Rome

Raphael never let a client down, and among his clients were some of the most powerful men in Italy. Apart from the pope, his chief patron was the papal banker Agostino Chigi, for whom he painted two chapels in the churches of Santa Maria del Popolo (Chigi’s own burial chapel) and Santa Maria della Pace. For Chigi he also painted his only major mythological subject, a Triumph of Galatea (c. 1511–12), frescoing it on a wall of Chigi’s Villa Farnesina in Rome. Where did this delectable sea nymph come from? Possibly, indeed quite probably, she is a portrait of Chigi’s mistress. In the myth, Galatea was uncouthly loved by the monstrous Cyclops Polyphemus, in the Odyssey. (Polyphemus himself is depicted in a nearby fresco in the villa, by Sebastiano del Piombo.) She escaped from him over the sea, in a boat drawn by two dolphins, and in Raphael’s version of the event one sees that one of these charmingly stylized marine mammals is chewing up an octopus, a “polyp,” in its sharp jaws—a sight which Raphael no doubt remembered from a visit to a fish market, but which equally alludes to the defeat of Polyphemus. Nereids and other sea deities sport around her, putti flutter in the sky above. Galatea herself is enchantingly pretty, surfing along in graceful contrapposto, but she may not have been directly painted from a living model: “To paint a beauty, I should have to see a number of beauties, provided Your Lordship were with me to choose the best. But in the absence of good judges and beautiful forms, I make use of an idea which comes to my mind.”

By then Raphael was famous throughout Europe, and so esteemed in the papal court that the pope’s treasurer—Leo X’s chief minister, Cardinal Bernardo Bibbiena—actually offered his niece to the painter in marriage. Even more remarkably, the painter politely refused. There seem to have been two reasons for this. The first was that Raphael’s life was full of other women, notably La Fornarina, who was his adoring mistress for years. If his portrait of her (c. 1518) in Rome’s Galleria Nazionale is truthful, which presumably it is, and correctly identified, which it may not be, one can well understand why he might not have wished to switch. The second reason is said to have been more practical: there was a possibility that Leo X might make him a cardinal, an office to which married men could not be raised. If that had happened, Raphael would have been the first and only artist in history to receive the red hat for making art. But neither that nor the marriage took place: in 1520, at the excessively young age of thirty-seven, Raphael died—as a result, some said, of a fever caused by a particularly energetic night of love with La Fornarina, “the Baker’s Daughter,” his delicious black-eyed woman of the people from Trastevere. He was buried in a niche in the Pantheon: the epitaph cut on his tomb slab was an elegant distich by his friend the poet Pietro Bembo: ILLE HIC EST RAPHAEL, TIMUIT QUO SOSPITE VINCI/RERUM MAGNA PARENS, ET MORIENTE MORI. “The man here is Raphael; while he was alive, the Great Mother of All Things [Nature] feared to be outdone; and when he died, she, too, feared to die.”

The frescoing of the stanze was one of the two chief achievements of Julius’ patronage. The other, it goes almost without saying, was the employment of Michelangelo Buonarroti. It was for Julius that Michelangelo, sometimes with the deepest misgivings and resentments, frescoed the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, producing what remains the most powerful—if not in all ways the most likable or even comprehensible—series of images of the human figure in the whole history of European art. It would be followed, more than twenty years after Julius’ death, by the Last Judgment on the altar wall of the chapel, conceived by Pope Clement VII late in 1533, commissioned by Pope Paul III Farnese in 1534, started as cartoons in 1535 and as fresco in 1536, and finally unveiled to very mixed reactions in 1541.

In between these fell the tragic debacle of Julius’ tomb, Michelangelo’s obsessive project. It was to have been a sculptural block about twenty-four by thirty-six feet, and thus with a “footprint” of over seventy square meters. It was designed to be on three levels, containing some forty-seven marble figures. It would have been in Saint Peter’s, where, since Bernini had not yet appeared, it would have been the greatest sculptural project of the Christian world. And, Michelangelo being what he was, maker of the colossal David in Florence, it would have been entirely the work of one man. Ascanio Condivi, who knew Michelangelo and wrote his life, relates:

All around about the outside were niches for statues, and between niche and niche, terminal figures; to these were bound other statues, like prisoners … rising from the ground and projecting from the monument. They represented the liberal arts, and likewise Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture … denoting by this that, like Pope Julius, all the virtues were the prisoners of Death, because they could never find such favor and nourishment as he gave them.

This was never achieved. Julius II died in 1513, but none of his successors was able, or willing, to support the project. Before long it was relocated, in a much-diminished form, to Julius’ former titular church in Rome, San Pietro in Vincoli. Though it contains one tremendous finished sculpture for the tomb, the Moses, Julius II’s final resting place does not even remotely resemble in scale, size, site, or imagery what Buonarroti had in mind. Julius himself had undermined Michelangelo’s chances to complete it, by ordering him to paint the Sistine instead. Paul III had ruined them by insisting that he lay down hammer and chisel to paint the Last Judgment. Then there were the architectural projects for the Medici, such as the Laurentian Library and the façade of San Lorenzo, the Medici church in Florence. A man, even if that man is Michelangelo, can only do so much.

The Sistine Chapel was so called because it had been built thirty years before Julius’ papacy by his uncle Pope Sixtus IV (reigned 1471–84). Its architect was the otherwise unremarkable Giovannino de’ Dolci. Its walls were frescoed by some of the greatest Quattrocento artists, including Luca Signorelli, Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Bernadino di Betto, better known as Pinturicchio; but nine out of every ten people who visit the Sistine go there only for the ceiling.

The layout of the Sistine reflects a particularly medieval conception of world history. It was believed, in the Middle Ages, that humanity’s past divided into three sections or epochs. The first was the story of the world before God gave the Law to Moses. The second was the Law as laid down to Moses. The third, life since the Law, centered on the birth and life of Christ: the period of the New Testament. Sixtus IV’s artists had illustrated the third part and some of the second. However, this left the first untouched, and so it was to Michelangelo that Julius II entrusted the task of illustrating, on the ceiling, the epic narrative of the Old Testament.

The ceiling was blank, or almost. The only decoration on it was a uniform coat of ultramarine blue, dotted with golden stars. It was enormous, forty and a half meters long and fourteen wide, and every inch of it had to be painted by Michelangelo. The contract to paint the vault was drawn up and signed in May 1508, and the work was finished in October 1512—a little more than four years, which included an interruption of close to a year, between 1510 and 1511. Considering that all, or nearly all, the painting was done by Michelangelo and not delegated to assistants, as Raphael might have done, this represented an astounding speed of execution. Of course, he did have assistants—carpenters to erect the high scaffolding and the ladders, studio men to grind the colors and mix the plaster, laborers to carry the paints and buckets of water up the ladders to the top of the scaffold, stuccatori to apply the wet plaster to the ceiling, and assistants to help hold the cartoons or design drawings in place while their lines were transferred to the plaster, whether by scratched-in marks from a stylus or by “pouncing” lines of powdered charcoal dots through holes pricked in the paper. No one man could have done all that donkey work. The conception of the grand design must have been formed by conferring with others, chiefly Julius II and whatever clergy and theologians he might have brought in—not many, one suspects.

But all the rest—which is to say, about 95 percent of the actual work, all the painting of more than ten thousand square feet of ceiling—was done by Michelangelo alone, and the more one knows about the technique of buon fresco, as this kind of painting was called in his native Florence, the more astounding the achievement of the Sistine becomes.

An artist could not just paint his design on a hard, dried plaster surface. That invited disaster, and when even an artist as skilled as Leonardo da Vinci tried it with the Last Supper in Milan, disaster obligingly came. The reason is that no wall made of bricks, mortar, and plaster is ever completely dry and impermeable. Waterborne salts work their way in from outside and destroy an oily paint film lying on top of plaster inside. This does not happen, or not as gravely, when the colored pigment is integrated with the plaster, and such is the essence of buon fresco. For the paint to be integrated with the plaster, it must be applied while the plaster is damp—ideally, two or three hours after the laying of the intonaco, as the fresh lime plaster is known. Then the two form an indissoluble chemical bond when they dry.

But fresco has its peculiarities, and the chief one is that it has to be done piecemeal. The artist must complete painting a section of the intonaco before it dries. If the pigment is put on dry plaster, as it sometimes has to be for retouching and correction, it is said to be done a secco and lacks the durability of true fresco. However, not all pigments are suitable for fresco, because some—particularly the blues and greens, such as ultramarine and malachite—are vulnerable to the alkaline action of the lime. These were used a secco. The preferred fresco pigments included the ochers, brown and yellow earths, hematite reds, umber, burnt sienna, ivory black, and vine black. The borders of each section must therefore be planned, like a large jigsaw. Each is limited to the work that can be done in a single day. The patch of each day’s surface was known as a giornata, and it is easy for a trained eye, close up, to follow the outlines of each giornata and thus reconstruct the order in which the fresco was done. If repair work is needed, as it sometimes was, it was done by brushing water-based paint onto the now dried intonaco. A further complication is that in fresco colors do not dry the way they look when wet—a problem that does not arise with oil paint or watercolor. Pigments with a green or black hue dry lighter, whereas iron-oxide pigments dry darker; matching up wet and dry demands from the artist the most acute powers of visual memory.

It is not known exactly how the narrative of the ceiling was composed. Michelangelo undoubtedly had input from others (especially the pope) in doing it. (He claimed he invented it all, but he was given to claims like that.) The basis of the vault we see now is nine scenes from the book of Genesis, framed in fictive (painted) stonework, running crosswise between the long walls. They begin at the altar end of the chapel with three scenes of cosmic creation, The Separation of Light from Darkness, The Creation of the Sun and the Moon, and The Separation of Land from Water. Then follow three more: The Creation of Adam, The Creation of Eve, and The Temptation of Adam and Eve combined in one panel with The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Finally, one sees The Sacrifice of Abel (or perhaps that of Noah), The Flood, and The Drunkenness of Noah, complete with the ancient patriarch’s eldest son committing what had become known as the Sin of Ham—not overindulgence in prosciutto crudo, but gazing upon his inebriated father’s nakedness.

Gazing on masculine nakedness was, of course, Michelangelo’s unwavering obsession. On the painted stone frame surrounding these scenes sit the ignudi, the beautiful naked youths who have no part in the biblical narrative but are purely the invention of the artist, and make up the grandest anatomical repertoire in Western art. They serve to hold up garlands and painted bronze medallions. The spandrels of the chapel hold mighty figures depicting those who foretold the coming of Christ to the ancient Gentiles (the Sibyls) and to the ancient Jews (the Prophets). They alternate down the walls: the Libyan Sibyl, then Daniel, then the Cumaean Sibyl, then Isaiah, and so on. It seems, the more one looks at this huge vocabulary of human form, that Michelangelo did more than any artist before him to give posture and gesture their utmost eloquence. Here is the Libyan Sibyl, arms spread wide to hold open her enormous book, showing her back but looking over her shoulder. Here is the figure of Jonah, just released from the mouth of the whale—which is actually more the size of a large tarpon—leaning back and gazing upwards in astonishment at a sky which he never thought to see again. Goethe, after visiting the Sistine, wrote that no one could have any idea of what a single individual could accomplish on his own unless he had stepped inside this huge hall. It is still true, and no other work of art can deliver that.

The effort of painting the ceiling, lying on his back, was brutal and interminable, even for a man in his mid-thirties in peak physical condition. Michelangelo wrote a sardonic sonnet about it, addressed to his friend Giovanni da Pistoia. “I’ve grown a goiter at this drudgery,” it begins,

      The kind wet cats get in the Lombard swamps

      Or in whatever country the things live—

      My belly’s rucked up underneath my chin,

      My beard points up, my memory hangs down

      Under my balls, I’ve grown a harpy’s breast,

      And all the while my brush above me drips,

      Spattering my face till it’s an inlaid floor.

He feels crippled, permanently deformed—“I am recurved like a Syrian bow”—and his thinking is distorted:

      A man shoots badly with a crooked gun.

      And so, Giovanni, come to rescue me,

      Come rescue my dead painting, and my honor—

      This place is wrong for me, and I’m no painter.

The Sistine ceiling is almost all body, or bodies; the only sign of a nature that is not flesh is an occasional patch of bare earth and, in the Garden of Eden, a tree. Michelangelo was not even remotely interested in landscape; in this respect, as in many others, he was completely the opposite of Leonardo da Vinci. The human body, preferably male, its structure, musculature, and infinitely diverse postures, framed all the expressive powers he wanted to use. A dumb tree? A patch of unconscious grass? A wandering, arbitrarily shape-shifting cloud? Forget it. None of these, in Michelangelo’s eyes, had the grand complexity, the sublimely purposeful integration, of the human body, created in God’s own likeness. Leonardo might suspect that universal laws lay hidden in the behavior of water pouring from a sluice gate into a still pond, but such speculations were of no interest to Michelangelo.

Twenty-one years after the ceiling was complete, in 1533, Michelangelo began work on his fresco for the altar wall of the Sistine, and this time the work contained nothing but bodies (though there is a small patch of water, representing the river Styx, at the bottom). The subject of this monumental muscle-scape was the Last Judgment. It is a huge creation, and he took eight years over it, finishing it in 1541, at the age of sixty-six—almost twice the age he was when he began the Sistine ceiling.

Politically, a great deal had happened in Italy in those twenty-nine years, and the most traumatic event of all had come in 1527, with the Sack of Rome. Barbarians and other enemies had got as far as the walls of Rome in previous years, but none had actually succeeded in breaching them on a large scale. The Sack of 1527, however, was almost another Cannae in its traumatic effects on Roman self-possession and self-confidence.

Europe had now become an immense cockpit in which national factions were battling it out for international dominance. Long and inconclusive wars (1526–29) were fought in Italy between the troops of the self-styled Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the hodgepodge alliance of France, Milan, Florence, and the Papacy. There is considerable truth in the saying that the Holy Roman emperor was neither holy, nor Roman, nor in any real sense an emperor. Nonetheless, Pope Clement VII had thrown his lot in with Charles so as to avert France’s defeat at the hands of Charles’s army. But the imperial forces did defeat the Franco-Florentine-papal alliance—only to find there was no money to pay the troops their promised fee. Frustrated, the imperial forces mutinied and forced their commander, Charles III, duke of Bourbon, to lead them in an attack on Rome. Rome was a fat, rich city, full of treasure; so it was assumed. The army of the Holy Roman emperor contained a substantial number of Lutheran sympathizers, grimly delighted at the thought of attacking the throne of the Great Whore of Babylon, the Catholic Church; and, whatever their religious views, all thirty-four thousand soldiers wanted their promised back pay. So they marched south, spreading rapine and chaos as they went, and arrived beneath the Aurelian walls of Rome in early May 1527.

The city was not strongly defended. It had better artillery than its attackers, but only five thousand militia and the small papal force known as the Swiss Guard. Duke Charles III died in the attack—the great goldsmith-sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, never averse to self-promotion, claimed to be (and possibly was) the marksman who shot him. With him died the last possibility of restraint on the imperial invaders, among whom were fourteen thousand fearsome German Landsknechte, thirsting for blood, sex, and gold. The Swiss Guard was cut down almost to the last man on the steps of Saint Peter’s—out of its five hundred members, only forty-two escaped and, with commendable bravery and guile, managed to smuggle Pope Clement VII by a secret corridor out of the Borgo and to precarious safety as a prisoner in all but name in the Castel Sant’Angelo. About a thousand defenders of the city and its churches were summarily killed. Then the sack began.

Before long, it was for the living in Rome to envy the dead. Priests were dragged from their sacristies, savagely humiliated, and put to death, sometimes on their own altars. Hundreds of nuns were gang-raped and then killed, starting with the younger and more attractive ones. Monasteries, palaces, and churches were gutted and torched, and the higher clergy—including many cardinals—had to pay heavy ransoms to the implacable soldiers. Some of the minor scars of these days can still be seen today: in one of Raphael’s stanze, a mutineer left his scratches on the fresco of Heliodorus. The chaos went on for weeks. The Emperor Charles V was unable, and not altogether willing, to stop his troops. Not until June 6, after a month of unremitting plunder and rape, did Clement VII formally surrender and agree to pay a ransom of 400,000 ducats for his own life.

It was spared, but there was no way to restore the prestige of his papacy, or the sense of inviolability that went with Rome’s position as caput mundi. If God had allowed this to happen, what reliance could be put on Rome’s supposedly divine mission? In minds all over Europe, the Sack of Rome was an omen, joining in terrible synergy with the Reformation, which was by now a ten-year-old movement with undeniable staying power. God was abandoning the city; had already abandoned it, perhaps. A judgment had fallen. This was the end of the Renaissance papacy in Rome, that short and glorious thing. And although Michelangelo, who witnessed these things, was not given to writing about current events, it is surely not wrong to see in the titanic pessimism of the Sistine Last Judgment some character of response to the sacking of the helpless city six years earlier. Possibly, indeed probably, the image of Charon, the diabolic ferryman, whacking the terrified souls out of his boat with his oar, harks back to some moment Michelangelo had witnessed when a gleefully ruthless Landsknecht was driving a gaggle of helpless citizens out of their shelter with stabs and swipes of his halberd.

The wall of figures is huge; it is also almost unbearably claustrophobic, because there is no “space” in the ordinary sense of the word: no landscape or skyscape in which you can imagine your own body moving. It is packed almost to immobility with enormous bodies. Its actors are vehemently corporeal, and yet not of this world. We see, as we have seen in other Last Judgments, the division of the damned from the saved, the former going down to Hell, the latter rising to glory under the aegis of Judge Jesus. And yet there is something disquietingly irrational about the scene, if something as huge and dispersed as this can rightly even be called a “scene.” Why does Jesus look more like a relentless Apollonian Greek god than the “normal” judge and Saviour of other Last Judgments? Why does Jesus’ mother crouch so submissively by his side, as though terrified by the revelation of her son’s capacity for wrath against sin? Perhaps both are related to the line of Dante’s which had probably inspired Michelangelo before, when he carved the adult and supremely beautiful dead Christ lying in his mother’s lap, Figlia del tuo figlio, Daughter of Your Son. But why does Saint Bartholomew, customarily depicted holding up his own skin (which was flayed from him in his martyrdom), hold up a human skin whose collapsed face is unmistakably that of Michelangelo himself? And why on earth did Michelangelo give the blessed Bartholomew the face of that most unsaintly writer, the satirist and pornographer Pietro Aretino, whose collection of sexual “postures,” illustrated by Giulio Romano, was one of the repressed classics of High Renaissance titillation? These and a dozen other questions rise unbidden whenever one enters the chapel and gazes at its altar wall, and they bring with them the thin thread of possibility that they could be answered, at least partly, if only one could see Michelangelo’s work as it had been when his brush left it.

In the meantime, both the ceiling and the Last Judgment had been condemned to woeful indignities. Some popes later than Paul III quite vehemently disliked it. Paul IV (reigned 1555–59) called the Judgment “a stew of nudes,” meaning “stew” in the Renaissance sense of a public bath, a stufato, a whorehouse. Another Medici pope, Pius IV (reigned 1559–65), ordered that some of the figures be made decent with painted loincloths; this task was assigned to a good painter, Daniele da Volterra, who ever after was known as il braghettone, the trouser maker. Clement VIII (reigned 1592–1605) wanted the whole thing whitewashed over, but fortunately was dissuaded by his clerics.

No art-interested person who was in Rome in the late 1970s and early ’80s is likely to forget the passions roused by the project of cleaning the Sistine. Lifelong friendships were broken; the field of discussion, usually a relatively tranquil one, was swept by hails and cross-fires of moral disagreement.

The argument tended to revolve around one central question: was the grayness, the almost monochrome character of so much of Michelangelo’s coloring, deliberate or accidental?

