With the election of Alexander VII to the papacy, the Basilica story comes full circle. Born Fabio Chigi, he was the grandnephew of Agostino il Magnifico—in his heyday the wealthiest of all Romans, the banker who secured the papacy for Julius II and performed even more crucial, lifesaving tasks for the Medici popes, bankrolling their excesses and paying the enormous ransom that kept their papacies solvent for another day.
Although Agostino Chigi became the Croesus of the Church, he had desired more than money. The salon was more alluring than the countinghouse, and once he had lucre, he yearned for luster. In 1655, his descendants reaped the ultimate reward. With the family fortune greasing the way to his election, Fabio Chigi was consecrated Pope Alexander VII.
Beyond his personal fortune, there was nothing of the countinghouse about Alexander. He was a poet who published under the pen name Philomathus; a scholar who set aside time each day for stimulating discussions of literature, art, and history; a Romano di Roma—a true Roman—who continued to make the city one of the great capitals of the world. It was said that Alexander kept two reminders in his bedroom: a wooden model of Rome to keep him focused on his goal and a wooden coffin to keep him humble.
On the day of his election, Alexander summoned Bernini to an audience, and to the end of his pontificate, they worked together to complete the Basilica. Alexander was a patron-collaborator, as involved as Julius had been. Every detail interested him, from the technical to the artistic, and he frequently offered suggestions. He commissioned Bernini to build the Scala Regia, the broad staircase leading from the piazza to the papal palace; one of the two fountains in the square (Maderno designed the other), and the Cathedra Petri.
Rescued from Constantine’s basilica, the Cathedra, or Chair, of Peter was made of oak and embellished with a carved ivory frieze and precious metals. It was revered for centuries as the actual throne on which Peter sat. The legend was off by several hundred years. The chair had been a gift from Charlemagne’s grandson, Charles the Bald, to Pope John VIII in the ninth century, but it continued to be revered.
The preliminary models that Bernini made for the setting for the Cathedra are on display in Room Seventeen of the Pinacoteca in the Vatican Museums. The models are a mixture of clay and straw applied over an iron frame.
Bernini placed the Cathedra on a grandiose bronze throne, gilded and burnished with six different patinas and surrounded by angels. The chair is held up by the four Doctors of the Church and surmounted by a dove, representing the Holy Ghost. The whole is set in a glorious burst of light and clouds. Bernini located the Cathedra in front of the altar, so that as you enter the Basilica, it appears to be a picture framed by the Baldacchino. Although the Cathedra was a dazzling conjuring act, Bernini’s most brilliant illusion was his last—the colonnades and piazza of St. Peter’s.
In the summer of 1656, while Bernini was creating the Cathedra, Pope Alexander asked for preliminary studies of a structure that in his words would be “the theater of the porticoes.” Although the concept of a grand entry to the new Basilica had been bandied about the Vatican for years, Alexander devoted the second year of his papacy to realizing it. From his meticulous daily diaries we know that he discussed various plans with Bernini.
Alexander imagined a colonnade open at the sides, with parallel columns and statues on top, enclosing a piazza. The colonnade would serve several purposes.
It had to introduce and welcome visitors and frame and exalt the Basilica. It also had to conceal the fact that the obelisk was not perfectly aligned with the Basilica nave and the tomb of Peter, overcome the difficulties of a vast, irregular space hemmed in by numerous small buildings, and correct the feeling of disproportionate width created by the façade.
Bernini believed that “an architect proves his skill by turning the defects of a site into advantages.” Initially ignoring the Fabbrica’s recommendation for a rectangular construction, he submitted a number of proposals. From a trapezoid, influenced by Michelangelo’s Campidoglio, his design evolved into a rectangle and then an oval. One model followed another as the pope and architect debated the best solution. Their goal was an arena with clear sight lines, so that a pilgrim standing anywhere in the piazza could see the Benediction Balcony and receive the pope’s blessing, urbs et orbis.
When Alexander proposed the colonnade, St. Peter’s was the center of a crowded neighborhood. The Swiss Guard barracks, a clock tower built by Paul V, the old church of Santa Caterina, and dozens of low houses and shops had to go to make room for the colonnade. A fountain added by Maderno east-northeast of the Basilica added a further complication. Bernini would resolve it by moving Maderno’s fountain so that it was aligned with the obelisk and sculpting a complementary fountain on the other side of the obelisk for visual balance. Diverting the water for Maderno’s fountain to the new location proved more of a headache.
Through the fall and winter of 1656, while Bernini was defining his ideas, the Fabbrica began to clear the site, buying then razing the houses and shops around St. Peter’s. As Alexander’s diaries attest, pope and architect considered a host of variants—for double or triple porticoes, for extending and vaulting the arms, for the circumference and order of the columns.
Finally, on May 20, 1657, Alexander wrote in his diary: “Cavaliere Bernini showed the plans and elevation of the porch of St. Peter’s and we shall finish it like this.” Three months later, on August 28, he laid the first stone. But just as the Basilica itself had remained a work in flux, subject to change throughout its construction, the stones of the colonnade were not set. The columns in this “final” plan were probably Corinthian, repeating the colossal order of the Basilica. That would change as Alexander and his architect continued refining the design.
If the details were variable, the essence was fixed. Earlier artists had imagined an impressive avenue leading to the new Basilica.* Bernini created an embrace. His solution was an ellipse, reaching out from the sides of the Basilica and designed “to receive maternally with open arms the Catholics and confirm them in their belief, to reunite heretics to the Church, and to illuminate the infidels to the true faith.” His plan called for three colonnades—one on either side of the Basilica that we see today, and a third smaller one, parallel to the façade, that was never built.
