-in-law Niccolò Ludovisi hoped to be assigned high-level political offices. After all, it was the only reason he had married Costanza at such a bargain-basement dowry. Gregorio Leti asserted, “This Prince had enclin’d to this match, out of an opinion of making great advantages by it, as seeing at the time that Cardinal Camillo was made Cardinal, and altogether unfit for business, so that he flattered himself with an opinion of being the only Nephew and governing the Pope and Church.”10
But Olimpia wanted all the power herself and was certainly not going to let the fat prince acquire any at her expense. Luckily for her, the pope didn’t like him anyway. Innocent “had no great tenderness for him,” the French ambassador reported.11 Sometimes Prince Ludovisi had to fight even to obtain an audience with the pope. When he did see the pontiff, Innocent “had no other conversation than topics of drollery and never entered into anything of importance. And if he initiated some discourse, the pope always interrupted him with gossip and foolishness which seemed to the poor prince that the pope wanted him to serve as a court jester rather than as a nephew.”12
When he complained to his mother-in-law about the lack of honors and offices that were his due as pope’s nephew, “Donna Olimpia answered him in a haughty manner, that it was honor enough for him that he had been preferred to marry her Daughter over so many competitors of as great a quality as himself. Whereupon the Prince, being unwilling to come to a rupture with one who had so great an influence upon the Pope, would hold his tongue and be quiet.”13
The prince vented his rage by telling anyone who would listen that he would never have debased himself by marrying the daughter of a cheapskate nobody like Olimpia if he had known he wouldn’t be getting any Vatican power in return. Word got around Rome, and we can only imagine how Costanza felt.
On May 4, 1645, at Olimpia’s suggestion, the pope appointed Prince Ludovisi commander-in-chief of the fleet sent to aid Venice in defending Crete against invading Turks. That would get him out of her hair for a while and stop him spreading such nastiness around Rome. Maybe, if she was lucky, he wouldn’t return. But when the fleet finally arrived in the Aegean after many delays, they found that all but one of the Christian forts had fallen, and the Turks were in control. After a few inconclusive skirmishes at sea, the prince bounced back to Rome, a war hero, gloriously wounded in the finger.
As if Innocent didn’t have enough on his hands, it appeared that the new façade of Saint Peter’s Basilica was in danger of falling down. The church was the grandest building in all the world, a marvel of engineering, and proof in stone of Catholic supremacy. Even a partial collapse would signal greater fits of laughter from the heretics, and louder sobs from the Catholics, than had yet been heard.
Clement VIII (reigned 1592–1605) had established a committee specifically for the building and maintenance of the basilica, the Congregation of the Fabric of Saint Peter’s. Working with this group, Innocent should have found it a simple task to have experts examine the cracks and propose solutions. But the pope was caught in a power struggle between the two most talented artists of his time, who, unfortunately, both happened to be living in Rome, competing for the same work, and nursing deadly hatred for each other.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, born in 1598, had achieved unheard-of success at an early age. Discovered by Cardinal Nephew Scipione Borghese as a child, Bernini sculpted some of the most phenomenal works of art ever created. Known as the new Michelangelo, Bernini had been the darling of Pope Urban VIII. The day Urban was elected in 1623 he called the young artist to the Vatican. “Great fortune is yours, Cavalier,” he proclaimed, “to see Cardinal Maffeo Barberini become pope. But even greater is our fortune, that Cavalier Bernini lives during our pontificate.”14
Bernini had entrée into Pope Urban’s apartments twenty-four hours a day and swashbuckled around the Vatican as if he owned the place. He was a handsome man with noble features, flashing black eyes, and high cheekbones. Sensual full lips poked out beneath his silky black mustache. His jaw was square, and an adorable cleft marked his chin.
He had quite a reputation as a womanizer and apparently sculpted the likeness of his rowdy mistress as Divine Love on the pope’s tomb. When Bernini turned forty, Urban announced that it was time for the loyal son of the church to marry and settle down. The pope had, in fact, already found him a wife, the most beautiful girl in Rome, Caterina Tezio, whom Bernini dutifully married and with whom he had eleven children.