There is always a certain resistance to cleaning any beloved work of art. The thought of damage, the natural fear of radical change, combine in what sometimes amounts to an anguished conservatism. And sometimes it is not a bit unreasonable: those who remember certain paintings in London’s National Gallery, before the director Sir Philip Hendy’s restorers were unleashed to use their swabs and solvents upon them, bitterly recall that they were not merely spruced up but skinned alive. The puritanical belief that cleanliness is next to godliness, that the more you take off the closer to the original truth you come, was still very strong in some quarters of the picture-cleaning trade in the late 1970s, and in the early 1960s it was virtually a dogma. The reduced color of the Sistine ceiling seemed to accord very well with the belief that Michelangelo was primarily a sculptor, a man who naturally thought in terms of monochrome substance. People didn’t want to think that the grayness which lent the figures a marmoreal grandeur, even as it deprived them of detail, was just dirt, soot, and centuries of grime.

Elaborate explanations were devised by the anti-cleaning faction, which, it is only fair to say, included some of the most distinguished art historians in Italy and elsewhere. The most popular idea was that Michelangelo, disliking the relative brightness of the Sistine frescoes, had applied an última mano, a “final touch,” in the form of a darkening and unifying wash of pigment and animal glue-size. Obscure and ambiguous ancient texts about the use of atramentum, a dark tonal wash, in antique painting were resurrected to suggest that Michelangelo had used it, too.

Glue there certainly was, and dark-wash pigment, too. But Michelangelo did not put them there. They were later accretions. The pigment was mostly airborne soot, from hundreds of years of burning candles. (Before the age of electricity, the Sistine was lit by large, stout candles, smoking away on an internal ledge below the level of the frescoes. They were not beeswax, which burns relatively cleanly, but the kind of black gunk you get on a barbecue from grilling chops.) And the glue was animal size, much of it also applied long after Michelangelo’s death by intrusive conservators who sought to bring up the higher tones in the frescoes by darkening the lower ones. The net result was a messy obscurity. Various attempts were made over the years to clean some of the film of dirt away, but none succeeded.

If you wanted to know what colors Michelangelo really preferred in a painting, it made sense to look at his one surviving complete easel picture, the Doni Tondo, or Holy Family (c. 1504). Bright, singing colors—colori cangianti, as they were called, the hues of shot silk, the crinkled sky-blue of Mary’s skirt, the opulent yellow of Joseph’s garment, the general clarity of light—none of this looked remotely like the colors of the Sistine ceiling. Inevitably, when the ceiling was cleaned in 1999 and colors similar to those of the Doni Tondo began to appear, there were cries of protest from art historians who felt that Michelangelo had been traduced: the “new” colors were those of later, Mannerist art, characteristic of artists like Pontormo or Rosso Fiorentino. The obvious deduction from this should have been that the bright colori cangianti of Mannerism had been copied from the Michelangelo of the Sistine, by artists who regarded Michelangelo as the ultimate guide and wished only to follow him in homage, when they flocked to the Sistine to see his new work. But critics of the restoration were determined to put the cart before the horse.

Seeing the Sistine frescoes in their renewed state a decade later, one can only guess what the hysteria of opposition had been about. They can now be seen in their full plenitude of color, and it is one of the world’s supreme sights. At this point I should perhaps confess a bias: working for what was then a major American magazine, Time, I was lucky enough to get extended access to the ponte or moving bridge between the Sistine walls on which the cleaners worked, and spent the better part of three days up there, with my nose a couple of feet from the fresco surface, seeing the way Michelangelo’s color was coming alive once more after so long a burial under waxy residue, and how the forms were being reborn. This was a privilege, probably the most vivid one I had in a fifty-year career as an art critic. It left me in no doubt that the Vatican team’s meticulous high-tech efforts, inch by inch, were as great a feat of skill and patience as John Brealey’s magnificently discreet cleaning of Velázquez’s Las meninas in Madrid, and that an enormous cultural truth, once obscured, was now coming to light.

Michelangelo’s frescoes are, of course, a magnetic point of concentrated attraction for visitors to Rome—so much so that it is no longer possible to appreciate them in peace, thanks to the intolerable jam-packed year-round crowds. Michelangelo’s Roman architecture is, however, a different matter. Its chief undertakings were three: the reform of the Capitol, complete with its bronze of Marcus Aurelius on horseback; the design of the grandest palace in Rome, Palazzo Farnese; and the development of the Basilica of Saint Peter’s.

Sometimes, while he was working on the Last Judgment, Michelangelo was approached in the hope that he would turn to public-architecture projects. With the Judgment finished, and the Paoline Chapel behind him, he was relieved to give himself over to architecture, and the first of the schemes in which he immersed himself was the redesign of Rome’s mythic and historic nucleus, the Capitol (in Italian, Campidoglio). The need for a renewed Capitol had become clear in 1536, nine years after the Sack of Rome, when the victorious Charles V made a state visit to the still horribly scarred Rome, and Pope Paul III realized that, although temporary processional arches were run up to greet the emperor along the old Roman route of triumph, there was no great central piazza for a reception ceremony.

The Capitoline Hill, with all its historical associations, seemed suitable, and in 1538, Paul III ordered the bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius on horseback to be moved from its site outside the Lateran to a new spot on the Capitol. The pope thought, wrongly, that it was a statue of the Emperor Constantine, hence Christian. It was a fortunate mistake, since only the fact that all Romans in the Middle Ages had assumed it to be Constantine (or, later, the Christian Antoninus Pius) had protected it from being demolished and melted down as a pagan monument. Michelangelo, interestingly enough, opposed placing the Marcus Aurelius on the Capitol—we don’t know why—but, fortunately for Rome, the pope overrode him. He was made an honorary citizen of Rome in 1537, and, flattered by this compliment, he pressed ahead with ideas for the Capitol. He designed an oval base for the statue, which he surrounded with an oval pavement, replacing the amorphous piazza in front of the Palazzo del Senatore. He put in two symmetrical staircases on the face of that palace, and designed a fine wide stepped ramp, the cordonata, linking the piazza to what is now the level of Piazza Venezia below. So the visual axis of the cordonata runs through the Marcus Aurelius and up to the junction of the twin stairs on Palazzo del Senatore. Now the statue needed a new architectural environment. To one side of it, built on the ruins of what was once the Temple of Jupiter, was the fifteenth-century Palazzo dei Conservatori. Michelangelo gave it a new façade, with powerful full-height Corinthian pilasters, and on the other side, facing it, he built the matching Palazzo Nuovo, now the Capitoline Museum, which holds its prodigiously rich collection of Roman antiquities.

In this way, Michelangelo created one of the greatest urban centers in the history of architecture; only a few others in Italy, such as Piazza San Marco in Venice and the Piazza del Campo or shell-shaped piazza in Siena, compare to it in spatial beauty, and none can approach its phenomenal richness of art content. Nothing could rival it, or ever will. Its effect on visiting aesthetes was summed up in a much later drawing by the neoclassical artist Henry Fuseli, who had moved to Rome for an eight-year sojourn in 1770. It showed a figure, head buried in his hands in despair, seated before the enormous marble foot and hand of Constantine; this is still on the Capitol. Its title is The Artist in Despair over the Magnitude of Antique Fragments. This emotion was often felt, and by many; but not by Michelangelo. Raphael was the more enthusiastic preserver of the two.

Through his short life, Raphael actively promoted the preservation of Rome’s innumerable ancient ruins and monuments. A report on their decay was submitted to Julius II’s successor, Leo X, who in 1515 appointed Raphael to be prefect of the antiquities of Rome. This did not give Raphael the power to block the plunder of ancient marble. Rather the reverse—it put him in charge of gathering ancient material to be used in building the new Saint Peter’s. So there is something hypocritical about the lamentations in the report. It is not clear who compiled and wrote it. Unsigned, it has been ascribed to Bramante, Raphael, the writer Baldassare Castiglione, and others. Since a draft copy of the report written in Baldassare’s hand was found in the Castiglione family library, and since Raphael (1483–1520) was not only the architect-designate of Saint Peter’s and the chief adviser on aesthetic matters to Leo X, but also an intimate friend of Castiglione, it is likely that the two men wrote the report together.

The author(s), says the report, have been all over Rome, looking, drawing, measuring, and it has been a decidedly mixed pleasure: this knowledge of “so many excellent things has given me the greatest pleasure; on the other hand, the greatest grief. For I beheld this noble city, which was the queen of the world, so wretchedly wounded as to be almost a corpse.” In Rome, antiquity had been mercilessly despoiled by the Romans themselves, the fine stone of the ruins looted, the columns felled and carted away, the marble statues and friezes burned for lime, the bronzes melted down. This had been going on for hundreds of years, without hindrance from pope or Senate. The Romans had done more damage to Rome than the worst barbarian invasions. Compared with them, “Hannibal would appear to have been a pious man.” “Why should we bewail the Goths, the Vandals, and other perfidious enemies of the Latin name, when those who above all others should be fathers and guardians in defense of the poor relics of Rome have even given themselves over to the study—long study—of how these might be destroyed and disappear?” This Ubuesque project of demolishing the ruins, this relentless urbicide, was Rome’s biggest, almost its only, industry.

How many pontiffs, Holy Father, who have held the same office as yourself, though without the same knowledge … have permitted the ruin and defacement of the ancient temples, of statues and arches and other edifices that were the glory of their builders? How many allowed the very foundations to be undermined so that

pozzolana

[volcanic ash] might be dug from them, so that, in but a little time, the buildings fell to the ground? How much lime has been burned from the statues and ornaments of ancient times?

This piecemeal destruction of the city by its ignorant developers was “the infamy of our times,” an atrocious historical castration. Raphael and Castiglione knew very well whom they were pleading to. He was Giovanni de’ Medici, successor to the mighty Julius II, the last layman to be elected pope, the second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent of Florence, then only in his early forties.

He had received a good humanistic education at Lorenzo’s court in Florence, from such luminaries as Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino, and the poet Angelo Poliziano. Both in Florence and in Rome, he had been immersed in art and literature; his reverence for the classical past was thoroughly instilled, not just an affectation or a pseudo-intellectual quirk. Moreover, he did not have automatic respect for the opinions of earlier popes, especially on such matters as architectural history.

“Since God has given us the papacy,” Giovanni de’ Medici famously remarked after his election as Leo X, “let us enjoy it.” He set out to do so, and he did. Venice’s ambassador to Rome, Marino Giorgi, wrote that Leo was “a good-natured and extremely free-hearted man, who avoids every difficult situation and above all wants peace.… He loves learning; of canon law and literature he possesses remarkable knowledge.” He had a menagerie of pets, including a tame white elephant. He was, according to the 1525 testimony of the historian and politician Francesco Guicciardini, an active and unembarrassed homosexual, “exceedingly devoted—and every day with less shame—to that kind of pleasure which for honor’s sake may not be named.” And he was culturally serious. Leo X restored the University of Rome, which had fallen on hard times during the pontificate of Julius II. He increased the salaries of its professors, expanded its faculties, and underwrote a Greek printing press, which created the first Greek book to be published in Rome (1515), an important step in the implantation of humanistic ideas in the city. He gave papal secretaryships to scholars and poets, such as Pietro Bembo and Gian Giorgio Trissino.

All this cost money—a great deal of it. Leo X badly depleted the papal treasury in two or three years. Naturally, it embarrassed him, as Christ’s vicar on earth, to find himself presiding over a city as miserably shorn of its ancient glory as Rome had become. The Church needed defenses, of which new buildings were the manifest and concrete proof. Julius II and his architect Bramante had begun to replace the old Saint Peter’s with a vast new basilica, and now Leo X set out to double its size, a thing unheard of in the previous history of Christianity. Much of the time these expansions were chaotic, since new popes tended quite often to allow the projects of those before them to lapse. The military, political, architectural, and artistic ambitions of successive pontiffs drove the Papacy into long spasms of bottomless debt, causing inextricable woes to its bankers. Leo X was certainly not exempt from these financial horrors, and his short-term palliatives for them were a disaster for the Church. He was one of the most feckless spenders in the history of the Papacy. One cannot help liking him for his attachment to the fine arts, especially for his encouragement of literature and scholarship. But the Church needed a more restrained man, and restraint was not a virtue Leo X understood. He needed immense sums, not only to support his luxurious tastes, but to finance large projects, of which the largest was building the new Basilica of Saint Peter’s. He therefore opened the door to one of the worst rackets in ecclesiastical history: the large-scale sale of indulgences.

When not enough cash was flowing in from it, Leo sold (to selected buyers, of course) the prestige of association with the Papacy. He invented all manner of new papal offices, and sold them to the highest bidders. It was reliably estimated that when Leo died more than two thousand people were paying for offices he had created, generating a capital value of three million ducats, which yielded the pope 328,000 ducats a year. Cardinals’ hats were commonly sold, and this caused the higher levels of the hierarchy to silt up with avaricious crooks. Leo was even reported to be pawning and selling some of the artistic contents of the Vatican—furniture, plate, jewels, and works of art.

It is not certain that Leo X fully understood the determined anger propelling the epic change in the history of ideas and of worship that was about to rock Europe; there could hardly have been two more dissimilar men than the Medici pope and the German monk named Martin Luther who, in the fourth year of Leo’s papacy, on October 31, 1517, nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenburg. Luther was a deeply educated man, but he had none of the hedonistic delight in culture that animated Leo. In no way could he have been called a sensualist, which Leo in all respects was.

The indignation and disgust this caused among the faithful was to be one of the prime causes of the Reformation, in which for doctrinal reasons the epochal split between Catholicism and Protestantism took root. But at the same time that Leo was disposing so recklessly of such magnificent works of art, he was acquiring others, notably books and manuscripts for the ever-growing Vatican Library. In the process, the pope who gave rise to the Reformation was also fostering a new intellectual elite: the Roman humanists.

7

Rome in the Seventeenth Century

You cannot imagine modern Rome without the changes that a single pope, Sixtus V, imposed on it in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Because of his patronage of titans like Michelangelo, we are naturally inclined to think of Julius II as the supreme “building pope” of the sixteenth century. And so he was, in a sense—but if the scale of Sixtus V Peretti’s changes to the urban structure of Rome is not appreciated, one is fated to misunderstand the city. It was Sixtus V who laid the groundwork of Baroque Rome, the city whose exoskeleton the visitor sees today but is apt to take for granted.

He was elected pope in 1585, inheriting a chaotic city riddled with crime, close to bankruptcy, and dotted with half-abandoned ruins. In the apogee of its imperial years, Rome held over a million people. Now it had possibly twenty-five thousand, and probably fewer. The economic depression of the fourteenth century, forced on Rome by the Great Schism that drove the city into a plunge, had turned Rome into a veritable ghost town with monuments.

The seven main churches of Rome were foci for a steadily increasing flow of religious tourism, which, unlike later and more exploitive forms of mass tourism, did little for the city’s general economy. True, every year the number of pilgrimages by the faithful increased. But the connective tissue between them—the living body of the supposedly Eternal City—seemed to be shriveling at an alarming rate. One project of renewal stood out: Michelangelo’s masterpiece of urban design, the remaking of the Capitol, which had been accomplished in the 1540s—long before Sixtus V’s papacy. But too little had been built anew, and the order on which Rome depended for its continued civic life had disappeared, replaced by a chaos reminiscent of New York City in the 1970s or Washington, D.C., in the 1990s. Some people believed the bandits had taken over. One estimate said there were twenty thousand of them, about one for every law-abiding citizen. This hardly seems plausible, but certainly the crime rate had increased beyond computation.

Such a crisis cannot be averted by one person. Yet it cannot be defeated without strong leadership, either—without a ruthless intensity of will that committees cannot usually summon. But, as sometimes happened, the crisis called forth the man—a cleric who, in the closing years of the sixteenth century, became pope and thus took over Rome and its administration. He was Felice Peretti, Cardinal Montalto, a Franciscan who had been elected pope by the conclave that followed the death of Gregory XIII, and had assumed the papacy under the name of Sixtus V.

He was a farmer’s son, born in Grottammare, an obscure paese near Montalto, in the Papal States. It was said that as a boy he had been a swineherd, which may easily be true. He rose rapidly within the Church as a Minorite friar, becoming the rector of successive convents in Siena (1550), Naples (1553), and Venice (1556). He was appointed counselor to the Inquisition there a year afterward. Fierce and fanatical Inquisitors were no novelty in Venice, but even there Peretti seems to have been abnormal in his zeal, and by 1560 the Venetian government demanded and got his withdrawal.

In 1566, Pope Pius V made him a bishop; in 1570, he took the cardinal’s red hat. Fifteen years later, he was elected pope. He was said to have entered the chamber of the electoral conclave on crutches, feigning extreme infirmity. No doubt he hoped this would improve his chances of being elected as an interim, short-term pope. The instant his election was confirmed by the white smoke rising from the chimney, he flung the crutches away, to stand before the assembled cardinals erect and fairly bristling with vitality. The story is untrue, but “se non è vero,” as the Romans habitually say, “è ben trovato,”—“if it’s not true, it ought to be.”

In some respects, Sixtus V was a terrifying figure; in others, an ignorant one; and in all ways, formidable. But he could never be reproached for either indecision or lack of creativity. The atmosphere of reform that seized the Church had brought forth a man whose belief in authority, especially his own as pontiff, was absolute. However, being a man of iron will, he was not inclined to listen to those he considered his inferiors—which meant anyone else in the One Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. This showed in all his actions, from city planning to Biblical scholarship.

In the late 1580s, Sixtus took charge of publishing the “Sixtine Vulgate,” or official Latin text of the Bible. This was a religious necessity, because it would give Italians the definitive printed form of the fundamental text of Christendom, protecting it from heretical incursions like Lutheranism.

But Sixtus did not take kindly to editors. He saw them as quibbling nuisances, and brusquely ignored their suggestions. This edition, published in 1590, became a bibliographic rarity, because it was so full of mistakes that it had to be suppressed—after his death, naturally.

Nothing like that happened with his plans for Rome itself. Thinking holistically, on a citywide scale rather than just building by building, Sixtus transformed the shape of Rome.

But first he had the crime problem to deal with.

“Non veni pacem mittere,” he told a fellow cardinal who congratulated him on his election, “sed gladium”: the words of Christ, “I come not to send peace, but a sword.”

The papal blade first swung, with deadly effect, at Rome’s population of thugs and thieves, who found themselves arrested, beheaded, garroted, or hanging from gibbets and the Tiber’s bridges. Sixtus V emphatically did not believe that citizens had the right to bear arms. What he did believe in was judicial terror. When four innocuous youths with sheathed swords were seen following one of his papal processions, he had them summarily executed. This policy was so effective that before long the Papal States were considered the safest domain in Europe. Sixtus celebrated this achievement by having a medal struck with his face on one side and on the other a pilgrim sleeping beneath a tree, with the motto Perfecta securitas.

In case villains tried to get away, Sixtus was the first to arrange for extradition treaties with neighboring states. No ruler was going to risk papal displeasure by ignoring them. If the death penalty could improve civic order, it could also do wonders for moral order. Among the actions Sixtus declared punishable by death, apart from theft and assault, were abortion, incest, and pedophilia. Theoretically, these had carried the death penalty before, but Sixtus made it absolutely mandatory and without exceptions. Lesser crimes, such as failing to keep holy the Sabbath day, were punished by condemnation to the galleys. (The Papal States still had a modest-sized fleet, though its ships were probably used less for warfare than for the punishment of sinners at the laboring oar.) Rome was swarming with prostitutes, who had scarcely been disturbed by previous papacies; Sixtus had them banned from major thoroughfares during daylight hours, and from all Roman streets after nightfall. He meant it, too: if a girl was caught plying her trade in the wrong place or out of hours, she would be branded on the face or breasts.