Like the atrium of Constantine’s basilica, the colonnades would form a paradisus—a kind of open-air entryway where pilgrims prepared themselves spiritually to enter the sanctuary. Just as the Baldacchino creates the interior setting for the altar and dome, the colonnades create the external setting for the Basilica. “The piazza and the gradual slope upward to the mighty Temple,” George Eliot wrote, “gave me always the sense of having entered some millennial Jerusalem where all small or shabby things were unknown.”
Bernini enclosed a space the size of the Colosseum with an ellipse formed by symmetrical, covered colonnades. The piazza is 1,115 feet long, the distance of three average city blocks. Like the imperial amphitheater, it is an open oval that can contain huge crowds. In each colonnade, four rows of Doric columns create three passageways. The central passage is 61 feet, wide enough for two carriages or cars to pass, and inscribed with a verse from Isaiah: “A tabernacle from the heat, and a security and cover from the whirlwind and from the rain.” On top of the colonnades, Bernini placed giant statues of popes and saints, twice as large as life, creating what he called “a cloud of witnesses.”
Because the obelisk is misaligned by 2 degrees from the Basilica nave, Bernini didn’t use it as the locus of the ellipse. Each colonnade has its own center, so that the rows of columns seem to shift and change, appearing as one or many as you approach the Basilica.* To correct the proportions of the façade, he kept the colonnades only sixty-four feet high, lending the illusion of greater height and lesser width to Maderno’s creation. Bernini described the relation of the colonnades to the Basilica as similar to the relation of the arms to the head.
The labor involved in building the colonnades was intensive. Simply excavating the site was a massive undertaking, displacing tons of earth, which then had to be removed from the site to make way for the quarried stone as it arrived from Tivoli. Construction required much of the engineering and sculptural talent in Rome. To handle the logistics of raising 284 columns and 88 pillars, each one 52 feet tall, Bernini created a veritable assembly-line force, with one group of artisans assigned to bases, another to shafts, another to capitals. Both to minimize transportation costs and to keep the work site uncluttered, he also employed teams of stonecutters in the quarries to hew the columns from the blocks of travertine. The roughed-out columns were then transported to a work area in the Vatican known as San Maria, where they were raised by winches. Teams of sculptors worked on them, then the finished columns were lowered onto rolling flatbeds, dragged to the piazza, and lifted into position. By the end of September 1658, the first twenty-four columns were in place.
A similarly work-intensive process was employed for the “cloud of witnesses” atop the porticoes. There are 140 twelve-foot statues.* Creating each one took about two months, required many hands, and involved five basic steps: building a full-size wooden model, chiseling a rough likeness in stone, hoisting the unfinished statue onto the portico for precise positioning, taking it down again to be finished, then raising and mounting it.
While Alexander was preoccupied with the Basilica projects, France threatened to invade the Papal States. The pope’s most potent offensive weapon was his architect. For years the egocentric French king Louis XIV and his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert had been hounding the pope to share the divine talent of Bernini. A letter from Colbert tactfully pleads for “a few hours of those you employ with such glory in the beautification of the first city of the world.” Alexander had resisted the Sun King’s imputations, but with the French spurred and booted, he capitulated. The pope agreed to loan his architect to the French for three months.
On April 29, 1665, Bernini reluctantly relinquished what he termed “the two most important works in the world.” Leaving his brother Luigi and Carlo Fontana to continue the Cathedra and the colonnades, Bernini embarked for Paris to build the Louvre. Accompanying him were three servants, the head of his household, and his three favorite assistants: his second son, Paolo, the sculptor Giulio Catari, and the architect Mattia de Rossi, who had been eighteen when he began apprenticing in Bernini’s workshop.
Although King Louis assured the pope that “upon entering my kingdom, Cavaliere Bernini should begin to receive proofs of the consideration I have for his merit in the manner in which he will be treated,” the visit was a disaster from the first day. Bernini was in bed taking a siesta when Colbert arrived to greet him, and relations deteriorated from there. The Italian was contemptuous of the petit bourgeois mentality of the Frenchman and dismissed his practical questions about time and cost as fit for a quartermaster, not for the world’s premier artist. “Do not speak to me of anything small,” he warned Colbert. Instead of building the Louvre, Bernini returned to Rome and the Basilica of St. Peter.
When Alexander VII died on May 22, 1667, ten years almost to the day after accepting Bernini’s design, the two long colonnade arms were nearing completion. Bernini never began the third colonnade, and it would take another century before the last figure in his “cloud of witnesses” was sculpted and mounted.
Bernini enveloped the Basilica of St. Peter in mystique. The experience begins at the river crossing. Bernini’s angels on the bridge at Castel Sant’Angelo lead the way across the Tiber to the Vatican. Through the spray from his fountain, iridescent in the sunlight, the Basilica comes into view. To the right is the Scala Regia, his majestic stairway to the Vatican palace, a statue of Constantine at his moment of conversion poised on the landing. To the left, no trace remains of Bernini’s ill-conceived and long-forgotten campanile.
Within the embrace of his colonnades, you cross the piazza, mount the steps, and encounter the Basilica—the immense, glittering, breathtaking culmination of two centuries of art and architecture. As you enter the nave, directly ahead, his Baldacchino draws the eye to center stage, framing the moment and the eternal mystery of an incarnate God. From so much disparity, the grand illusionist conjured unity. It was Bernini’s supreme achievement.