Bernini’s extraordinary success at an early age, flamboyant personality, and dashing good looks irritated his fellow artists, who were less successful, less flamboyant, and less good-looking. But the most irritated of all was the sullen Francesco Borromini, born in 1599, the absolute antithesis of Bernini in appearance, demeanor, and personality. Borromini was not an attractive man, with his small, hard eyes, hooked nose, and thin lips. He had a disheveled appearance, and those who saw him must have restrained themselves from whipping out a comb and trying to tame his hair. There were no woman stories wafting about Borromini like cheap perfume, nor were there any boy stories, either. He lived a solitary existence, pouring his passions into his work and his vengeance.
Borromini felt that he would be Rome’s top architect if only that windbag Gian Lorenzo Bernini had not come into the picture. In terms of solid engineering skill and architectural originality, Borromini had the advantage over his rival. While keeping colors and costs to a minimum, he created designs that were unique, unexpected, employing inverted geometrical forms in ways that had never been done before.
For all his startling genius as a sculptor, Bernini’s architecture employed conventional forms overlaid with lavish colorful materials. Engineering was his weakest point. He had gone through a baptism of fire—literally—when casting the bronze baldachino in Saint Peter’s. Toward the end he realized the structure could not bear the weight of the risen Christ he had designed for the top. The four colossal statues Bernini had placed on the piers surrounding the baldachino had been designed to react to the figure of Jesus in the center. But they ended up gasping and gesturing in response to something that didn’t exist, which they still do to this very day.
Rome’s art commissions, like marriages and political appointments, were decided at the dinner table. Bernini’s wit sparkled like the crystal goblets he drank from. Draped in his eternal, old-fashioned black clothes, Borromini was more like Death eating an onion, his face scowling and puckered, lacking only a sickle to complete the picture. As it was unpleasant to have Doom as a dinner guest, he usually wasn’t invited back. When clients did give him work, he was often so temperamental that they fired him, or he stormed off the job in a blistering rage.
Borromini felt that Urban VIII should have given him the two great commissions of the 1620s—the construction of the Palazzo Barberini and the design and casting of Saint Peter’s baldachino. The pope gave both jobs to Bernini, and Borromini worked under his archrival for one tenth the pay. As Borromini saw it, he had crafted the guts of the projects while Bernini was toasted at all the best parties and took all the credit, never sharing a shred with his team of talented workmen. “I do not mind that he has the money,” Borromini would say, “but I do mind that he enjoys the honor of my labors.”15
Frowning in the shadows, Borromini waited for his chance to pounce on his despised competitor. And it came. The façade of Saint Peter’s was always meant to have bell towers, or campanili. In 1618 the great architect Carlo Maderno had begun to build foundations for low, modest towers at each end of the façade, but work stopped when Paul V died in 1621. In 1638 Urban VIII commanded Bernini to build magnificent three-story bell towers, some two hundred feet high, loaded with pilasters, arches, colored marble inlay, and marble columns.
When he heard of Bernini’s latest papal commission, Borromini grumbled that the foundations had not been built to support the heavier weight and the façade would crack. But those who heard him were mindful of his sour grapes, and his warnings were ignored. Borromini kept a careful eye on his enemy’s construction and was delighted to find that as the south tower rose, alarming cracks appeared in the church façade. The added weight was indeed pushing the south part of the building into the shifting, sandy soil below.
In 1642 work on the towers ceased. Pope Urban needed all available funds for the Castro war. Before his death in 1644, no decision was made as to how to proceed with the bell towers—whether to shore them up or tear them down. But the new pope was faced with the urgent decision his predecessor had put off. One of Innocent’s first decrees after his election was to form a committee of architects, engineers, and the eight cardinals of the Congregation of the Fabric to look into the problem. A shaft was dug to examine the foundations of the south tower, into which members of the committee descended on rope swings.
The first meeting was held on March 27, 1645. The most outspoken critic of the bell towers was none other than Francesco Borromini, who claimed the heavy towers would pull the façade with them as they settled, and the entire front of the church would collapse. Borromini presented mathematical calculations to show that the tower was three times higher and six times heavier than it should have been. “The prudent architect does not first erect a building and then make a sounding to see if he finds cracks in the foundation,” he declared, making it clear to all that Bernini was a most imprudent architect.16
Innocent attended the next meeting, on June 8, as did both Borromini and Bernini. Borromini presented new drawings to show that the whole thing was poised to topple with a thunderous crash. “He declared publicly against Bernini in the pope’s presence with all his heart and all his strength,” Domenico Bernini wrote in his biography of his father.17
Borromini and other jealous architects, wounded by years of papal neglect, beat their breasts. “These were the ruinous results visited on Rome,” they cried, “by those popes who were pleased to give all the work to one man alone, although there was an abundance of meritorious men in the city.”18
In the face of such vehement opposition to his bell towers, Bernini offered to work with other architects to study the foundations and perform tests over a period of time. Everyone on the commission except Borromini agreed that there was no imminent danger of collapse. The cautious pope found Bernini’s suggestion a wise one, and so the matter was left.