With crime and vice under some kind of control, Sixtus next turned his attention to the planned but unfinished urban work of Gregory XIII. This pontiff had already made his own changes to the city. A Holy Year was scheduled for 1575. It would bring many pilgrims to Rome, multiplying the circulation problems. By way of preparation for this, Gregory had cleared a wide street called the Via Merulana, running from Santa Maria Maggiore to the Lateran. He also revised the building codes, to encourage larger and more impressive civil structures.

But this was small stuff compared with the projects Sixtus V now embarked on, through his architect-in-chief, Domenico Fontana (1543–1607).

Much earlier, in 1576, Fontana had designed a huge (and ever-expanding) villa on the Quirinal for Sixtus, the Villa Montalto. He advised the pope on the restoration of one of the most beautiful early churches in Rome, the fifth-century Santa Sabina, with its twenty-four matching Corinthian columns recycled from some ancient pagan temple. He designed a large but undistinguished building to house what is now a great collection, that of the Vatican Library (1587–90), and chose the painters who frescoed it with such scenes as the Cumaean Sibyl presiding over the burning of the Sibylline Books.¹ Sixtus was not in favor of keeping the palace of San Giovanni in Laterano, parts of which dated from the sixth century, and which until the fifteenth century had been the chief papal residence. Pope Nicholas V had moved out of it and into new quarters in the Vatican. Since then, the old building had decayed through neglect, and much of it was uninhabitable, certainly not pope-worthy. Sixtus decreed that it should be razed to the ground, and in its place Fontana built a new Lateran Palace, which was finished in 1588.

The particular concern of Sixtus V, though, one which amounted almost to an obsession, was the shape and circulation of the city of Rome itself. It was not enough for the pope to ban all overhanging wooden structures on its streets, though he did. The streets themselves needed radical surgery. In the end, Sixtus either paved or resurfaced about 120 streets in Rome, and laid out some ten kilometers of new roads within the city.

The city maps from earlier in the sixteenth century show its seven pilgrimage churches: San Giovanni in Laterano, San Pietro, San Paolo Fuori le Mura, Santa Maria Maggiore, San Lorenzo, Sant’Agnese, and San Sebastiano. Meandering between them were roads, most of which were mere cattle paths. This messy informality offended the pope’s sense of order. In future, straight streets would join up at focal points, in orderly progressions. For instance, he directed the layout and construction of avenues that linked Santa Maria Maggiore directly to the Lateran Palace, and the Lateran with the Colosseum. A wide, handsome street named the Strada Felice (after the pope’s own name), and later renamed the Via Sistina, was driven three kilometers from Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, on to Santa Maria Maggiore, and so to Santissima Trinità dei Monti. No existing building impeded the clearance of these avenues. If anything was in the way, down it came. The pope had an unquestioned right of eminent domain on secular as well as ecclesiastical buildings, and he exercised it without restraint.

Nor did he have the slightest regard for the classical monuments. Sixtus V was a man of superficial culture, never inhibited by humanistic reverence for the Roman past, or even the memories of the Renaissance. His predecessor, Gregory XIII, had set up ancient statues on the Capitol; Sixtus objected to this, saying that they were no more tolerable than any other pagan idols, and had them carted off. He told one of his courtiers that this gave him particular enjoyment because he had dreamed that Gregory XIII, whom he hated, was suffering in Purgatory. He took pleasure in spending the recorded sum of 5,339 scudi on destroying the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian. Without a qualm he demolished the remains of the magnificent façade of the Septizodium of the emperor Septimius Severus (dedicated in 201 C.E.), so admired by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artists, and had its spolia of precious marble dispersed through the city as part of his own building projects. He wanted to see the four-sided arch of Janus Quadrifrons, in the Forum Boarium, demolished, so that his court architect, Fontana, could use its marble to make a base for the obelisk in front of San Giovanni in Laterano, and gave orders for the destruction of the tomb of Caecilia Metella, even though it was well outside the city limits. He also thought the Colosseum should be turned into a wool factory to increase employment in the city. This latter plan was going forward, but on Sixtus’ death, in 1590, it was dropped. So (luckily) was another and far worse idea of his, which was to tear down a whole section of the Colosseum to make way for a new, straight avenue connecting the Campidoglio to San Giovanni in Laterano.

When the question arose of what to do with the two great antique columns of Rome, those of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, Sixtus went right ahead without regard for the original meanings of these monuments, installing a statue of Saint Peter (cast from the bronze of ancient statues melted down) on top of Trajan’s Column and one of Saint Paul on that of Marcus Aurelius. In dedicating the statue of Peter, His Holiness explained that such a monument as Trajan’s could only become worthy to bear the effigy of Christ’s vicar on earth if it was rededicated in the cause of the Catholic Church—an astonishing piece of casuistry.

The truth was that Sixtus V, like many another man of unbridled power, believed more in the future than in the past, because the future could be shaped but the past could not. At his core he simply did not see why the remains of a defeated paganism should be allowed to impede the progress of a living, triumphant faith. He was in that respect an ideal pope for the Counter-Reformation. Everything that was built, restored, carved, or painted under his papacy had to exemplify the power of the Church Triumphant. If a fountain was to be designed, its subject could no longer be the pagan Neptune surrounded by sea nymphs and Tritons. It would have to be Moses striking the rock, releasing the gushing water of faith.

Water was a prime metaphor of devotional art by now. Much of Fontana’s work depended on his construction of a new aqueduct, which, in homage to the pope’s birth name of Felice Peretti, was known as the Acqua Felice. “Happy Water,” indeed. Until then, new building in Rome had mostly been confined to the low-lying areas along the Tiber. The Acqua Felice entered Rome higher up its hills, finishing at Piazza Santa Susanna, by the Baths of Diocletian, the present site of the Museo delle Terme. This wider distribution of precious water opened up much more of the disabitato, the “abandoned” or “empty” tracts of the city, for development and occupation. Naturally, it was much easier to build on empty land than to “do an Haussmann” and have to demolish and clear every site first.

So there was always work, but the one project by which Fontana is remembered, and which gave him a deserved immortality as an engineer, was moving and re-erecting the obelisk of Saint Peter’s, that huge spike rising from what would become the heart of Christianity.

Sixtus V had a vast liking for obelisks, and Rome had more of them than any other European city—thirteen, to be exact, all except one either broken or lying prone, or mostly both.² His enthusiasm was satirized by one of the acrid couplets that made the rounds during his papacy:

Noi abbiamo basta di guglie e fontane:

Pane vollemo, pane, pane, pane!

      We’ve had it up to here with obelisks and fountains:

      It’s bread we want, bread, bread, bread!

These angry rhymes were known as “pasquinades,” because they were traditionally affixed to a worn antique statue named, since time immemorial Pasquino. Rome had a number of such “talking statues,” which served as vents for civic annoyance at a time when Romans had no access to any press. Another was a female bust, now rather battered, known to Romans as Madama Lucrezia, attached to the wall of the Palazzetto Venezia, next to the corner of the Basilica di San Marco, the church of Rome’s Venetian colony. But the most famous pair of talkers were Pasquino and his old friend Marforio. Marforio, an ancient river god, used to be at the entrance of the Mamertine Prison, but then he was moved up to the Capitol and is to be found reclining at the entrance to the Capitoline Museum. Pasquino is in the little piazza named for him, the Piazza di Pasquino, behind Piazza Navona. Marforio would speak (through a placard), and Pasquino would reply (or vice versa), and their dialogue, usually in a dialect incomprehensible to the non-Roman, was one of the great comic acts of Rome.

Pasquino, like Marforio, is ancient: a worn and beaten classical torso of Menelaus from the third century B.C.E. dug up during the repair of an adjacent street. It was installed in its present place by a cardinal in 1501. The name is supposed to have come from a tailor in a nearby shop who was dangerously free with his impertinent criticism of the papal government. But there are so many legends about Pasquino’s origins that it is probably impossible to disentangle the true one.

In any case, one day during the reign of Sixtus V, Pasquino was seen wearing a horribly filthy shirt. Why, Marforio wanted to know, did he wear such a stinking rag? Because Donna Camilla has become a princess, came the answer. Donna Camilla, the pope’s sister, in her humbler days had been a washerwoman, but had just been ennobled by His Holiness.

There was a limit to what great figures would endure from Pasquino, and this crossed the line. It got to the ears of Sixtus V, who let it be known that, if the anonymous satirist owned up to writing it, his life would be spared and he would receive a present of one thousand pistoles in cash. But if anyone else found him out and denounced him, the writer would be hanged. Naturally, the nameless graffitist—for who was going to turn down such a reward?—confessed. Sixtus V gave him the money and spared his life, but unsportingly added, “We have reserved for Ourselves the power of cutting off your hands and boring your tongue through, to prevent your being so witty in the future.” But nothing would shut Pasquino up; he had a hundred tongues and two hundred hands. The very next Sunday Pasquino was seen draped in a still-wet freshly laundered shirt, set to dry in the sun. Marforio wondered why he couldn’t wait until Monday. “There’s no time to lose,” said Pasquino, thinking of His Holiness’s taxation habits. “If I stay until tomorrow perhaps I’ll have to pay for the sunshine.”

The obelisks of Rome were souvenirs of the Empire’s conquest of Egypt, and most of them had been brought to the city in imperial times. Ancient Egypt had three basic commemorative forms: the pyramid, the sphinx, and the obelisk. But the task of moving an obelisk (never mind a sphinx or a pyramid) across the Mediterranean was hardly less daunting than making the thing to begin with, which was difficult enough—indeed, insanely so—and could only have been undertaken by a theocratic anti-state like ancient Egypt.

All known Egyptian obelisks came from the same quarry—a deposit of extremely hard and fine-grained syenite, a rock similar to granite, at Aswan, below the first cataract of the Nile. It lay seven hundred miles from Alexandria and five hundred from Heliopolis, where the biggest concentration of finished obelisks stood.

The tools of ancient Egypt were very simple. No stonecutting saws or explosives, of course; no steel; and for moving the heavy blocks of syenite, once they were free of the quarry, only the timber lever, the roller, the inclined plane, the wedge, palm-fiber ropes, grease, and limitless manpower. Human muscle, at least, was not in short supply, and it was preferred to animal traction, since the fellahin could obey orders a team of oxen would not understand. Egypt had about 11,500 square miles of inhabitable terrain, and a population, in pharaonic times, of perhaps eight million people, a density of some seven hundred per square mile—six times more than China’s or India’s then.

The task of cutting out the granite block for an obelisk was simplicity itself—tedious, infinitely laborious simplicity.

You and other slaves marked the intended line of cleavage in the granite by gouging a channel for its full length, about two inches deep and two wide. Into the bottom of this channel you drilled a line of holes, each about three inches in diameter and six inches deep, spaced some eighteen inches apart.

You and your fellow slaves now had two choices.

The first was to hammer a wooden plug into each of these holes and then fill the channel with water, which other slaves would have brought in skins from the nearby Nile. If, despite the evaporative power of the Egyptian sun, the wood was kept soaked long enough, the plugs would swell and, with luck, cause the whole mass to crack away from its matrix.

The second choice was to build a fire the whole length of the channel and keep it burning until the rock was piping hot, then sweep away the ash and embers and quickly douse it all with cold water, which (with luck) would also crack the granite.

No tools for work on the obelisks have ever been found, except a single bronze chisel at Thebes. Iron tools, if they existed at all, have entirely disappeared, rusted away (some think) by the highly nitrous Egyptian soil. Possibly the chisels had diamond teeth. For the long and arduous task of smoothing the faces of the obelisks, there must have been abrasives of some kind—emery, corundum, or even diamond dust. The main ingredient, of which ancient Egypt was never short, was limitless amounts of human labor.

How the obelisk got its final sculptural shape, with the “pyramidion” or point on top of the shaft, is not known. It cannot have been done with abrasives—there was too much rock to remove—but trying to split the waste rock off accurately at sixty degrees on all four faces must have been, to put it mildly, chancy.

Nevertheless, it was done, and now came the problem of getting the thing to its intended site. But this was not a matter to deter a really serious pharaoh. In the nineteenth dynasty, about 1400 B.C.E., Rameses II had a nine-hundred-ton effigy of himself dragged 138 miles from its granite bed to the memnorium in Thebes, on some kind of enormous sled, with obedient Egyptians pouring oil on the sand in front of its runners to reduce friction and thousands of other Egyptians hauling on ropes. The obelisk’s granite bed was not so far—at least, not unthinkably far—from the Nile. The best guess is that the Egyptians built a dry dock on the bank of the river, at low water. Inside this, a transport barge was constructed. Now the obelisk would be dragged from the quarry to the dry dock on a massive timber sledge, an operation requiring perhaps fifty thousand men in double or quadruple lines, and miles of palm-fiber rope.

Thus the obelisk would be loaded slowly, slowly into the barge, there to wait for the great event, the annual inundation of the Nile. This would raise the laden barge, which then, with great luck and skill, would be floated down the river to a place as close as possible to the obelisk’s appointed site. There, the patient Egyptians would run through the whole process again, this time backward, building another dry dock, securing the barge in it, waiting for the Nile water to recede, dragging the obelisk from the barge and the embankment to its eventual pedestal, and raising it vertical.

How this might have been done was entirely conjectural, and so it had to be reinvented again and again. First the ancient Romans, of the time of Cleopatra and Ptolemy, had to reinvent it, no doubt with a great deal of subservient Egyptian help. Then, more than a thousand years later, the Italians had to invent it once more, since there were no records of the original moves.

Of the ships that brought the obelisks to Rome, not a trace remains. It is presumed that they were enormous galleys, each custom-built, quinqueremes with at least three hundred oarsmen, and that the prone obelisk was ballasted with many tons of wheat or dried beans in sacks packed around it to prevent it from shifting, since any instability in so immense a load would have rolled the ship and sent it to the bottom at once. (Underwater archaeology has found an amazing variety of objects in ancient wrecks, including what some presume to have been a primitive ancestor of the computer off the island of Antikythera—the “Antikythera Mechanism”—but no obelisk so far.)

Once the ship and its cargo had reached Ostia, the entire process had to be repeated in reverse: the dry dock, the sledge, the hauling, and the inch-by-inch journey to Rome. Some obelisks, at least, were raised vertically on their bases in the Circus Maximus and elsewhere, but it is not known how. Most of them were broken into several pieces, either by toppling over in unrecorded antiquity, or by damage from earthquakes or ground subsidence as they lay prone.

There was, however, one perfect unbroken obelisk still standing in Rome in the sixteenth century. The largest intact one outside Egypt, it dated from the nineteenth dynasty, about 1300 B.C.E., and had been brought to the Eternal City on the orders of none other than Caligula, having been raised first at Heliopolis. Caligula decreed its transport to a site on Nero’s Circus, which, more than a thousand years later, turned out to be the back of the old Saint Peter’s Basilica. It was a tapering granite shaft, eighty-three feet and one inch to the tip of its pyramidion, weighing 361 tons. On top of the pyramidion was a bronze ball, which nobody had ever opened; it was reputed to contain the ashes of Julius Caesar.

Pope Sixtus V had often looked at the obelisk from afar, and was not satisfied. It should not be behind the new Basilica of Saint Peter’s, which was then nearing completion. It must be moved to the front. A simple matter of civic punctuation—shifting the exclamation point in the sentence. A great piazza would be made in front of the new Saint Peter’s (and so it was, years later, to the designs of the as yet unborn Gian Lorenzo Bernini). Let the obelisk be brought round and planted there, plumb in the center, to the wonder of pilgrims now, the edification of the faithful in centuries to come, and the eternal memory of Pope Sixtus V.

But—the age-old problem—how to move it?

The pope appointed a commission to look into the problem. Through 1585, some five hundred experts from all over Italy and as far afield as Rhodes, which had had previous experience with colossi, were consulted. Some were for transporting the obelisk prone, others for doing it standing upright, and at least one proposed, for inscrutable reasons, moving it at an angle of forty-five degrees. Some wanted to move it horizontally and then turn it upright by means of a gigantic half-wheel to which it would be fixed. Others proposed raising it off its pedestal with wedges. Scores of solutions were proposed, most of which looked ineffective and some downright lethal.

Before too long, Sixtus V wearied of looking at these notions, and appointed the man he had had in mind all along: his own architect, Domenico Fontana. The hitch was that Fontana was only forty-two, and therefore seen by some papal officials as too young and inexperienced. So the commission appointed a watchdog: the distinguished Florentine architect Bartolomeo Ammannati, who was seventy-four and had to his credit a number of architectural masterpieces, such as the courtyard of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence; the Ponte Santa Trinità, spanning the Arno; and the Villa Giulia in Rome.

Ammannati was an outstanding architect, but he was hardly needed, since Fontana was the greater engineer. What Fontana proposed was to set one pair of massive timber pylons on each side of the obelisk. Each of the four pylons would consist of four vertical members, each ninety-two feet long, made of twenty-by-twenty-inch timber lap-jointed securely together with one-and-a-half-inch thick iron lag-bolts and iron bands. The timber balks were brought from twenty miles away. Ropes would run over pulleys at the top of the pylons and be secured to the obelisk, which was to be padded with straw and then encased in two-inch-thick planks for its whole length, to give it some degree of protection—though if it dropped nothing could save it from shattering. These cables would connect to eyebolts fixed to iron bands clasping the sheathed body of the obelisk. The cables would run to windlasses on the ground, turned by horse-powered capstans, like the capstans used to raise the anchors of ships. Fontana calculated the gross weight of the obelisk, its armature, and metal lifting bolts at 681,222 pounds. A capstan powered by four horses, he figured, could lift fourteen thousand pounds. So he would need forty capstans to lift vertically 80 percent of the obelisk’s weight—the remainder being done by five massive timber levers. If the obelisk began to tilt, it would initiate a catastrophe, slipping sideways to the ground, so the most exquisite care was going to be required to keep the tension equal on all those forty cables, fanning outward to the capstans around the obelisk. Winching in the cables required pulleys based on ship’s tackle, but of a huge size never used on a ship—scores of double-sheaved pulley blocks, iron-bound, with a two-to-one ratio, the largest of them five feet two inches long. The cables themselves were each 750 feet long, three inches in diameter, and spun in an especially large ropewalk at Foligno, with a breaking strain (Fontana figured) of fifty thousand pounds. This was the largest order of equipment the Italian maritime industry had ever known. But, then, nothing like this had ever been tried in the history of Italian civil engineering. It was going to need almost unheard-of care and coordination, which Fontana proposed to achieve with a system of sound signals—a trumpet to start each capstan pull, a bell to end it.

First the obelisk must be raised from its base, and then swayed down prone on the enormous carriage and rollers on which it would be dragged from the rear of Saint Peter’s to the site in front. Then the pylons and capstans must be brought round, rerigged, and used to stand the prodigious block of stone vertical again and gingerly lowered onto a base which had been prepared for it in front of the basilica.

Sixtus V issued lengthy and detailed orders that no one “shall dare impede, or in any way molest the work.” This meant invoking eminent domain over everything that lay along the route of the obelisk: if there was a house in the way, down it would go. The whole operation, which took days and consumed the labor of nine hundred men and some 140 horses, was watched by most of the population of Rome—who were kept back by a security fence and had been warned, in no uncertain terms, that anyone who made a noise or spoke a word would be instantly put to death. Nobody uttered a peep.

However, it became part of the folklore of this tremendous operation that, at a certain point, the ropes carrying the obelisk began either to fray from the load or to smolder from the friction. Disaster stared Fontana in the face. Legend has it that the day was saved by an iron-lunged Genoese sailor named Brescia di Bordighera, who broke silence by bellowing, “Acqua alle funi”—“Water on the ropes!” Far from punishing the man for breaking silence, the pope, when he realized how the sailor had saved the project, rewarded him with blessings and annuities.

Unfortunately, the story seems not to be true. Neither Fontana, who kept a log of the lowering, moving, and raising of the obelisk, nor anyone else who was there mentions the sailor and his saving cry, and it would hardly have been possible for anyone to find or bring the necessary water to Piazza San Pietro in time.

When the obelisk was vertical, Sixtus V could not contain his joy, crying in triumph, “Cio che era pagano ora è l’emblema della cristianità”—“The thing that was pagan is now the emblem of Christianity.” And that was the point: to Sixtus, the moving or “translation” of this and other obelisks, achieved with such immense, concerted effort and determination, symbolized the work of the Counter-Reformation, the reunification of the Church, the defeat and pushing back of heresy.

The pope showered Fontana with honors.

The bronze ball was opened, and it contained no trace of Caesar; it was quite empty. So much for superstition.

The Vatican obelisk and the Acqua Felice were the most spectacular projects that Sixtus’ papacy contributed to the fabric of Rome, but not by any means the only ones. An even bigger obelisk had been lying in three pieces near the cathedral, San Giovanni in Laterano. Originally commissioned by the Pharaoh Thutmose III, it was removed to Alexandria by Constantine in 330 C.E., and then transported to Rome by Constantius II in 337 C.E. and set up in the Circus Maximus. It was 105 feet high—fully twenty feet taller than the enormous Vatican one—and weighed 510 tons. At Sixtus V’s behest, Fontana managed to raise it, and repaired it so well that today its seams can be seen only if you look closely. He took charge of a third obelisk, which had also served as a marker in the Circus Maximus, and moved it to the Piazza del Popolo, where it still stands. Compared with the Vatican and Lateran obelisks, this was almost child’s play—a mere seventy-eight-footer, 263 tons. Finally, he had the obelisk that lay in four pieces on the Via di Ripetta, on the west side of the Mausoleum of Augustus, excavated and set up anew behind the apse of Santa Maria Maggiore, in Piazza Esquilino. This was completed by the end of 1587.

This example was followed by several later popes, so that within a century a dozen obelisks were standing in Rome. The chief obelisk-pope, after Sixtus, was Pius VI Braschi, who had three erected during his twenty-four-year pontificate (1775–99). The first was put up on the Quirinal, between its huge white marble statues of the horse-taming Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux. It, too, came from the Mausoleum of Augustus, where it had been found in the sixteenth century, reburied (it was a massive obstacle to riverside traffic on the Via di Ripetta), exhumed again in three pieces, and, under the direction of the architect Giovanni Antinori, set up in 1786 in front of the Quirinal Palace. The second was installed at the top of the Spanish Steps, outside Santissima Trinità dei Monti, in 1789. The third, extracted from Augustus’ Mausoleum and known (for its ancient use as a gnomon on the enormous sundial) as the Obelisco Solare, went in five pieces to Piazza Montecitorio and was reassembled by Antinori; it still stands there today, in front of the Palazzo dei Tribunali. Augustus had brought it back from Heliopolis, in Egypt, where it had been made for the Pharaoh Psammetichus I.

So Sixtus V’s obelisk raising was by no means unique. How, after inheriting a bankrupt papacy, could this manic-impressive pontiff keep up the rhythm of building public works that he insisted on? By the sale of offices, by the establishment of new monti or public loans (a money-raising device first employed by Clement VII in the sixteenth century), and above all by ferocious taxation. All this created a glut in the papal fiscus, which, like some omnipotent Scrooge McDuck, he preferred to keep in bullion and specie in giant iron-ribbed coffers (still to be seen, but gaping empty) in the Castel Sant’Angelo. In these money boxes he hid three million scudi in gold and 1.6 million in silver, the biggest mass of cash in Italy, one of the biggest in Europe. In fact, his accumulation took so much cash out of circulation that it created severe economic problems for the Roman economy; money could not circulate as before, and so business stagnated. Either Sixtus was unaware of this, or he did not care about it. The public display, the rhetorical obelisk, was the thing.

In most respects his politics, particularly in the field of foreign policy, were a mess. He was given to grandiose fantasy. Wasn’t he God’s vicar on earth? He would conquer Egypt, he would bring the Holy Sepulchre to Italy, he would annihilate the Turks. He renewed the excommunication of Queen Elizabeth I of England, and agreed to give the Spaniards a large subsidy for the Armada which would conquer England—not, however, to be paid until the Spanish forces had actually landed, which of course they never did, so that their providential wreckage and dispersal by a storm in the Channel saved him a million crowns.

But the rethinking and rebuilding of Rome around those exclamation marks of the obelisks, the re-creation of the expanse of the city as a pattern of rhetorical circulation—that was something new, worthy of another Caesar: and all done in five years of an incredibly short, obsessively active papacy. A fair epitaph was pronounced on him by the nineteenth-century vernacular poet Giuseppe Belli (1834):

Fra tutti quelli c’hanno avuto er posto

De vicarj de Dio, non z’è mai visto

Un papa rugantino, un papa tosto,

Un papa matto, uguale a Papa Sisto.

      Among all those who have held the place

      Of God’s vicar, there had never been seen before

      Such a quarrelsome, tough, crazy

      Pope as Pope Sixtus.

Nor would there ever be again. A visitor from Mantua, Angelo Grillo, reported, “Such is the newness of the edifices, the streets, piazzas, fountains, aqueducts, obelisks, and other stupendous marvels which Sixtus V of glorious memory embellished this old city” that he could hardly recognize the place he had left ten years before. Later popes would build, but not with such a commitment to reorganize the basic pattern, the manifest sense of space, that was Rome. In a sense, the “building popes” of the Baroque era stood in the shadow of Sixtus’ obsession with the city as a pattern of movement and coordinated public declamation, not just a collection of separate monuments. So the visitor to Rome feels gratitude to this man, so inventive, so tyrannous, and so dreadful in different ways. Yet few could be surprised to learn that a statue of him, erected in his honor on the Capitol when he was alive, was torn down by the common people of Rome—the “rabble”—as soon as the breath was out of his body. They must have felt a right to smash it, since it had been put up with the tax money Sixtus extorted from them.

And what of his early seventeenth-century successors? How did they change the appearance and layout of Rome? Very considerably, though perhaps not as radically as terrible Sixtus.

The greatest scheme was the one accomplished during the pontificate of Alexander VII Chigi (reigned 1665–67)—the rebuilding of Piazza del Popolo, which lay just inside the Porta del Popolo, one of the chief entrances to Rome. “Popolo” does not carry some proto-socialist implication; in the Middle Ages, populus was a politically neutral term, meaning simply “parish.”

Alexander VII cleared the way for his urban desires by reviving the Congregazione delle Strade, the planning commission for Rome, which had fallen into disuse. He gave it the authority to demolish whatever it wished, whenever it saw fit. This was a powerful license. It enabled him, for instance, to get rid of the Arco di Portogallo, which, by constricting the Via del Corso, caused endless traffic jams.

What Alexander favored was generous squares approached by wide streets (no more medieval crimps and doglegs) marked out by distinctive buildings, fountains, and groups of statuary: these he called teatri, “theaters,” and certainly Piazza del Popolo showed what he meant. It was the first part of Rome that most arriving foreigners saw, and it deserved special treatment. Gian Lorenzo Bernini had designed the gate with the Chigi star carried proudly above it, and at the other end of the piazza now rose twin churches. Designed by the architect Carlo Rainaldi in 1661–62 and finished by Bernini and Carlo Fontana in 1679–81, these frame the entrances to the trident of streets (Via del Corso, Via del Babuino, Via di Ripetta) that plunge away into the core of Rome, and heighten the sense of anticipation that has already been raised by the Porta del Popolo. Everyone who sees them from the piazza, unless forewarned, admires them for their symmetry. In fact, they are not symmetrical, being built on different-shaped sites. Santa Maria in Montesanto (on the left, looking from the piazza) stands on a longer triangular slice of ground than its companion. It therefore has an oval dome, whereas Santa Maria dei Miracoli has a circular one. But nobody notices this (at first) from the outside, and the illusion of symmetry is perfect until you look closer.

Rome of the Counter-Reformation—the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—did not offer much work to great Italian-born painters, though it incubated some extraordinary expatriates. There were, however, several outstanding exceptions, some of whom (chiefly Bolognese painters in Rome) affirmed the classical tradition, though another seemed completely to subvert it. The first of the classicizers was Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), along with his brother Agostino Carracci (1557–1602). They were native Bolognese, and a third painter-member of the Carracci clan, their cousin Ludovico (1555–1619), chose to spend his life in Bologna and never painted in Rome. Both Agostino and Ludovico were fine painters, but the genius of the family was undoubtedly Annibale.

How powerfully inventive he was can best be gauged by a visit, if it can possibly be arranged, to the state rooms of the Palazzo Farnese. Generally, this used not to be possible, since the palace, originally built by that arch-nepotist Alessandro Farnese, the future Pope Paul III (reigned 1534–49), and without much doubt the most sumptuous palazzo in Italy, became the French Embassy, and access to it used to be so unbelievably restricted that even its courtyard, the combined work of Antonio Sangallo and Michelangelo, was open to the public for exactly one hour a week, between 11 a.m. and noon on Sundays. As for the state rooms, forget it. This meant that one of the supreme works of seventeenth-century Italian painting could only be known by the visitor to Rome, and imperfectly at that, from reproduction. Fortunately, these conditions have now relaxed somewhat, and guided tours are offered. They should not be missed.

Alessandro Farnese (this, one must remember, was before he became pope, though it is unlikely that his proclivities changed much after his election to the Fisherman’s Chair) decreed that its subject should be the Power of Love, and earthly rather than divine love at that. To call such a theme inappropriate for a future pontiff would be a mistake: he had been made cardinal by the Borgia Pope Alexander VI, whose mistress was Alessandro Farnese’s sister, Giulia Farnese. Moreover, he had four illegitimate children of his own, plus an unknown number of by-blows.

Thus Annibale Carracci set out, with tremendous zeal and brio, to cover the twenty-meter barrel vault with frescoes representing the Triumph of Love as symbolized by the cavortings of Bacchus and Ariadne—a surging, tumbling apparition of scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a veritable firmament of classical flesh, anchored in references to Raphael’s Loggia Farnesina and the ignudi of Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling, but as pagan as the art of painting could imaginably be. Annibale, a superb draftsman, was one of the greatest reinventors of the nude body that has ever existed, and the Farnese ceiling is virtually the last full-strength appearance of the classical impulse, at its outer boundaries of ambition, in Italian art. If one wants to see the other extreme of Annibale Carracci’s work, it, too, is in Rome, in the Galleria Colonna: the much earlier and more social-realist portrait of a worker tucking into his lunch of beans and onions, while clutching a bread roll and returning your gaze with a glare of feral possessiveness, mouth open, frayed straw hat on: The Bean Eater (c. 1583). It, too, is a masterpiece, though of a very different sort. Presumably it would be difficult, for today’s dinner guests in their fracs, glancing up from their plates of foie gras en gelée Lucullus at the tumultuous joys of gods on the embassy ceiling, to connect the two. It is sad to know that Farnese paid Annibale Carracci so stingily for his four years’ inspired labor on the Farnese ceiling that the artist slid into depression, took to the bottle, and died at the early age of forty-nine, reduced at last (one supposes) to eating beans.

The other major Bolognese artist working in Rome in the first part of the seventeenth century was Guido Reni (1575–1642). There can be few painters in history whose careers show such a spectacular rise to the heights of reputation, followed by such a plunge to the depths. For more than a century after his death, connoisseurs, tourists, and other artists considered him to have been angelically inspired, as famous, in his way, as Michelangelo, Leonardo, or (for that matter) Picasso. Percy Bysshe Shelley, who died in Italy, thought that if some cataclysm overwhelmed Rome, the loss of Raphael and Guido Reni would “be alone regretted.” Unquestioned geniuses, such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini, thought he painted “pictures of Paradise” and took his work for a model, and other artists were unstinting in their praise. As well they might have been: as his allegorical frescoes in the Palazzo Rospigliosi-Pallavicini in Rome, such as the Raphaelesque Aurora (1614), amply demonstrate, Reni at his infrequent best had an exquisite sense of style. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, his big altarpiece of the Trinity in Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini was considered one of the sights of Rome, a mandatory spectacle for the serious young artist. But by 1846, in Modern Painters, John Ruskin was attributing to Reni “a taint and a stain, and jarring discord … marked sensuality and impurity.” Fifty years later, Bernard Berenson declared, “We turn away from Guido Reni with disgust unspeakable”—not that it took so very much to disgust that severe and fussy aesthete. The nadir was reached fifty years after that, when you could easily get a ten-foot Reni (if you wanted it, which few did) for under three hundred dollars at auction.

What happened? A tectonic shift in taste. The Victorians did not mind sentimental high-mindedness, just as long as it was not hypocritical, and hypocrisy was the charge made, more and more often, against Guido after his death. He was proud, he said, of being able to “paint heads with their eyes uplifted a hundred different ways,” but this did not seem a virtue to later generations—not, at least, one that outweighed Reni’s manifest vices, the saccharine of his expressions, the self-repetition, the overproduction.

Moreover, his personal life was disastrous, a swamp of neuroses. Reni had the misfortune to be a gambling addict, always badly in debt, and turning out masses of hackwork to stay afloat. It has been surmised, no doubt rightly, that his gambling was inspired by masochism—losing was a form of self-flagellation for the sin of being alive. Since debts had to be paid, he kept an enormous studio—at one point, his biographer Malvasia noted with some amazement, Reni employed some two hundred assistants. At the same time, he was socially inept, agonizingly aware of his poor education (which hampered him as a history painter and made him hopelessly awkward with sophisticates and scholars), and an extreme closet-case. It was commonly assumed that he lived and died a virgin. He was not only a daily churchgoer but morbidly superstitious. Women terrified him—he suspected them all of being witches, a suspicion they could only allay if they showed themselves to be the Virgin Mary, a hard thing to prove—and he could not bear it if anyone except his own mother touched his laundry.

Yet, for all that, he was capable of extraordinary things. Perhaps his greatest painting was done in 1618–19, not long after leaving Rome for his native Bologna, and now in the Prado. This is Atalanta and Hippomenes. In the myth, Atalanta was a swift-running huntress who was determined to keep her virginity and refused to mate with any man who could not outrun her in a footrace. Nobody could, until she was challenged by Hippomenes, who had been provided with three golden apples by the interfering goddess Aphrodite. At intervals in their race, Hippomenes would drop an apple, which Atalanta could not resist; picking them up delayed her so much that she lost both the race and her virginity. Reni’s vision is of two superb nudes that fill the picture space to the exclusion of everything except empty earth, bare sky, and a plain horizon line. But there is little doubt about its subliminal meaning. Hippomenes is well ahead of Atalanta, who is greedily stooping for her second apple. His gesture toward her, however, is one of repulsion and banishment; he is fending off all possibility of contact with her, even though his victory in the race will, according to the myth, entitle him to claim her. He is racing for a prize that he does not desire. It would be hard to think of a more direct statement of homosexual repulsion (within the bounds of decorum) than this.

The word “radical” became so comically overused in the late twentieth century that it has been worn to near-complete vacuity. But there were times (now long gone) when it could (with due caution) be applied to things that happened in the arts. One such time was the early seventeenth century in Rome, and such an event was the appearance in Rome of a young painter named Michelangelo Merisi, known by the name of his birthplace, the northern Italian town of Caravaggio, where he had been born in 1571. There was no reason to suppose that anything of promise, let alone of transforming importance, would come out of a backwater like Caravaggio. It had produced no artists, had no intellectual life, and could boast no aristocratic collections for a young painter to admire or copy. Yet Michelangelo Merisi was a genius, and he possessed what all who knew him agreed was uno cervello stravagantissimo, a really weird turn of mind. What form did the weirdness take? In a word, realism. Caravaggio was not even faintly interested in the tricks and tropes of Mannerist painting—the elongated bodies, the balletic twisting and posturing, the arty metaphors and elaborate concetti. Roman painting in 1592, the year Caravaggio got there, had a great past but a mincing present. Much of it was as fatuous as the stuff that would come to be praised as “postmodernism” there (and in New York) four centuries later: pedantic, clever-clever, garrulous, and full of weightless quotation. He wanted to see reality head-on, and paint it that way, direct from life, with the maximum impact and sincerity, down to the last callused foot and dirty fingernail.

This ambition, which seems admirably natural today, earned him much finger-wagging: he was called an “anti-Michelangelo,” as though that meant “anti-Christ”; an evil genius, a concocter of overpeppered stews, and so forth. But Caravaggio’s work really did turn the history of European painting around. For a time, one had practically no choice but to be a Caravaggista. France, Holland, Spain, Germany, and of course Italy itself were all subject to his influence. When he was born, almost all painters in Europe worked under the classicizing idealism of Michelangelo. Forty years later, after his early death, their descendants with equal unanimity were painting Caravaggios, neither classical nor idealistic. Scratch almost any seventeenth-century artist and you will find traces of Caravaggio: Rembrandt, Seghers, and Honthorst in the Netherlands: Velázquez and Ribera in Spain; Georges de La Tour and Valentin de Boulogne in France; and a dozen more, omitting the scores of mere imitators.

There are two reasons why the hunger in Caravaggio’s eye, the desire for complete and unidealized human truth, had such a powerful effect in its time, the early seventeenth century.

The first was a general one: all over Europe, people were getting tired of the euphemism that tends to accompany abstraction. One sees this, for instance, in theater: how the powerful and wrenching scenes of the Jacobean “revenge” dramatists entranced their audiences:

      Tear up his lids,

      And make his eyes like comets shine through blood;

      When the bad bleeds, then is the tragedy good.

Or think of the fearful scenes in Lear—cold Goneril insisting that her father be blinded, not just put out of his misery by hanging—or in Titus Andronicus. Obviously, the language of horror and dramatic extremity was not invented by seventeenth-century artists and writers, but it moved to the forefront of their imaginations, whether for titillation or for religious revelation, and thus became one of the main ingredients of Baroque art. Then one must add the fact that, horror or not, seventeenth-century Europeans were getting a lot more interested in the pragmatic and the factual. Fewer angels with gauzy wings; not so much disembodied spirituality. Instead, direct appeals to the senses of smell, touch, hearing, and to the actual look and feel of a world which, after all, God had created. If a painter set before a viewer an image of high, transcendent artificiality, it might not affect his beliefs. But an image which came out of the real world and referred dramatically back to it, one which inhabited the same kind of space as the viewer, which was subject to the same kind of feelings—that was more convincing. Such was the opinion of the Council of Trent, which resolved to find ways of making the doctrines of Roman Catholicism more vivid and direct to an unsophisticated public. The object of art would be not to out-argue Luther, not to win theological debates, but to assure the faithful of the Truth by means of a superior intensity, a more palpable truth of events and emotions. And that, his patrons soon realized, was where Caravaggio came in.

He certainly did not please everyone, but nobody could say he went unrecognized. “In our times, during the pontificate of Pope Clement VIII,” begins a diatribe by the sixteenth-century painter and theorist Vicente Carducho (1570–1638), an Italian who had moved to Madrid,

Michelangelo Caravaggio rose in Rome. His new dish is cooked with such condiments, with so much flavor, appetite, and relish, that he has surpassed everybody.… Did anyone ever paint, and with as much success, as this monster of genius and talent, almost without rules, without theory, without learning and meditation, solely by the power of his genius and the model in front of him? I heard a zealot of our profession say that the appearance of this man meant a foreboding of ruin and an end to painting.…

Though he finished as a sublime religious dramatist, Caravaggio began as a painter of benign nature. Granted, the worm is in the bud sometimes—Caravaggio’s early still-lifes often show overripe, embrowned fruit—but the Caravaggian cave of darkness was not invented overnight. His early Roman works, such as the exquisite Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1594–95), are evenly and crisply lit, in a way recalling the High Renaissance painters Lorenzo Lotto and (more distantly) Giorgione. Mary, bent sleepily over her infant, is a beautiful redhead (presumably Caravaggio’s girlfriend at the time), and the elderly Saint Joseph holds up a score, from which the angel is playing soothing music on his fiddle as the mother and child doze.