But Bernini’s flamboyance got the better of his common sense. In February 1646, at the behest of Olimpia, he wrote and produced a Carnival play at her palazzo for a crowd of cardinals and nobility. Bernini made the sets and costumes and joined the young noblemen of Rome in acting. Unfortunately, the play made fun of the pope and the cardinal nephew. The ambassador of Modena, Francesco Mantovani, explained, “There was depicted in the play a youth who had good will but who never did anything and an old man who never could make up his mind.”19
Though the script has, tragically, been lost, we can still hear Olimpia’s loud guffaws as she poked fun at her inept son and her indecisive brother-in-law. She must have seen no harm in it because other Bernini plays given at her palazzo poked fun at Olimpia herself, making her out to be a greedy, power-hungry vixen; she chuckled hardest at these.
When he heard about the play, the old man who could never make up his mind couldn’t make up his mind about it. Draped in his brittle dignity, Innocent had never been one to laugh at himself. He asked Cardinal Panciroli his opinion about Bernini’s play. The cardinal reassured him that it was just another silly piece of Carnival revelry that would soon be forgotten.
But the young man who never did anything was furious. Camillo complained bitterly to the pope that the play had his mother’s “tacit approval and reinforced the caricature of the cardinal nephew circulating at court.” He told his uncle the play was “foul.”20 Everyone in Rome was talking about it and making fun of him.
Camillo vowed to wreak his revenge. Though Olimpia seemed untouchable at the moment, Bernini was in a very delicate situation due to the bell towers. He was also fragile politically; the spoiled darling of the reviled Barberini family, he stood on a precipice, ready to tumble after them into the fissures of disgrace.
While the enemies of the Barberinis circled their prey, and the jealous architects of Rome pounced, it was the cardinal nephew who bit into the jugular. According to Bernini’s contemporary biographer, Filippo Baldinucci, when Innocent retired to an estate outside Rome for a few days, “enemies of Bernini and the Barberini family, especially a certain person semi-skilled in art whom the pope greatly trusted,” persuaded the pope “by intensive arguments” to have the bell towers torn down immediately.21 The certain person semi-skilled in art was Camillo.
It was reported that the pope also decided to fine Bernini the cost of dismantling and reconstructing the bell towers, a whopping 160,000 scudi. “It is a miracle that the Cavaliere has not been condemned to prison,” Mantovani marveled. But, the ambassador continued, Bernini tactfully gave Olimpia a thousand gold coins and presented Camillo with a valuable diamond ring given to him by Queen Henrietta Maria of England. The threat of a fine was dropped, but the beautiful half-built bell towers came down. Now Saint Peter’s would forever be too wide for its height.
For the first time in twenty-five years, Bernini was no longer the chief papal architect. Now Borromini, who had smoldered with ill-suppressed rage for decades, swaggered about the Vatican, dizzy with victory. It is not surprising that the stiff, uneasy pope was perhaps the only person in Rome who actually liked the stiff, uneasy Borromini. Bernini’s razzle-dazzle enthusiasm had frayed Innocent’s nerves.
Though disgraced, Bernini was allowed to complete the elaborate sepulcher of Urban VIII in Saint Peter’s that he had been sculpting on and off since 1628. It is just to the right of the far altar as the spectator looks at it, balanced by the equally magnificent monument of Paul III just to the left. The figure of Christ on the cross in the center caused some wits to call the statues of the nepotistic popes on either side the “two thieves.”
Bernini’s very public downfall and the triumph of his inveterate enemy made him ill for a while, and it seems that he sank into a deep depression. When he recovered, he found he had countless high-priced commissions from noblemen and cardinals for paintings and sculptures. But Bernini first made a statue for himself, a giant female image of Truth, which he kept in his home. This prompted Pasquino to quip that the only truth to be found in Rome was in Bernini’s palazzo.