Such works made him popular with the upper ranks of Roman collectors. They included Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who owned eight of his paintings, and the discerning and deep-pocketed Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, who had fifteen.

Because of their even lighting and elegant variety of color, we are apt to think of these early works as “untypical.” By his early thirties, though, Caravaggio’s essential character as an artist was formed. Its prime element was his mastery of gesture. Caravaggio saw things and set them down with uncanny accuracy: how people move, slump, sit up, point, and shrug; how they writhe in pain; how the dead sprawl. Hence the vividness of Abraham’s gesture in The Sacrifice of Isaac, as he pins his wailing son down on a rock like a man about to gut a fish. In The Supper at Emmaus, the characters seem ready to come off the canvas as Christ makes his sacramental gesture over the food (an ordinary Roman loaf); and the basket of fruit, perched on the very edge of the painted table, is ready to spill its contents at one’s feet. And the cramped little Cerasi Chapel of Santa Maria del Popolo, for which Caravaggio painted a Conversion of Saint Paul and a Crucifixion of Saint Peter (1600–1601), is so small that it is impossible to get a distance from the paintings: they are almost pressed against you, like bodies in a crowded room, and you cannot believe this effect is not deliberate. This is particularly true of the figures of Peter and his three executioners; they form a powerful X of flesh and dun-colored cloth, the faces of two executioners hidden from us completely, and the third turned away in shadow. Only Peter (who was crucified upside down, according to pious legend, because he did not think himself worthy to die in the same way as the Messiah) is fully visible—that strong old man’s body reflecting the light, those eyes staring in anguish at the iron nail driven through his hand and into the wood. These are not invented or imagined figures; they have a tremendous physical presence, and one is left in no doubt that the stories about Caravaggio’s way of working—that he found his models among the people on the streets, and painted them just as they were—are basically true. He clearly went to great lengths to arrange the directional lighting in his dark studio. But not much else is known about his way of working, because not a single attributable drawing by Caravaggio has survived. Perhaps he destroyed them all, or they were lost in one of his many moves between one improvised studio and the next, one city and another. But there is also the possibility, which one cannot reject out of hand, that he did not make any: that he drew directly on the canvas, without planning things first.

Naturally, this risky and exalted spontaneity—unlikely as it seems, and out of kilter with “normal” studio practice—seems to fit the picture of Caravaggio that his way of life offers, from what we know of it. He died of a fever in 1610, at the age of thirty-nine, in Porto Ercole, then a malarial Spanish enclave on the coast of the Maremma, north of Rome. The last four years of his life were one long flight from police and assassins; on the run, working under extreme pressure, he left altarpieces—some very great, and none mediocre—in Mediterranean seaports from Naples to Valletta to Palermo. He killed one man with a dagger in the groin during a game of tennis in Rome in 1606, and wounded several others, including a guard at Castel Sant’Angelo, and a waiter, whose face he cut open in a squabble about artichokes. He was sued for libel in Rome and mutilated in a tavern brawl in Naples. Saturnine, coarse, and queer, he thrashed about in the etiquette of early Seicento Rome like a shark in a net. But the vivid piety of his work after 1600 was fundamental to Baroque painting, and he will always be remembered as one of the essential figures of Roman art on the verge of the Counter-Reformation.

The others were largely foreigners, drawn into the irresistible orbit of the world’s art capital. While he was being fêted during an unproductive visit to Paris (see this page), the great Baroque sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini was shown the work of a number of French painters. They did not impress him. To the old maestro’s implacable eye, they seemed small fry—hacks and bores, capable of an uninteresting decorum at best. There was, however, one artist whose works had been collected by Paul Fréart (1609–94), the sieur de Chantelou and steward to Louis XIV. This was Nicolas Poussin. To him, Bernini responded strongly, looking long and carefully at his paintings and exclaiming, at last, “O il grande favoleggiatore!”—“Oh, the great storyteller!” (except that favola suggests a kind of moral weight that goes beyond mere anecdote, into serious allegory). Later, again to Chantelou, Bernini would point to his own head and say admiringly that Poussin was an artist “who works from up here.”³

It was true; and one reason for its truth was Rome. Poussin was the father and first great practitioner of French classicism. He lived most of his working life in Rome, and left it only with the greatest reluctance. In cultural terms, everything north of Rome was merely a colony—especially France, the second-rate power he came from. “We are indeed the laughingstock of everybody, and none will take pity on us,” Poussin morosely wrote of the French, in a letter from Rome in 1649. “We are compared to the Neapolitans and shall be treated as they were.”

For him, Rome and the countryside around it were, above all, the terrain of thought and of memory. The thought was not abstract; it was grounded in observation. The memory combined deep feeling about the observed, natural world with a kind of poetic erudition which was rare enough in the seventeenth century and is even less common in the culture today. William Hazlitt put his finger on it when he compared Poussin to John Milton. Poussin, he wrote, “was among painters (more than anyone else) what Milton was among poets. There is in both something of the same pedantry, the same stiffness, the same elevation, the same grandeur, the same richness of borrowed material, the same unity of character.” Looking at certain Poussins, where a sturdy figure in a plain-colored garment is walking through a leafy landscape, you cannot help remembering the last words of “Lycidas,” as the shepherd takes the rural path, having sung his song, “With eager thought warbling his Doric lay”: “At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:/Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.” Everything about Poussin’s landscapes is ordered and coherent, but nothing in them is abstract; they are the “Fair champain” of Paradise Regained,

      Fertil of corn the glebe, of oyl and wine,

      With herds the pastures throng’d, with flocks the hills,

      Huge Cities and high tower’d, that well might seem

      The seats of mightiest Monarchs, and so large

      The Prospect was, that here and there was room

      For barren desert.…

What Poussin offers above all is the earthiness of the world he creates, and of the men, women, and children who work, embrace, play, and doze in it. This is not an abstract world of lifeless marble. You can imagine yourself desiring its inhabitants as flesh, not as idealized stone: the long-thighed shepherdess who leans forward with her shepherd companions (who clearly cannot read, either) to peer at the inscription Et in Arcadia ego on a forgotten sarcophagus in the woods, with a skull on top of it to remind you that the ego in Arcadia, the self, is the inexorable presence of death; or the ravishingly beautiful figure of the goddess Diana to whom the infatuated Endymion, kneeling, declares his love. “This young man has the inner fire of the devil,” wrote one of Poussin’s Roman acquaintances, and in fact it was his vitality, breathing his life into his reimagining of the Antique, that distinguished his work from all other archaizing painting that the seventeenth century produced in Rome. Even the play of children, watched by nymphs while charging at one another on goat-back, has a certain chivalric intensity, though it is at the same time a parody of knightliness. This landscape lives and breathes, and looks as though nothing trivial can happen in it. His goddesses and nymphs have not dropped from Olympus; they grow up out of the earth. They carry their archaism like a bloom, so that there is more sexual tension between the white goddess and the kneeling shepherd in Diana and Endymion (1628), than in a hundred Renoirs. This tension, for him, is part of classicism. “The beautiful girls you will have seen at Nîmes,” he wrote to a friend in 1642, “will not, I am certain, delight your spirits less than the sight of the beautiful columns of the Maison Carrée, since the latter are only ancient copies of the former.” It is an enchanting conceit, yet more than a conceit: the idea that the ancient orders of architecture were “copies” of the ideal proportions of the beautiful human body was deeply embedded in Poussin’s thinking, as it was in the ideas of many connoisseurs. This humanized ancient architecture and emphasized its relation to the present. And it emphasizes one’s feeling that the women drawing water from a well in a Poussin have a relationship to the architecture behind them which is not simply formal, but, in some historical way, spiritual.

In Landscape with Saint Matthew (c. 1640), we see the evangelist surrounded by ruins—fallen column, broken entablature—writing down the words of a visiting angelic being on a sheet of paper: its subject is the same as the Caravaggio in San Luigi dei Francesi, the dictation to Saint Matthew of his Gospel. But in its companion piece, Saint John writing the Apocalypse on the island of Patmos, Poussin produced what could almost amount to a self-portrait, sitting among the mighty ruins of antiquity, sketching their geometrical fragments (prism, cylinder, with an obelisk and an intact-looking temple in the background), quite like himself encountering, in real life, the Roman ruins of the Campagna. Wherever else he may be, he is not where he was born. He is where fate and the necessity of his own art have obliged him to go. He was the model expatriate. This was the story of Poussin’s life.

He was born near Les Andelys, a provincial market town on the Seine in Normandy, in the vicinity of Rouen. Not much is known about his childhood, except that it clearly included some instruction in the classics, without which he could never have developed his enthusiasm for ancient Rome and its culture. Around 1612, he left home for Paris, and from there he is known to have made one unsuccessful attempt to reach Rome, defeated by illness and poverty (he got as far as Florence, but had to turn back). But then, in Paris, he had the good luck to meet the Italian poet Giambattista Marino (1569–1625), who was impressed by some drawings young Poussin had made for him on themes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and invited the budding artist to come to Rome with him. No urging was needed. In 1624, Nicolas Poussin arrived in Rome and began to make acquaintances whose regard for his work would stand him in excellent stead. One was Francesco Barberini, nephew of Urban VIII. The other was Cassiano del Pozzo, the Barberinis’ secretary, a man of singular connoisseurship and some scientific knowledge.⁴ Poussin’s main job in Rome, before his pictures started selling, was to draw records of classical sculpture for del Pozzo. This gave him excellent access to private collections, and the time to develop a repertoire of figures that would fill his work in years to come. The two men arranged for Poussin his first big commission, though a very uncharacteristic one—an altarpiece for Saint Peter’s done in 1628, the Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus, an early saint who suffered disembowelment, his guts wound out on a windlass. In the painting, which is mercifully short of blood, Erasmus’ intestines look like a long string of thin luganiga sausage. This would be one of Poussin’s very few images of a human being in extreme pain. Its only competitor is the anguished face of a woman in The Massacre of the Innocents, which Francis Bacon thought was the most awful depiction of grief in all Western painting. Poussin was certainly able to paint extremes of human feeling, but he wisely kept them under control and used them only where they counted most.

Poussin devoted his early years in Rome to studying ancient architecture, drawing the live model (in the studios first of Domenichino and then of Andrea Sacchi), and making measured drawings of Roman statues and reliefs. But his work as a history painter came into full focus in the 1630s with two magnificent compositions, each depicting a heroic or tragic moment from the Roman past. The first was The Destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, commemorating the Emperor Titus’ sack of the Holy of Holies. (There goes the seven-branched candlestick with the soldiers, presently to be carved on the Arch of Titus in Rome.) The second was The Death of Germanicus.

Germanicus Julius Caesar, conqueror of Germany, was sent to command Rome’s Eastern Empire and died in Antioch in 19 C.E., poisoned on the orders of his adoptive father, the Emperor Tiberius—so it was believed—by a jealous Roman governor. He soon became an archetype of the Betrayed Hero.

In Poussin’s picture, the hero lies ashen and dying beneath the frame of a blue curtain, which suggests both a military tent and a temple pediment. On the right are his wife, women servants, and little sons; on the left, his soldiers and officers. The common soldier on the far left weeps inarticulately, his grandly modeled back turned toward us. Next to him, a centurion in a billowing red cloak starts forward: grief galvanized into action in the present. Then a gold-armored pillar of a general in a blue cloak (adapted from an antique bas-relief) projects grief forward into the future by swearing an oath of revenge. We do not see the man’s face or its expression, which is Poussin’s way to suggest that this death is not a private issue but one of history itself. The target of this socially ascending wave of resolution is not only Germanicus’ exhausted head on the pillow but his little son, whose blue cloak matches the general’s; the women suffer and can do nothing, but the boy learns, remembers, and will act.

In 1629, Poussin moved in with the family of a French cook in Rome, Jacques Dughet, who cared for him during an infection of syphilis which would last the rest of his life. In the end, Poussin was so afflicted by the tremors brought on by the advanced stage of this disease that he could no longer paint with any confidence; in 1658, aged sixty-four, he apologized in a letter to Chantelou for not writing a separate letter to his wife “because my trembling hand makes it difficult for me. I ask her pardon.” But there remained to him another twenty years of uninterrupted creativity. Poussin was lucky in being one of those men who did not care much about the social world. Selected friendships, such as his relationship with Chantelou in Paris, mattered greatly to him, but not the world of courts, whether royal, noble, or papal. A story went the rounds of how his friend and patron the Cardinal Camillo Massimi visited him in his modest house in Via del Babuino and wondered how Poussin managed without servants. “And I pity Your Eminence,” retorted the painter, “because you have so many.” “He avoided social gatherings as much as he could,” recalled one of his friends, the connoisseur André Félibien, “so that he could retire alone to the vineyards and most remote places in Rome.… It was during these retreats and solitary walks that he made light sketches of things he came across.”

Poussin was quite often accompanied on these walks by another French expatriate in Rome, Claude Lorrain (1604–82). The two men shared a passion for ideal and classical landscape, but were otherwise unlike each other; Poussin, compared with Claude, was a positively scholarly painter, well acquainted with classical poetry and philosophy, whereas Claude’s knowledge of ancient Roman and Greek culture was relatively thin. He was less educated than Poussin partly because he came from a lower social level—his parents were of peasant stock, smallholders from the village of Champagny in Lorraine. He was not interested in allegory or the illustration of myth: Poussin was the favoleggiatore, not Claude. And this was just as well, since he did not have a jot of Poussin’s aptitude for painting the human body, and hence not much gift for narrative.

Claude’s observation of trees, earth, water, and especially of light was exquisite, rapturous; the figures in his landscapes (and convention demanded that they should be there) were conventional at their infrequent best and, at their more usual worst, looked like spindles or slugs—a fault shared, not incidentally, by Claude’s great follower, J. M. W. Turner. No matter: Claude’s mastery of, and inspiration within, the conventions of ideal pastoral landscape (some of which he invented) were so great that he became a model for several generations of painters, and the visitor to Rome is still likely to catch brief glimpses of Italy through Claudeian eyes.

Claude came to Rome as a teenager, possibly as early as 1617. He seems to have had no artistic training in his native France, though it was often said that he had been a pastry cook—indeed, he is sometimes credited with having learned the technique of puff pastry, pâte feuilletée, in Rome, and introducing it to France; this is possible, but undocumented. His first known training with a painter was in the studio of a German artist in Naples, Goffredo Wals. He did not stay there long, and soon was back in Rome as a studio assistant to the Italian landscapist Agostino Tassi. In 1625, he returned briefly to France, to work for a minor court painter named Claude Deruet. But by 1627, or even a little earlier, Claude was back in Rome. He would remain there for the rest of his life, never revisiting France or traveling elsewhere in Europe, always at the same address, in Via Margutta off Piazza di Spagna, the haunt of foreign artists in Rome. Everything about his life was low-key and modest. He scrimped and saved. He never married; and of his love life, if he had one, nothing is known. Even though he was modest, hardworking, and probably rather a bore when he was away from the easel, Claude’s career was steadily successful; he sold nearly everything he painted, and at his death there were only four unsold paintings left in his studio. He was not interested in social climbing in the “great world”; the world could find its way to him, and it did, reliably and regularly. In fact, by the mid-1630s he was so popular that he was plagued by fakers, Roman artists who saw in the manufacture of “Claudes” a useful supplement to their modest (or nonexistent) incomes. The trademarks of a Claude were, at a certain level, easy to mimic: the parallel planes of the landscape, the luminous ultramarine skies (no cheap pigments for the maestro, only the very best), the feathery repoussoir trees framing a distant view of water or a Roman ruin—the Colosseum and the cylindrical tomb of Caecilia Metella, displaced, were particular favorites with collectors. To safeguard his own rights in his own work, Claude came up with the practice of making records of his paintings—drawings of them in their finished state, which he annotated and bound in an album called the Liber veritatis, or Book of Truth. Whatever was not in the book of truth was, by definition, false. In fact, Claude did not copy all his work in this way, and that led to some acrimonious disputes about the authenticity of perfectly genuine paintings—but the Liber veritatis was the first effort an artist ever made to keep a catalogue of his own work.

Claude’s career exemplified the fact that no foreign artist could really consider himself a finished man unless he had studied and worked in Rome, though of course the lengths of apprenticeship to the great city varied. So many flocked there, from practically every country in Europe, that it would be pointless to try to list them all. The chief ones will have to do. From Spain, they were Jusepe de Ribera (1588–1652) and Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599–1660).

Ribera, a brilliantly gifted realist painter of humble origins (he was the second son of a Valencian cobbler), was inspired by Caravaggio, whom he may have met in Naples. His most Caravaggian traits were his precise draftsmanship, unideal street-life models, and intense lighting, with faces and limbs plucked from surrounding darkness by brilliant shafts of light, in the manner of Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew in San Luigi dei Francesi. Though he passed almost all his working life as an expatriate in Naples, where he was affectionately known as lo spagnoletto (the little Spanish guy), Ribera spent several early years in Rome, 1611–15, living with a bohemian group of Spanish and Dutch expats around the Via Margutta.

His main surviving early work there was an extraordinary series symbolizing The Five Senses. Sight, for instance, is a portrait of an introverted-looking thinker, no doubt one of Ribera’s friends, holding a Galilean telescope, with a pair of spectacles and a mirror on the table before him. Earlier and more genteel painters might have symbolized Smell with flowers and flasks of perfume, in the hands of a nymph; Ribera painted a ragged and none-too-clean old man, who certainly stank, holding a split onion near his face. His opposite, however, is Touch, which one identifies at once with the cultural life of Rome—a well-kempt and decently barbered dealer in a brown jacket, his eyes closed in thought, running his discerning fingers over an antique head.

There is a certain family resemblance, caused by a common Caravaggian realism, between early Ribera and early Velázquez. That, and Spanish blood, was all the two men had in common, and it is doubtful that they met more than briefly in Italy, if at all. Ribera by nature was a democrat and a populist, whereas Velázquez was a gifted courtier and a crushing snob. (In person, that is. Both painted low-life figures, common workers, bravos, and tavern inhabitants, since the rich enjoyed seeing pictures of the poor on their walls in the seventeenth century, just as they would in the twentieth century with Blue Period Picassos.)

Velázquez was undoubtedly one of the greatest geniuses who ever held a brush, but he might have given up painting altogether for the sake of the right title. He was stiff, reserved, extremely conscious of lineage and protocol, religiously observant to a fault (you needed to be, for the right cardinals to give you the right commissions), and obsessed with winning membership in the noble Order of Santiago—a distinction he finally obtained, after years of lobbying, in 1658, only two years before his death, having tried throughout his life, without success, to prove that his family was of noble origin. In his self-portrait at the easel in his climactic masterpiece, Las meninas, he is wearing the red cross of Santiago on his tunic. Membership in this exalted order entailed proving his limpieza de sangre, purity of blood—no Arabs or Jews allowed. He cannot have been an easy man to know. His contemporaries admired and respected more than liked him. But of his qualities there was little doubt: one of Italy’s leading artists, Luca Giordano, called his work “the theology of painting,” the highest imaginable praise.

Velázquez was born in Seville and spent most of his career in Madrid, in the service of King Philip IV. He was apprenticed to a mainly religious painter, Francisco Pacheco (1564–1644), for six years. As an artist, Pacheco was a distinctly minor figure, but he knew a great deal about art theory and Christian iconography, which he imparted to the young Velázquez. As for his painting, its qualities were perhaps best summed up in a boutade:

Who painted you thus, O Lord,

      So dry and so insipid?

      Some may say it was True Love—

      But I can tell you Pacheco did it.

Pacheco had a wide acquaintance as a portraitist among the upper crust of Seville, and this gave his student his first involvement with society. His apprenticeship ended in 1617, and Velázquez, now licensed to work as an independent painter, celebrated by marrying Pacheco’s daughter Juana and setting up his own studio. What earned him the most kudos in these early years, however, was less his portraits than his bodegones, or genre paintings—the word bodegón originally meaning a rough eating house offering the simplest of meals and wine. Bodegones were not considered a very serious form, but it was young Velázquez, above all, who made them so, by turning them into a vehicle for the most detailed and exquisitely recorded perceptions of substance and human character. There is no more beautifully painted glass of water in European art than the one the old man is passing to the boy in The Waterseller of Seville (c. 1617–19), nor has a terra-cotta water urn ever been painted with more enraptured and sober attention. It may be that these early Velázquezes bear a debt to the early works of Jusepe de Ribera, but the debt is more like a compliment. When a new Habsburg king, Philip IV, ascended the throne of Spain in 1621, it was almost inevitable that young Velázquez, who had already found favor with his grand adviser Gaspar de Guzmán, the count (later duke) of Olivares, should have been on track to become the Pintor del Rey, to which office he was raised in 1623.

To be the King’s Painter in seventeenth-century Madrid was not only a singular honor, but an extraordinary advantage. It gave Velázquez unlimited access to one of the greatest collections of painting in Europe, formed by the dispersal of the royal collection of the English King Charles I after he was beheaded by Oliver Cromwell—this collection was a veritable storehouse of Titian, Rubens, and other masters. Since Spain had no public collections and would not until the formation of the Prado in 1819, and since common painters had no access to the palace or the Escorial, this gave Velázquez the edge over practically every other painter in his country, and he made the fullest use of it—quite apart from the social advantages that went with being Pintor del Rey. Then, when Peter Paul Rubens arrived at the Madrid court from the Netherlands and Rome in 1628, an even wider world opened before the enraptured eyes of the thirty-year-old Spaniard. Rubens (who seems to have painted a number of his Madrid commissions in Velázquez’s studio) urged him to go to Rome, the center of the world, and of course Velázquez needed little urging. Letters of release and introduction were arranged, and in 1629 Velázquez set off for Italy: Venice, Ferrara, Bologna. But the key destination was Rome, where Velázquez stayed for a year with the Spanish ambassador, the count of Monterrey. On this first visit, he came as a young painter, albeit a brilliant one. On his second visit to Rome, twenty years later (1649–51), he arrived as an established and, as it were, absolute master.

What did Velázquez get from Rome that Spain could not have given him? A sense of pictorial possibility and sheer skill: no painting in Spain could rival in confidence, range, and pictorial imagination what Italian art from the Renaissance on—Michelangelo, Raphael, Veronese, Titian, Caravaggio, the Carraccis—magnificently embodied. Then there was the Antique as well, the ancient statues which Velázquez was not there to copy, but which fortified his sense of possible continuity with the long past. There were no Roman paintings that look like Velázquez’s Surrender of Breda (The Lances) (1635), and yet he could hardly have managed that theater of expression, that complex composition in deep space, and that inspired frieze of twenty-four vertical lances (their rhythmic beat broken by just three oblique ones) without knowing and internalizing the achievements of Roman art. For an ambitious artist with the skill and determination to work out its lessons, seventeenth-century Rome was indisputably the school of the world. It gave great liberties and opportunities to artists. For instance, in Velázquez’s case, it encouraged a figure painter to paint naked women. This practice, if not unknown in Spain, was very rare, because of the ignorant moral hostility of the clergy; as for the clientele, they could not display nudes on their walls, for fear of obloquy. But there was no risk attached to painting the female nude in Italy, and somewhere among the horde of potential models who hung out for hire around Piazza di Spagna, Velázquez found the girl whose slender, lovely body was destined to become one of the most celebrated in art history, and the first recorded nude by a Spanish painter: the pensive mirror-gazing subject of The Toilet of Venus, or The Rokeby Venus (c. 1651). Rome also presented Velázquez with the opportunity to create one of the most mesmerizing and inquisitorial images of human power ever put on canvas. This, of course, is the 1650–51 portrait of Pope Innocent X Pamphili, which still hangs in its cubicle in Palazzo Doria, above Piazza Navona. Such is the nature of late-modernist fame that, by now, probably most people who are aware of this painting know about it through the “screaming pope” versions of it done by Francis Bacon. These are among Bacon’s best work, but they do not come near the original (which is of course not screaming: of all men, the one least likely to scream, even privately, is this Pamphili). Indeed, one is sometimes tempted to say that very few portraits, if any at all, approach Velázquez’s pope—even Innocent X himself, on seeing it finished, is said to have called it “too truthful,” and when one confronts its steely, interrogatory glare, it is all too easy to know what he meant.

The fourth great seventeenth-century expatriate to work in Rome was not a Spaniard but a Fleming, originally from Antwerp: Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640). In terms of versatility, influence, and sheer historical and mythical power, there has never been another artist to touch Rubens, and it is likely that there never will be. In his energy and his ability to fulfill great public roles, he puts every twentieth-century painter in the shade. We are apt to regard Picasso’s Guernica as a very important piece of public art, and so it is—for its time. But it is alone in Picasso’s work, whereas Rubens, the greatest Northern painter associated with the Counter-Reformation, could and did turn out such utterances, usually of a religious sort although sometimes descriptive of politics, on the grandest scale and with an eloquence and formal beauty that leave Picasso far behind him. This kind of painting, with such ambitions for the languages of paint, is simply no longer possible; its use has been subverted by the decay of religion, the distrust of politics and politicians, and the evaporation of belief in authority that characterize our own age. There can never be another Rubens, because the intellectual and ethical backgrounds to his work, not to mention the educational systems and reverence for historical prototypes that supported and infused it, no longer exist. Nor can they be willed into being. The enormous fish has no water to swim in, and the estuary is dry.

There is no doubt that Rubens got his sense of the public role of an artist from a long visit to Italy and, in particular, to Rome. He made his first visit there at the end of 1601, when he was serving at the court of Vincenzo Gonzaga, duke of Mantua. In that northern city he had already been able to study the late King Charles I’s collections of Renaissance art. Presently the collection was relocated to Spain, where Velázquez got to study it, and where Rubens would later be able to renew his acquaintance with its Titians, Tintorettos, Veroneses, and other High Renaissance masterpieces now relocated to the royal collection in Madrid. On his first trip to Rome, and during a later sojourn there in 1606–8, Rubens was able to study the chief works of the Grand Manner, all of which were there: Michelangelo’s Sistine frescoes, Raphael’s Vatican stanze. Their impact on him was immeasurable, and it was increased by the fact that the ancient Roman marbles, which had served these earlier artists as authoritative sources, were also there for Rubens to study and copy, side by side: the Belvedere Torso, the Laocoön, and lesser but still instructive works such as the African Fisherman (then thought to be a carved marble figure of the dying Seneca). Thanks to the wholly privileged position of the Church, the greatest collections of such antiquities were in the hands of wealthy clerics: the huge room in Palazzo Farnese, for instance, whose ceiling Annibale Carracci had frescoed, was crammed with ancient statues, and Cardinal Alessandro Farnese had already opened this collection of antiquities to scholars and selected artists (not yet a general public) in 1589. In an age before public museums, this situation was tailor-made for Rubens, who used all his powers of charm, talent, and ingratiation to get access to such aesthetic treasures and draw them, accurately, fast, and from every angle. He made hundreds of such drawings, which served him as memory aids—these being the days before photographic reproduction—and furnished the basis of many of his own figures and compositions to come. Rubens would never cease to be a student of the art of the past, and drawing was his medium of study. To copy a work was to absorb it; to internalize it; to assimilate its DNA. This process is almost lost to us today, in an age of mass mechanical reproduction.

On this early visit, Rubens did not leave many works in Rome. He was not yet well enough known to get big commissions there, although he did an altarpiece for the Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, commemorating the Empress Helena’s acquisition in Jerusalem of the relics of the True Cross and the Holy Staircase contained in the church itself. But the experience of Rome, and in particular the sense of an immense sacred and aesthetic history transmitted through the ancient fabric of the city to the present day, would never leave him: it remained one of the basic messages of his art, the old vigorously underpinning the new. There was no artist who gave one a stronger sense of continuity in art than Rubens in Rome.

¹ The Cumaean Sibyl was the most famous of that sisterhood. Her prophecies and oracles, filling nine volumes, were offered to the last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, at a high price. He refused; the Sibyl burned three of the books and offered the remaining six to Tarquin at the same price. He refused again; she burned three more of them and offered the remaining three to Tarquin, who finally bought them. These Libri Sibyllini, filled with prophecies and advice on how to avert divine anger, were entrusted to the care of patricians. The Sibyls came to be thought of as equal to the Old Testament prophets and figure as such in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.

² It is thought that there had once been more than forty; the fate of the rest remains unknown.

³ Paul Fréart was chiefly remarkable for accompanying Bernini on his visit to France, and reporting copiously on the sculptor’s reactions to French art and his views on sculpture.

⁴ As a result of Cassiano’s instruction, Poussin became the illustrator of a later edition of Leo-nardo’s work on optics.

8

High Baroque (Bernini, Borromini, Etc.)

The Catholic Church, faced with the stresses of the seventeenth century, responded with brilliant skill and energy. It marshaled its forces in defense of its own dogmas and powers, and the visual arts were one of the theaters in which such marshaling took place. This was part of the ideological and imaginative thrust known as the Counter-Reformation. Never, not even in the Middle Ages, had so much been expected of architects, sculptors, and painters in defense of Catholic belief. If one had to choose a single sculptor-architect who completely embodied, in his person and his work, the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, there could only be one candidate. He was Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680). Across a long and prodigiously fecund working life, Bernini epitomized what it could mean to be a Catholic artist in the fullest sense. “Inspired” is a word that should be used with caution, but there is no more fitting adjective for Bernini. Not only was there no angle between his beliefs and those of the royal personages and Catholic hierarchy for whom he worked; he drew an extreme stimulus from them, taking an unfeigned joy in satisfying their doctrinal requirements. He was the marble megaphone of papal orthodoxy in the seventeenth century. If you cut stone and worked in the seventeenth century in Italy (and elsewhere in Europe, too), you worked in the shadow of this Roman prodigy. It was really as simple (but as complex) as that, and there have been few artists in European history who defined their age and their spiritual environment as completely as Bernini did. If we look back on him from a century whose defining cultural characteristic is doubt, it seems hardly credible that a man of such skill and certezza could have existed. But he did, and he found the right patrons to match his genius.

The presence of Baroque art is so massive now, so powerful in our reading of European culture, that it might always have been there. But it was not. “Baroque” was a term of abuse, and the work it denoted was considered vulgar, hateful, and (despite its technical skill) inept, right through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Colen Campbell (1676–1729), the Scots protégé of Lord Burlington, whose Vitruvius Britannicus was such a strong influence on British architectural taste, saw the period as a descent from the heights of Palladian genius into “capricious ornaments, which must at last end in the Gothick”:

I appeal to the Productions of the last Century: How affected and licentious are the works of Bernini and Fontana? How wildly extravagant are the designs of Borromini, who has endeavoured to debauch Mankind with his odd and chimerical Beauties, where the parts are without Proportion, Solids without their true Bearing, heaps of Materials without Strength, excessive Ornaments without Grace, and the Whole without Symmetry?

Nor did the succeeding two centuries bring much change of heart or opinion. For indignant Ruskin, to whom Gothic was the sublime mode for religious architecture, Baroque was merely “the flourishes of vile paganism.” Charles Dickens, visiting Rome in Pictures from Italy, found Bernini’s Baroque monuments “intolerable abortions,” “the most detestable class of productions in the whole wide world.” The 1911 edition of that style bible of English architectural history, Banister Fletcher’s History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, gave the whole seventeenth century thirty lines of text: writers on the Baroque were apt to content themselves with the mere exercise of stamping on its grave. It represented, wrote Fletcher,

an anarchical reaction [to Palladio]. Sinuous frontages and a strained originality in detail are characteristic.… Ornamentation is carried out to an extraordinary degree without regard to fitness or suitability, and consists of exaggerated and badly designed detail.… Ma-derno, Bernini and Borromini are among the more famous who practiced this debased form of art.

Such a picture of Baroque achievement, particularly in Rome, is unrecognizable today. Tastes change, as a matter of course; but in the case of seventeenth-century building and the reactions to it, we might be looking at a different world—and in a real sense, we are. Where the Ruskins and Campbells saw disordered heaps of ostentation, a gratification of the lust for pomp without reference to true religious feeling, we are more likely to see the last great universal language of spirituality. The reasons for this begin and end with Bernini (1598–1680).

Bernini had his training in the studio of his sculptor-father, Pietro Bernini, a Florentine Mannerist artist of some achievement who worked in Naples and settled in Rome, the art world’s center, around 1606 to work for Pope Paul V. His earliest known independent works belong to childhood: a small group of statues of the goat Amalthea suckling the infant Jupiter, done with the complex realism he must have learned from the Hellenistic marble carvings he saw in Rome, and from his father’s imitation of them—all those tangles of matted goat hair, done with such relish!—dates to about 1609, when he was eleven. He was hardly more than a boy when his work first came to the attention of Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, who saw his carving of the Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, being grilled to death over hot coals and rising marble flames but looking fairly composed about it. It is said (se non è vero, etc.) that the twenty-year-old sculptor arranged a mirror and then put his leg into a fire, the better to see the anguish on his own face—although the expression of this Lawrence does not look unduly agonized. Or was it just that Bernini was unusually stoic? Probably not.

It was through Barberini that one of Rome’s foremost art collectors became aware of young Bernini’s work. This was Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1576–1633), nephew of Pope Paul V, connoisseur of antiquities, bon vivant, and man of enormous wealth. He was the pope’s secretary, and, to all intents, he ran the Vatican government. He held a host of official positions, most of which returned him serious money; by 1612, his annual income was said to be a huge 140,000 scudi.

Pederasty in seventeenth-century Rome was a crime which, at least in theory, carried the death penalty. There is no doubt about Scipione Borghese’s homosexual proclivities, but he was protected—indeed, armor-plated—by birth and wealth. He surrounded himself with fanciulli or pretty boys, and there is little doubt that the homosexuality of the great realist Caravaggio, whom Borghese was one of the first to encourage, was a prime reason why early Caravaggios like the Sick Bacchus, the Boy Bitten by a Lizard, and other works entered Borghese’s collection. These pouting pieces of rough trade, with their lumberous dark eyes and hair like black ice cream, were clearly much to the cardinal’s taste.

His collection of ancient sculpture included some of the most admired pieces in Europe, such as the Borghese Gladiator (c. 100 B.C.E.), which Bernini strove to emulate. It was clear to Borghese that Bernini, hardly out of his teens, was a maestro in the making. And Borghese was not the kind of collector who would wait for, or be denied, anything that took his imperious fancy (one of his more odious actions was to confiscate more than a hundred pictures from the Cavaliere d’Arpino, a feeble Mannerist painter whose claim to distinction was to have taught Caravaggio for a while, for not paying his taxes). Borghese started amassing Berninis, and secured some of his best early works: among them, a life-sized figure group of Aeneas and his little son, Ascanius, fleeing the burning city of Troy, carrying his aged father, Anchises, who himself carries the penates (household gods) of their lost home. This is a transcription in stone of Virgil’s lines from the Aeneid:

      “Then come, dear father. Arms around my neck:

      I’ll take you on my shoulders, no great weight.

      Whatever happens, both will face one danger,

      Find one safety.…

      Father, carry our hearth-gods, our Penates.

      It would be wrong for me to handle them–

      Just come from such hard fighting, bloody work–

      Until I wash myself in running water.”

This sculpture, the spiraling movement of its bodies so strongly indebted to the great Mannerist sculptor Giambologna, was designed for Scipione Borghese’s new villa at the Porta Pinciana in Rome, where it still stands. So was the extraordinary Pluto and Persephone (1621–22), in which the imposingly muscular figure of the king of Hades is seen carrying off the helpless daughter of Zeus and Demeter to be his prisoner and bride in the Underworld: a girl snatched, in Milton’s lines, from

      …that fair field

      Of Enna,

¹

where Proserpin gathering flours

      Herself a fairer Floure by gloomie Dis

      Was gather’d, which cost Ceres all that pain

      To seek her through the World.…

Persephone shrieks in vain; she struggles and wriggles helplessly, enticingly; we even see the marble tear on her cheek, and the yielding flesh of her thigh as Pluto’s fingers sink implacably into it. It is an extremely sexy sculpture, and should be, since its subject is a rape; Scipione Borghese possessed an unsurpassed collection of antique Roman erotica, with which the young sculptor must have been happily familiar. The extraordinary character of this sculpture lies in a mastery over carving which transcends the puritanical mantra of modernism about “truth to material,” as though there were only some things that could legitimately be done with wood or stone, and to go beyond them were a sin. Bernini leaves you in no doubt that stone can represent anything if the shaping hand is skilled enough. Is it wrong for it to look as though it were modeled rather than carved? Assuredly not, the marvelous surfaces and textures of Pluto’s and Persephone’s bodies tell us. Is the effect a lie? Of course, but art itself is a lie—a lie told in the service of truth.

The showpiece of Bernini’s early virtuosity is, however, the Apollo and Daphne, commissioned by Scipione Borghese after he gave the Pluto and Persephone to the pope’s nephew to curry favor with the pontiff. It is a sculptural illustration of one of the more beautiful and poignant moments in classical poetry, which occurs in book one of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Apollo has encountered the nymph Daphne, daughter of the river-god Peneus. The love-god Cupid, witnessing this, fires two arrows from his bow; one sharp and tipped with gold, which pierces Apollo’s vitals, and the other blunt and lead-tipped at Daphne, who at once becomes unreachable by love. Apollo is now compelled always to pursue Daphne, who is likewise doomed always to flee. “But the marriage torches/Were something hateful, criminal, to Daphne,” who entreats her father to “Let me be a virgin always.…” Apollo, of course, has other ideas. She runs,

       But Apollo,

      Too young a god to waste his time in coaxing,

      Came following fast. When a hound starts a rabbit

      In an open field, one runs for game, one safety,

      He has her, or thinks he has, and she is doubtful

      Whether she’s caught or not, so close the margin,

      So ran the god and girl, one swift in hope,

      The other in terror, but he ran more swiftly,

      Borne on the wings of love, gave her no rest,

      Shadowed her shoulder, breathed on her streaming hair,

Her strength was gone, worn out by the long effort

      Of the long flight; she was deathly pale, and seeing

      The river of her father, cried “O help me,

      If there is any power in the rivers,

      Change and destroy the body which has given

      Too much delight!” And hardly had she finished,

      When her limbs grew numb and heavy, her soft breasts

      Were closed with delicate bark, her hair was leaves,

      Her arms were branches, and her speedy feet

      Rooted and held, and her head became a tree top,

      Everything gone except her grace, her shining.

      Apollo loved her still. He placed his hand

      Where he had hoped and felt the heart still beating

      Under the bark; and he embraced the branches

      As if they still were limbs, and kissed the wood,

      And the wood shrank from his kisses, and the god

      Exclaimed: “Since you can never be my bride,

      My tree at least you shall be! Let the laurel

      Adorn, henceforth, my hair, my lyre, my quiver:

      Let Roman victors, in the long procession,

      Wear laurel wreaths for triumph and ovation.…”

      He said no more. The laurel,

      Stirring, seemed to consent, to be saying

Yes.

This, one might have thought, would have been an impossible thing to illustrate with sculpture. Sculpture—at least until Bernini—always depicted achieved actions and complete states. Nobody had tried to illustrate in sculpture things in transition, to convey what was incomplete or in the very process of change. Yet in Apollo and Daphne we do see the change from girl to tree happening before our eyes; the bark enveloping and encasing her lithe body; softness giving way to ligneous toughness; movement turning into rootedness. Moreover, the sculpture seems to defy what we know is a chief property of stone: its brittleness. How on earth (one wonders), through what preternatural skill, did Bernini manage to render those brittle stalks and thin, freestanding blades of laurel leaf in marble, without snapping them off? It must have been done with rasps, drills, and abrasive; a hammer blow, the touch of a chisel, would have ruined any of them. And once a leaf was broken, there were no adhesives like epoxy capable of mending it in the early seventeenth century. No sculpture, one feels, could be riskier. Of course, one’s admiration of Bernini’s technique is not confined to enjoying its Last-Supper-carved-on-a-peach-stone virtuosity, which has always been considered to go beyond mere skill. There is no feeling that he has achieved such effects by some sort of trickery or legerdemain. They are there, factual, and it was not magic that put them there. And the rendering of emotion and expression rivals the intensity of the work of the painter Guido Reni, the Italian artist whom, we know, Bernini greatly admired. In years to come, Bernini’s work would deepen and acquire a wider emotional resonance. It, and he, would mature. But already, in his twenties, he showed himself capable of producing one of those works of art that seem to enlarge the scope of human possibility. Anyone who thinks of the young Picasso as a prodigy should reflect on the young Bernini, and be admonished. There was no twentieth-century artist, and certainly none of the twenty-first century, who does not look rather small beside him.

He was a man of the utmost concentration and energy. Even in old age (and he lived to eighty-two), Bernini was quite capable of working on a marble block for seven or eight hours at a stretch. This vitality, which he never lost, combined with astonishing executive powers. He ran a very large studio, and had to, because of the number of commissions in sculpture and architecture, for the highest levels of government and religion, that he confidently undertook and completed. He was by far the most influential sculptor in Rome, or in the seventeenth-century world. Bernini was to become the supreme artist of the Counter-Reformation in sculpture and architecture, as Rubens was in painting.

And, like Rubens, he was a man of strong and deep religious conviction. It is not, of course, true that to create important works of religious art one must be pious. Still less is it true that an artist’s personal piety underwrites the quality of his art as art—much of the world’s vilest, most sugary religious kitsch has been deeply felt and produced by honest and morally impeccable people. But there have been cases, uncommon but real, when deep religious impulses lend an authentic intensity of spiritual feeling to depictions of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, one which detachment or agnosticism cannot provide. Bernini’s was such a case.

The event that set the seal on Bernini’s growing success came on August 6, 1623, with the election of Maffeo Barberini as Pope Urban VIII. Barberini (reigned 1623–44), a Florentine, was a man of the most unbridled political ambition. Indeed, his papacy reached the high-water mark of the extent and power of the Papal States within Italy. It would hardly have been possible for him to remain aloof from politics, not only because the Papacy ruled Rome but also because his reign coincided with twenty-one years of the Thirty Years’ War.

But the patronage of art was also, for him, as important as the prosecution of war. He built extensively in Rome, and some of the results were glorious in their extravagance—notably his own residence, Palazzo Barberini, on the Quirinal (Via delle Quattro Fontane 13). Its initial design—a villa with wings extending into the garden around it—was done by Carlo Maderno; later, the work, interrupted by Maderno’s death in 1629, was taken over by Bernini and Francesco Borromini. Its façade derives, in its essentials, from that mighty prototype of Roman Baroque palaces, the Palazzo Farnese. If he had built nothing else, Maffeo Barberini would deserve a place in architectural history for this private home, but of course he did much more. He was determined to leave a great indelible mark on Rome; like many before him, he chose to do so through its principal church, Saint Peter’s. The man who would do this for him was young Bernini. On the very day of his election, Urban is said to have summoned the sculptor and declared: “You have the great fortune to see Cardinal Maffeo Barberini Pope, Cavaliere; but ours is much greater to have Cavaliere Bernini alive in our pontificate.” Or words, at least, to that effect. Later, Urban would write of his artist, “Rare man, sublime artificer, born by Divine Disposition and for the glory of Rome to illuminate the century.”

Bernini was only twenty-three when he was made a cavaliere, a papal knight. This honor was merely a formal recognition of what everyone who had seen his early sculptures already knew: that, of all the stonecutters and bronze casters working in Europe, Bernini was the most skilled, the most inventive, not only in his technical mastery of materials, but in his astonishing ability to create a concetto or “concept” of sculpture. This gift went far beyond the ability to carve a strong Hercules or a desirable Venus, which was (relatively) easy. It had to do with inventing an entirely new kind of drama from posture, gesture, and expression. It ensured Bernini his first papal commissions, of which the principal ones had to do with Saint Peter’s. In fact, for the half-century after 1623, hardly a year would pass in which Bernini would not be involved in the decoration of this prodigious basilica, and it was Urban who brought him into it as the master of papal works, starting with an enormous monument right below the dome, over the (supposed) burial spot of the Apostle Peter.

This was the baldacchino, or altar canopy. It can never be overemphasized that the shared project of Bernini and Urban VIII was to display to the world the triumph of Catholicism over Protestant heresy, and give unforgettable visual form to the tenets of the Counter-Reformation. The canopy was the first icon of this: a huge, exuberant declaration of the belief that Saint Peter, Christ’s vicar on earth and first in an unbroken line of popes, lay buried here and nowhere else, that the only true version of Christianity was his faith and that of his successors, not (perish the thought!) Martin Luther’s. It marks the foundation stone of the Church: “Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam,” Christ is recorded as saying, punningly, to Peter: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” These words are inscribed around the drum of the crossing, above the baldacchino, in letters five feet high.

The baldachin would have to be huge. In the vast space of that nave, under such a dome, seen from the distance of the entrance (the nave is 218.7 meters long), anything less than huge would look as trivial and incongruous as a beach umbrella. Obviously, one could not use a real canopy, figured silk supported on poles. The size of the thing would have been too great for any kind of cloth, which would have perished anyway. So the canopy must be rigid, made of metal. The correct metal would be bronze. But a structure so large, with its superstructure of volutes and its twenty-meter-high twisted columns (of the type known as “solomonicas,” from the belief that spirally twisted columns were used in Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem), would require enormous quantities of this metal. Where would it come from? Where, but another church? Urban VIII gave Bernini leave to strip the ancient bronze cladding from the portico of Santa Maria Rotonda, the new name of the Pantheon, which had been adopted and reconsecrated for Catholic rites and was the property of the Holy See. From this and other sources of recyclable bronze, Bernini got the metal to make the baldacchino, with enough left over to cast some cannon for the Castel Sant’Angelo. This made some Romans indignant, though in truth, even if it would obviously have been better to have both, it would be difficult to claim that the exchange of the Pantheon’s bronze for Bernini’s baldachin was anything but a net gain.

The baldacchino is the world’s first incontestably great Baroque monument. No wonder Bernini’s enemies derided it (behind his back, of course) as a “chimera”—it fell into no agreed category of décor, sculpture, or architecture. It still strikes the viewer with awe, through the richness and complexity of its detail no less than its astonishing size—the largest bronze sculpture in the world. But is it sculpture? Or metallic architecture? Manifestly, both. As a work of propaganda it has few rivals elsewhere in the fine arts. It is propaganda not only for Catholic doctrine and Catholic archaeology, but for Maffeo Barberini himself. The bronze bees that are crawling everywhere on it, giant insects the size of starlings, are the heraldic api of the Barberini family. The recurrent suns and the laurels that twine the massive corkscrew columns are, likewise, Barberini emblems. L’église, c’est moi.

Maffeo Barberini’s papacy had been a fairly long one—twenty-one years, from 1623 to 1644. It cannot be called a financial success; he practiced nepotism on too gigantic a scale. When he came to the throne, the papacy was sixteen million scudi in debt, and Urban took only two years to run that up to twenty-eight million. By 1640, the debt stood at thirty-five million, so that the interest payments on it alone consumed more than four-fifths of the annual papal income. His political adventures tended to be quite disastrous: Urban was the last pope to go to war in the hope of expanding papal territory, and he always lost his battles. Nor was his scientific sense much better. He vigorously opposed Galileo’s heliocentric theory of the universe, the belief that the earth went round the sun and not vice versa, and summoned him to Rome in 1633 to make him recant. He also—to descend from the serious to the absurd—issued a papal bull, in 1624, that made smoking tobacco punishable by excommunication. The reason was that when smokers sneezed their convulsion resembled orgasm, and this struck Urban as a mortal sin of the flesh.

Bernini far outlasted his patron in life, and glorified him after death in a tomb which occupies one of the most honored spots in the basilica, enthroned and wearing the papal tiara (bareheaded was more normal in tomb sculpture). Nobody can miss the encompassing gesture of benediction with which he faces the viewer, but people do not always notice Bernini’s attribution to him of eternal life: three bronze Barberini bees, which have flown out of the sarcophagus and are heading upward, in illustration of Virgil’s lines from the Georgics describing the immortality of those cooperative insects: “There is no room for death: alive they fly/To join the stars and mount aloft to heaven.”

Nowhere could Bernini’s diplomatic skills have been more evident than in his handling of the transition of power, after Urban VIII’s death, to the new pontiff, Giovanni Battista Pamphili, who succeeded to the Fisherman’s Chair in 1644 and reigned for eleven years under the name of Innocent X. Though Bernini would spend a few years out in the cold, he bided his time; his sheer talent and unrivaled ingenuity would ensure his return to favor. Innocent had a visceral loathing for his predecessor, who had left the Papacy heavily depleted—patronage of one’s own family, as Urban practiced it, was a most expensive hobby.²

Innocent’s acute dislike extended to the recipients of Urban’s largesse, of whom the most conspicuous was Bernini. The great sculptor was detested by most artists and architects in Rome, since nothing breeds envy more than extreme success. It was therefore with an overwhelming sense of relief and Schadenfreude (that useful German word that has no exact English equivalent but means roughly “pleasure in the misfortunes of others”) that the Roman cultural world not only saw him fail, but saw the pope do nothing to rescue him.

The stumbling block was a design he made in 1637 for bell towers on the façade of Saint Peter’s. Apparently, Bernini did not design a strong enough footing for them; the ground was more weakened by subterranean streams than the architect realized. Soon after it was built, cracks appeared in the left tower. To the unrestrained delight of his enemies, including his arch-rival Borromini, Bernini’s towers had to be demolished. Because of Innocent X, it was politically safe for anyone to be as nasty about Urban VIII’s once-omnipotent protégé as he liked. For the first time in his life, Bernini was out in the cold. From the point of view of his prosperity, this demotion from the exalted status of papal architect hardly mattered—there would be enough commissions from rich but lesser patrons to keep him busy through Doomsday. Still, losing the pope’s favor was a severe blow, one that the great man could not accept.

And Innocent meant business. Once his mind was made up, he did not easily relent. Urban was hardly cold in the magnificent tomb Bernini had made for him in Saint Peter’s when Innocent X brought suit against his relatives, the Cardinals Antonio and Francesco Barberini, for misappropriation of public funds. They fled to France and took refuge under the powerful wing of Cardinal Mazarin, leaving financial chaos behind them; Innocent promptly confiscated their property.

He was also as given to meddling in the affairs of other countries as his medieval namesake Innocent III: but this was still normal for a powerful sacro-secular state like the Papacy. One should not forget that the Papacy still ran the civil and political government of Rome. Its affairs were not only those of the Church, but of the state. The Church was the state. An extreme case of this meddling was Ireland. During the Civil War (1642–49) in England and Ireland, the pope dispatched a nuncio—an ecclesiastic diplomat—Archbishop Giovanni Rinuccini, to Kilkenny with a huge sum of money and ten tons of the best gunpowder. Though he declared, and with sincerity, that he meant to sustain the king, his purpose was to help the Irish Catholics throw off the Protestant yoke of England, restoring confiscated property to the Irish Church and the rights of Catholic worship to the Irish people. It went badly awry; instead of gaining its lost rights back, Ireland got the “accursed butcher” Oliver Cromwell, who invaded with his New Model Army and in what could euphemistically be called a “police action” mercilessly crushed the rebellion and ensured more than three further centuries of bloodshed between Catholics and Protestants within long-memoried Ireland—“much hatred, little room,” in W. B. Yeats’s pregnant words. Archbishop Rinuccini was recalled by Innocent in 1649, his gunpowder wasted.

Preoccupied with his political adventures, Innocent X had little or no time for Bernini, who bided his time and worked on more private commissions. The greatest of these was the Cornaro Chapel, in the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, the work which signaled a new and audacious development in the sculptor’s thinking. This is the project which brought together sculpture, scenography, narrative, and architecture in a way which had never been done or even attempted before—a hinge point, not only in Bernini’s career, but in the history of seventeenth-century art.

It was a memorial, commissioned by the Venetian Cardinal Federigo Cornaro (1579–1653), patriarch of Venice, to commemorate both himself and his family. The saint it glorifies is Saint Teresa of Ávila (1515–82), the holy Spanish woman, founder of the Carmelite Order (to whom the church belongs) and teacher of Saint John of the Cross, whose copious writings include a vision of Divine Love, manifesting itself in the form of an angel with a spear. Her description of this vision has often been quoted, but it is worth repeating not only for its classical importance in the canon of mysticism but also because Bernini followed it to the very letter and clearly, as a most devout Catholic, believed every word of it, striving to make it as concrete as sculpture could be:

He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest rank of angels, who seem to be all on fire. They must be of the kind called cherubim.… In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he pulled it out, I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul then content with anything but God. This is not a physical but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it—even a considerable share.… If anyone thinks I am lying, I pray God, in his goodness, to grant him some experience of it.

In Bernini’s sculpture, Saint Teresa is levitating, borne up on a marble cloud. Only three parts of her body are visible: her face, one bare foot, and a single nerveless hand. The rest of her is a mass of drapery, a near-chaos of folds and pleats, beneath which no sign of the body’s form is discernible. All is agitation, the swirls and crumples of marble cloth standing as signs of the intense emotion caused by the vision’s arrival. Her mouth is open, moaning; her heavy eyelids are lowered, stressing the internal power of her vision. Discreetly but without ambiguity, Bernini shows us a woman in orgasm—“If that is divine love, eh bien,” said a worldly French diplomat on catching sight of The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa for the first time in the 1780s, “I know it well.” (So, it should be added, did Bernini; he had an earthy-looking mistress named Costanza Bona-relli, whose bust he carved, voluptuously parted lips and all.) Compared with Saint Teresa, the angel is all unitary force, rising vertically beside her, his face a study in benign masculine sweetness, his eyes fixed on her as he draws back the spear to plunge it, once more, into her welcoming flesh. (His left hand, touching the saint’s disordered garment, is a superbly ambiguous touch: it could be seen as gently lifting the cloth to expose flesh which he can see but we cannot, or else as raising the whole body of the saint, weightlessly, upward—a reminder of the levitation Saint Teresa said she had undergone.)

The space of the chapel, which is in the left transept of Santa Maria della Vittoria, is quite shallow. Its focus is, of course, the marble group of Teresa and the angel. This is framed inside a niche, a sort of proscenium with a pediment that breaks forward on a curve and is framed on each side by a pair of darkish-green Breccia Africana columns. The dark surround makes the white figures of angel and saint even more apparitional, especially since they are lit from above by a source we cannot see. In a chimney or light well that is hidden from view, light cascades from a yellow glass window. (At least, it used to; the glass is now so dimmed by dust and pigeon droppings that the Carmelites had to install an electric bulb to replace the sun.) The “real” light falls on fictitious light—a burst of gilded sun rays, fanning down behind the figures.

On the side walls of the chapel are two symmetrical niches, designed in false perspective to give the illusion of deep space running back. In them are seated white marble effigies of eight members of the Cornaro family: Cardinal Federigo, the donor, with his father, the Doge Giovanni Cornaro, and six earlier Cornaros, all cardinals, too—a conclave of pious family power, spanning several generations. Leaning forward in fascination at the miracle before their eyes, they turn to one another, talking and arguing (or, since this is a church, whispering in awe) about it and its meaning; their astonishment parallels our own and increases it. This was the largest and most complicated essay in group sculptural portraiture (individual lifelike portraiture, not merely figure groups) ever done. And it reminds the viewer, as so much of Bernini’s work does, that he had a background in theater: he relished designing stage setups, theater sets, and special effects like floods and sunrises, though we have little idea of how realistically they might have worked. We do know that they impressed and likely fooled the audience.³ No wonder the Cornaro Chapel keeps its magic of illusion even in an age of photography and film, and retains its talismanic power as a mixed-media masterpiece, melding sculpture, theater, architecture, and colored marble surfaces in an inspired unity, a “total work of art” that Wagner might have dreamed of.

Nobody of Bernini’s genius can remain out in the cold in an age of public patronage for very long, and certainly Bernini did not. His restoration to papal favor came through the very pontiff who had revoked it: Innocent X Pamphili. No great Roman family was more bound up with an architectural feature of Rome than the Pamphili clan with Piazza Navona. It was “their” square—actually, an elongated horseshoe which almost exactly followed the track of the ancient Stadium of Domitian, which lay beneath it. Because footraces had been held in this stadium in ancient times (it was not a venue for either chariot races or the murderous rites of the gladiators), it was relatively short and lacked a central divider or spina. A place of intense physical striving, it had become known as the Circus Agonalis or platea in agone, which became changed by Roman dialect into “Piazza Navona.” A grand open space, ringed with palaces, closed at one end by the unwieldy bulk of Palazzo Doria, it had been distinguished by the pilgrimage church of Sant’Agnese in Agone, built on the presumed site of the holy child-virgin’s martyrdom, a Roman brothel. It was a modest church in its first form, but that would presently change by the orders of various members of the Pamphili family. In 1652, Innocent X decreed a total rebuilding of Agnes’s little shrine. This work was entrusted to Innocent’s architect Girolamo Rainaldi. He had designed the Pamphili Palace next door, and he would work on Sant’Agnese until 1653, shortly before his death, when the project was taken over by his son Carlo. But in 1653 the work on the commission was also joined by Francesco Borromini, the depressive genius who was Bernini’s chief rival. He redesigned the façade of Sant’Agnese as a concave oval curve between bell towers on either side. The church façade one sees from the piazza, therefore, is a palimpsest of three architects’ work: Borromini up to the cornice, then a classical pediment by Bernini (1666), and finally the dome and the upper parts of the campanili by Rainaldi. It is a horse made by committee.

Nevertheless, the piazza had evolved into one of the greatest festive precincts in Rome, frequented alike by the grandees taking their evening passeggiata, and every kind of jongleur, contortionist, pickpocket, pimp, tart, hawker, and gawker, whose descendants still throng the square as the day’s light is fading. In a superb demonstration of civic theater, there was until the end of the eighteenth century a custom of flooding the piazza with water, through which processions of horse-drawn carriages would festively parade round and round—a spectacle painted more than once by such artists as Hubert Robert. It must have been quite a sight, though prolonged immersion in water cannot have done much good to the wooden chassis and spoked wheels of the carrozze. But sometimes a Roman has no choice but to cut a bella figura, even when his carriage warps. Piazza Navona in the Baroque era was a center for street theater, replete with processions and ceremonies such as the Giostra del Saraceno, a jousting contest in which the target of the riders’ lances was an effigy of a Saracen mounted on a pole. But none of these delights of the effimero barocco (temporary Baroque) could compare to what Innocent X, through the ministrations of Bernini, made of the piazza.

At the beginning, the pope did not mean to use Bernini at all. Piazza Navona was the Pamphilis’ backyard, their family precinct, and Innocent X was determined to convert it into a permanent memorial to his reign—the greatest public square in Rome. He saw to it that every sculptor-architect of proven quality in Italy was invited to submit designs for the remodeling of Piazza Navona—with the single exception of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who, being so conspicuously the favorite of the detested Barberini, was disqualified.

At first it looked as though Borromini was going to win the commission: it was he who conceived the idea of a sculptural centerpiece for the square, a great fountain outside Sant’Agnese, with figures representing four rivers and, perhaps, symbolizing the four quarters of the known world. He also devised a scheme for a new aqueduct which would bring enough water for the fountain. Project models would be displayed to Innocent, and he would choose.

But, unknown to Borromini and everyone else, including the pope, Bernini’s friend Prince Niccolò Ludovisi had briefed the great sculptor on the situation and recommended that he make his own model, some say of silver; it would be secreted in a room where the pope would see it. Bernini chose the theme of the four rivers, too—no doubt Borromini never forgave him for this plagiarism—and proposed to add an Egyptian obelisk, which Innocent X had previously seen lying in five pieces on the spina of the Circus of Maxentius, out on the Via Appia. If Sixtus V could have his obelisks, so could Innocent X.

But it was necessary to give it a more grandiose and memorable setting than other obelisks, and Bernini proposed that it should be moved and reassembled to stand on the fictive mountain of travertine where the statues of the four rivers were ensconced. These rivers were the Nile, the Plate, the Ganges, and the Danube. Each of the rivers would represent one of the world’s four then known continents—Africa, America, India, and Europe—respectively, identified by allegorical figures and implications: a lion for the Nile, a pile of riches for the Plate (representing the promise of the New World), a man holding an oar for the Ganges, and a papal coat of arms for the Danube. The whole thing would be an astounding coup de théâtre: that giant spike borne up on a rough arch of rock, standing on a void above water—an image of the world, imago mundi, without parallel in earlier sculpture.

On top of the pyramidion would be a bronze dove, the stemma of the Pamphili as the bee was of the Barberini, proclaiming to the world the triumph of Christianity (the Holy Ghost, which a dove also symbolized) over Egyptian and all other paganism, and the happy identification of that same Holy Spirit with the Pamphilis in general and this pope in particular.

Then came a further level of meaning: the traditional form of Paradise contained, at its center, a fountain, and from it sprang the four rivers that irrigated the four quarters of the world—the Gihon, the Pison, the Tigris, and the Euphrates. Bernini’s design alluded to this, too, thus implying that the Pamphili pope was in charge of Paradise, and, in a theological sense, its actual gatekeeper.

The model was finished; Prince Ludovisi arranged for it to be set in a room in Palazzo Pamphili through which Innocent always passed on his way from dinner. He was on his way with his brother cardinal and his sister-in-law, Donna Olimpia, when it caught his eye.

On seeing such a noble creation and the sketch for so vast a monument, [he] stopped almost in ecstasy.… After admiring and praising it for more than half an hour, he burst forth, in the presence of the entire privy council, with the following words: “This is a trick of Prince Ludovisi. It will be necessary to employ Bernini in spite of those who do not wish it, for he who desires not to use Bernini’s designs must take care not to see them.” He sent for Bernini immediately.

And so Bernini’s design for the Fountain of the Four Rivers went ahead.⁴ Begun in 1648, it was finished in 1651, thanks to a cast of skilled assistants working to his designs—on a project like this, Bernini was more the master of works than the carver, although he reputedly did the horse, the palm tree, the lion, some of the rock, and possibly the bizarre hybrid creature next to Francesco Baratta’s figure of the river Plate, which looks like nothing that ever lived but was meant to be an armadillo, an animal so exotic that neither Bernini nor anyone else in Rome had ever seen one or even an engraving of one. Bizarreries and jokes were designed into the stone: Antonio Raggi’s figure of the Danube is holding up its hand, allegedly to shield its gaze from the unwelcome sight of Borromini’s façade of Sant’Agnese. Because the source of the Nile was unknown, the figure of it, carved by Giacomo Fancelli, has a head swathed in cloth—but this blindfold was also said (falsely) to protect the Nile against a glimpse of Borromini’s work.

The reassembly and erection of the obelisk was a major enterprise: not, perhaps, as monstrous as Fontana’s task in shifting the obelisk of Saint Peter’s for Sixtus V, but attended by great engineering problems. It is a gigantic spike balanced above a void. Bernini constructed the base from travertine, apparently solid rock but carved to simulate “natural” stone, an arch. One can see right under and through it, from one side of the piazza to the other. This was the new base of the obelisk. One can but guess a connection between the emotional effect that the collapse of the bell tower at Saint Peter’s must have had on Bernini, and the daring with which he set up the obelisk over the void at the center of the Four Rivers Fountain. Let the public and the papacy see, he in effect declared, what I can do! Let them know that the bell-tower fiasco was not of my own making! And then one realizes something else. This spike over a void within the “legs” of an arch—what is it but a prefiguring of the feat Gustave Eiffel would bring off two and a half centuries later, in steel and in Paris, with his celebratory tower? Was this where Eiffel got his first idea for the structure which, at the end of the nineteenth century, would be identified more than any other with modernity? Tantalizing, but impossible to know.

The Four Rivers was by far the most elaborate, ambitious, and delightful fountain Bernini contributed to Rome, but of course it was not the only one. His earliest was possibly the “Ship” or Barcaccia in Piazza di Spagna. It may have been designed by his father, Pietro, who was the official architect of the Acqua Vergine, the aqueduct through which its water came; but the son seems to be the more likely author. Created in 1627–29, it takes the low water pressure in that area and turns it to advantage: the motif is a marble ship half sunk in a pool, dribbling rather than exuberantly spouting water from its gun ports. It may be that it has a political reference, since the patron who commissioned it was Urban VIII, who at the time was conspiring with France and Spain to launch the seaborne invasion of Protestant Britain—the very attack that would end in the ignominious destruction of the Spanish Armada. With consummate hypocrisy, Urban penned a distich which was engraved on the fountain and, in translation, reads, “The ship of the Church does not pour forth fire, but sweet water, by which the flames of war are extinguished.”

Bernini had a hand in the original design of the Trevi Fountain, but it was not started by him, and it fell to Nicola Salvi (1697–1751) to build it in the mid-eighteenth century. The commissioning pope was Clement XII Corsini (reigned 1730–40). The fountain occupies one whole flank of Palazzo Poli. It is huge—twenty meters wide and twenty-six high. Its central figure, by Pietro Bracci, represents the sea god Neptune, riding on an enormous shell drawn by sea horses and guided by two Tritons. These in turn are flanked by allegorical figures of Abundance and Healthfulness, in praise of the benefits of papal government. It owes at least some of its popularity, not so much to its grandiose and congested design, as to that hardy perennial of 1950s sentiment, the movie Three Coins in the Fountain—that, plus the iconic sight of the young blonde bombshell Anita Ekberg wading stalwartly in it in Fellini’s La dolce vita. There is an urban myth which says that if you stand with your back to the fountain and toss a coin over your shoulder into the pool, your return to Rome will be guaranteed. The other, and perhaps more attractive, legend of the fountain holds that if a lover drinks a cup of its water in the presence of his beloved, he will never be able to get her out of his heart. Presumably this story is connected to the source of the fountain’s water, which used to be known as the Acqua Vergine because its upwelling, some miles away, was pointed out to ancient Roman water-seekers by a young girl.

The Bernini fountain that remains an outstanding favorite of the Romans themselves is the Triton Fountain, in Piazza Barberini (1642–43), outside the Barberini Palace, itself partially the work of Bernini. If the Trevi Fountain is the most grandiose in Rome, the Triton Fountain is surely the most graceful and, if one may use the term, the most epigrammatic. In the middle of a geometric pool, four head-down dolphins bear up, on their tails, a gigantic scallop shell which has opened its ribbed halves, like a book, to reveal a Triton blowing his conch. The “music” one expects to come from a conch is a vertical blast of water, glittering in the Roman sunlight. It is a fabulous concetto, scarcely diminished even by the parked cars that cluster around it, the avvocato Agnelli’s hogs at a trough.

Italy was the only country in which Bernini’s genius was able to spread its wings. The French King Louis XIV had him invited to Paris, and (cautioning His Majesty not to speak to him about small projects) the sixty-six-year-old culture hero actually made the long and arduous trip to discuss a possible rebuilding of the royal Palace of the Louvre. Nothing came of this except some drawings and a magnificent, complex marble portrait bust of Le Roi Soleil, which survives and remains in France. Bernini took a sardonic pleasure in seeing people flock to view him as though he were a traveling elephant.

The visit also gave rise to a tremendous display of the old maestro’s bad temper, when he heard the architect Claude Perrault, Bernini’s eventual successor as architecte du roi, commenting to Chantelou on a possible flaw in Bernini’s design for pavilions. The two men were speaking French, of which Bernini hardly spoke a word. Nevertheless, he thought he understood, and flew into a towering rage.

He wanted Perrault to know, Bernini said, that in the matter of design Perrault was not worthy to clean the soles of his shoes. That his work had pleased the king, who would be hearing about the insult personally. “That a man of my sort,” he fumed on, “I, whom the Pope treats with consideration and for whom he has respect, that I should be treated thus! I will complain of it to the King. I shall leave tomorrow. I do not know why I should not take a hammer to the bust after such an insult. I am going to see the Nuncio.” Eventually, the great man consented to be soothed with apologies, and he never listened to a French official again. The point was taken. He retired, victorious, to Rome.

The size of Bernini’s huge output in Rome defies short summary, and so does its “mood,” if that is the word. Bernini could be very funny in his unofficial work, as in his pen-and-ink caricatures of Vatican notables, which were not made for public display. The much-loved elephant of Piazza Minerva, bearing an obelisk on its back, shows his humorous fantasy at full stretch. In the seventeenth century, an elephant, in Italy, was a veritable apparition, a rarity seldom seen. The very name of the animal was a synonym for the bizarre, the unexpected, and (sometimes) the menacing—hadn’t Hannibal used the great beasts to crush the Roman armies at Cannae?

But apart from three other churches,⁵ the stairways, fountains, portrait busts, chapels, palaces, and tombs, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s enormous reshaping of Rome centers on the greatest basilica in Christianity, Saint Peter’s. You cannot imagine this complex without Bernini and his powers, not only of architecture, but of stagecraft—not that the two are readily distinguished. Bernini was responsible not only for much of the church and its contents but for its link to the Vatican palaces, in the form of the so-called Scala Regia (1663–66). Before he installed this staircase, the passage between church and palace had to be negotiated by a flight of cramped steps up and down which the pope was carried, at some risk, on a litter. Bernini had this steep and undignified incline demolished and replaced it with a new stair, which had a break near the bottom. This point, at which one turned through ninety degrees left to ascend the last and longest run of stairs, he marked with a huge sculpture of the Emperor Constantine on his rearing warhorse, stricken with his vision of the cross—“Conquer, in this sign,” promising victory over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge.

But now he had to resort to a perspective trick. The walls of the basilica and the palace were not parallel. They converged toward the top of the stairs. Bernini therefore introduced, on either side of the stairs, a run of columns which create a diminishing tunnel-vault, getting smaller as your gaze travels up, giving the impression that the walls do not converge.

Of all the Berninian features of Saint Peter’s—the altar that carries the Cathedra Petri or Apostolic Throne, the baldacchino, the numerous papal tombs and figures of saints, the nave decorations, the twin fountains on either size of the central obelisk⁶—the one that absolutely typifies Baroque grandeur, that “stands for” the size and inclusiveness of the seventeenth-century Church, is of course its piazza. Saint Peter’s Square, which is not a square but a colossal oval colonnade, “pulled apart” in the middle, has been known to hold the tens of thousands of people who flock there to receive the papal blessing, and is justly regarded, even by some Protestants, as the very epicenter of Christianity—a pair of immense arms, Bernini himself said, reaching out from the façade in a gesture of embrace to the world.

It is the greatest anthropomorphic gesture in the history of architecture.

It is also the stripped-down essence of Baroque, for it carries little of the elaborate detail and décor usually associated with Baroque design. Its columns—284 of them, in four rows—are austerely Tuscan, not the more florid Corinthian one might expect from Baroque. Its frieze is unbroken Ionic, without sculptural ornament, though there are some three hundred sculptures—more than a lifetime’s work, one might have thought, even for Bernini’s corps of assistants—along the edge of the roof. But in the vast spaces and distances of the piazza, these cause no visual congestion. Some critics have said, truthfully enough, that the piazza pays no compliment to the enormous façade of the basilica, by Carlo Maderno, that closes it off. The front of Saint Peter’s is too wide for its height—some 115 meters broad. The loss of Bernini’s bell towers caused this disproportion. It is a flaw, admittedly, but a small one in the context of a scheme so gigantic both spatially and conceptually.

Bernini’s rival architect in the formation of the Baroque style in Rome, his prodigious contemporary Borromini, did not build as much as Bernini, and he was not a sculptor; but his relatively small output of buildings is so concentrated, so inventive, as to set him alongside Bernini as one of the heroic figures in architectural history. Moreover, it should be recalled that Bernini was not an architect to begin with, and much of what he learned about the design of buildings was acquired, usually without acknowledgment, from Borromini. It would be hard to find two architects of comparable talent who were, psychologically and temperamentally, less like each other. Borromini’s life ended in a way utterly unlike the sense of fulfillment conveyed by Bernini’s death; at the age of sixty-eight, harried by jealousy and an irascible sense of failure, he wrote out his will by candlelight and then gave himself what he hoped to be a truly Roman exit, falling on his sword. Botched and painful, it was neither a quick nor an easy death, just a tragic one.

That he was a misfit genius of the first order cannot be doubted. Melancholic by nature, he went to extremes in admiring Michelangelo’s penchant for solitude and for terribilità. In a Rome where sexual morality among men was notoriously lax, he had a reputation for strict and extreme chastity, focusing only on his work and never indulging in stray affairs. He made a point of always dressing in funereal black, Hamlet-like, in the Spanish way. In another architect, this might have been a sign of dandyism; one may be fairly sure that in Borromini it was not. It was more like penance, or perhaps indifference, to fashion in an intensely fashion-conscious cultural capital. Borromini was never popular with everyone in his own lifetime. His contemporary Giovanni Baglione, a priggish but influential figure, denounced him as “a most ignorant Goth and corrupter of architecture, and the infamy of our century.”

The innovations of detail and planning he wrought into his buildings were paralleled in the way he presented their designs to clients. Thus Borromini was the first architect to use the graphite pencil rather than ink-and-wash in his presentation drawings. Moreover, he seems to have regarded these drawings as ends in themselves, finished works of art, rather than merely indications of what structures and finishes would be. He liked to call his drawings his “children” and often refused to be parted from them by sending them to competitions—“sent begging into the world” was his phrase for this.

Borromini’s origins were humble. He was the son of a builder, born in Bissone, on Lake Lugano. The apprenticeship of a manual worker started early, and when he was only nine years old, his father dispatched him to Milan to learn the basics of stonecutting on the decorative details of the city’s cathedral, then under construction. He was a thoroughly skilled scarpellino or stoneworker when, in 1619, he moved to Rome and found work on the construction site of Saint Peter’s, to whose official architect, Carlo Maderno, he was (very distantly) related. At first he carved decorative details; then Maderno and others saw that he had talent and facility as a draftsman.

He was developing a very wide knowledge—probably wider than that of anyone in his generation, including Bernini—of the history of architecture, both ancient and modern. He absorbed and venerated old Roman building, but also studied sixteenth-century masters, from Bramante and Raphael through to Palladio and Vignola—and, especially, Michelangelo, whom he called “Prince of Architects” and revered almost as a god.

This made him extremely valuable to the better-connected but perhaps somewhat less studious Bernini, who, only a year older than Borromini, was engaged in the first big project of his fast-track career, the baldacchino for Saint Peter’s. At that early stage, Bernini had no architectural experience, and he had to rely on Borromini, whom he hired to do all the working drawings for the baldachin, along with the designs for some of its details, such as the bronze vine leaves and the four marble column bases with their complex Barberini shields and heraldic bees. It is likely, too, but undocumented, that Borromini designed the baldachin’s dynamic top, the four bronze volutes that so successfully replaced Bernini’s original idea of semicircular ribs. If so, this could have been the seed of the painfully frustrating rivalry that Borromini felt toward Bernini for the rest of his life: the volutes are a much-admired stroke of architectural genius for which he got no credit.

Borromini’s relations with Carlo Maderno, however, remained good, and they led to his work on Palazzo Barberini (1628–32), one of the archetypes of the grand Roman Baroque palace. Maderno also hired Pietro da Cortona and Bernini as codesigners, and the questions of who designed what and when are too complicated and uncertain to resolve easily or briefly. Maderno died in 1629, leaving the job to the three younger architects—a troika which seems to have been plagued by disagreements, hardly a surprise given how strong-willed each member was. Before long, Borromini left.

His first solo, independent commission came in his mid-thirties, in 1634, through the good offices of Cardinal Francesco Barberini. This was a monastery and church for the Discalced (or Barefoot) Trinitarians, an offshoot of the well-established Trinitarian Order, which had originally been formed in 1198 with the object of rescuing Christian captives from the Muslim “infidels.” The Barefoot Trinitarians tried to set an example of reform through austerity—one might almost say that they stood in the same quasi-fanatical relation to the original order as Borromini did to Bernini. They had little money and few means of raising it. But their superior, Padre Giovanni della Annunziazione, became confessor to Barberini, who happened to be very rich.

This was just as well, since the austere Discalced Trinitarians badly needed funds and a strong contact with the papal court. The friars had been horrified when Borromini presented them with his first drawings for the church and monastery that became San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, and they complained that they had wanted something that cost about a fifth as much. Eventually, a compromise was reached, brokered by Cardinal Barberini, who presumably gave money for its construction—though it is not known how much.

What they got in return was one of the most radical and daring small buildings of the Roman Baroque. Despite the shortage of funds, Borromini was able to develop and keep the three key elements of his project: the plan, the dome, the façade.

The plan became almost immediately famous, and architectural visitors to Rome kept begging for copies of it (which they did not get, because Borromini did not trust them). It had begun as a central-dome church with four crossing piers. Because the site was long and narrow, that configuration was squeezed, and the circular dome became an oval. This produced the further sensation that the walls were going in and out, “breathing,” almost like a live creature with lungs.

The dome is coffered. Its interior is very deeply shaped, the pattern produced by a series of interlocking hexagons and crosses that seem to recede from your eye as your gaze travels toward the center of the dome, which is marked by an emblematic triangle representing the Trinity, after whom the order is named—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is an optical illusion: the geometrical figures are getting smaller, but the dome is not getting deeper. Nevertheless, the spatial effect is very powerful. Borromini delighted in such tricks of false perspective: there is another, smaller one in Palazzo Spada—the palace in Piazza Capodiferro, near Palazzo Farnese—which he redesigned for Cardinal Bernardino Spada in 1652, consisting of an illusory Doric colonnade which, because of the sharply decreasing size of its framing pillars and the slant of its floor, seems to be twenty meters long, though its actual length is only 8.6. This “Prospettiva,” as it was known, was (and is) one of the most charming minor sights of Rome. But when you catch sight of it and see how it works, it is immediately readable as a trick, and it may have had a deliberate allegorical meaning: just as its size is an illusion, so, too, is worldly grandeur. No such ironic meaning attaches to the dome of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane.