R. A. Scotti (25 page)

E
ight years after the dome was raised, a child was born in the southern port of Naples who would become the last great architect of St. Peter's. Gianlorenzo Bernini inherited his looks from his mother, a southern beauty, and his dexterity with a chisel from his father, a Florentine sculptor. His genius was uniquely his own.

Bernini was ten when he visited Rome for the first time. His father, Pietro, a favorite artist of Paul V, introduced his son to the pope. Gianlorenzo was an elfin boy with black-olive eyes, a crown of black curls, and the face of an angel. The pope was charmed and he asked the boy to sketch a portrait. The young Bernini remained thoughtful for a moment and then asked Paul whether he wanted a portrait of a man or a woman, a youth or an old man, and with what expression—sorrowful or happy, disdainful or pleasing? The precocious boy soon gained two eminent cardinal-patrons—Paul's nephew Scipione Borghese and the wealthy intellectual Maffeo Barberini, who urged Bernini not to concentrate exclusively on sculpture but to study architecture and painting as well. At the age of twenty, the prodigy was working on his first papal commission, a portrait of Pope Paul.

Bernini was brash and young, with all the flaws inherent in such a combination. Extreme talent at such an early age is often a flash in the pan, but his gifts deepened. Older artists resented him. Contemporaries despaired of surpassing him.

Like the artists of the Renaissance, he was a man of many talents. An English diarist, visiting Rome in 1664, wrote: “Cavaliero Bernini, Sculptor, Architect, Painter & Poet…gave a Publique Opera (for so they call those Shews of that kind) where in he painted the Seanes, cut the Statues, invented the Engines, composed the Musique, writ the Comedy, and built the Theater all himself.”

Bernini had a charismatic personality and swashbuckling good looks. In a self-portrait, he pictures himself with flowing black hair, a devilish mustache with the ends curled and waxed, and a narrow, affected goatee. It is the portrait of an actor who relishes theater.

The Baroque infused art with theater, and Bernini was its master. He personified the Baroque, as the Baroque mirrored the man. His genius gave it a distinctive style. You are hard pressed to find a flat plane or straight line in any work of his. His art is all light, shadow, and movement—curvaceous, sensual, and whimsical. Theatricality is integral to Bernini's art and to the Basilica of St. Peter.

 

Religion is illusion. No institution understands that more profoundly than the Church of Rome. More than tenets and ethics, religion is mystery and magic, the ultimate conjuring act, body and blood from bread and wine. And the gleam of gold, the clouds of incense, the remote elevated person of the pope, the sacred art and evocative music, create that illusion. Stripped bare of all but its dogma, it would be exponentially reduced. Just as religious belief requires both reasoned argument and a leap of faith, so its practice requires both truth and illusion.

Rarely, if ever, can the spirit be reached and released by intellect or engineering alone. Religious faith comes through the heart to the head. It causes sinners to repent, the proud to humble themselves, and the powerful to bow to a higher authority. Emotions and imagination make zealots, saints, and martyrs out of clay-footed mortals.

The Baroque is to art what opera is to music—the elevation of pathos; a spectacle of color, emotion, and drama; fantasy rising to frenzied ecstasy. Bernini's Baroque was art designed to serve religion, and more specifically to serve the needs of the Counter-Reformation. Whether it was contrived to meet a clear purpose or whether it was a spontaneous expression, it fulfilled the mandate of the resurgent Church. The static perfection of the Renaissance was the art of the elite. The hot, intense Baroque was art to move the masses. It was popular art in the truest sense—cinematic special effects without a camera lens.

Bernini is the grand illusionist of the Basilica story. In art and architecture, he believed that the lie was more beautiful than the truth, camouflaging or concealing as it does the underpinning play of physics and statics.

Bernini was twenty-five, as young as Raphael had been when his patron Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII. Before the sun had set on the new pope's consecration day, he called Bernini to service. “It is your great good luck, Cavaliere,” Urban said, “to see Maffeo Barberini Pope, but we are even luckier that the Cavaliere Bernini lives at the time of Our pontificate.” Their relationship was as intense as the one between Julius and Michelangelo, but considerably less volatile. Urban looked on Bernini as a son.

The first of the great Baroque builders and patrons, Urban VIII was himself a musician, poet, and scholar—a man of vast personal wealth and deep learning, at home among Italy's intelligentsia. There was neither the stern dominance of Sixtus nor the slight pomposity of Paul V about him.

Born Maffeo Barberini in 1568, the scion of a noble Florentine family, he was educated in Rome by the Jesuits. Barberini was a fiercely intelligent young man, in the vanguard of the arts and sciences. He enjoyed lively intellectual debate so much that one cardinal on his way to a papal audience quipped: “I don't go to the Vatican to obtain a hearing but to grant one.”

Elected almost unanimously with fifty of the fifty-five votes of the College of Cardinals, on August 6, 1623, Urban was expected to return the papacy to the humanistic spirit of the Renaissance, turning it from the rigidity it had been forced to embrace to answer the Reformation. Through his patronage of art and science, he would engage the Church in the intellectual movements that were percolating in the early seventeenth century.

Urban VIII's ambition was to be as true and astute a patron as Julius, and in the precociously talented, alarmingly handsome young Neapolitan, he found his Michelangelo.

A clear line extends from the mature Buonarroti to the precocious Bernini. Both artists embraced the human body, Michelangelo its physicality, Bernini its sensuality, and for both religious art was an expression of personal faith. For all his cockiness, Bernini was sincerely religious. He followed the exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, and took Communion twice a week. In some ways, he was Michelangelo's alter ego—the agony that tormented Buonarroti replaced with an ecstasy for life and art.

Bernini was not a solitary artist prey to doubt and anguish. He described himself as a virtuoso and lived his life at center stage, surrounded by family, patrons, and numerous assistants, who carried out his orders, drew his detailed plans, and realized his ideas. Bernini's architectural drawings are all quick sketches, dashed off to capture an idea, not to convey precise directives to masons and carpenters. Often he used his walls as notepads, grabbing a piece of charcoal and sketching thoughts for a project as they came to him until he had exhausted the subject and satisfied himself. His imagination was always churning, constantly spinning out ideas, and the last, the freshest, always seemed the most exciting.

 

When Bernini came to St. Peter's the structure was settled, but its spirit was his to shape. His first commission from Pope Urban was a Baldacchino or canopy to cover the Confessio di San Pietro. The twenty-five-year-old sculptor had never engineered a construction of any kind, and at first the pope did not give him a formal contract, perhaps waiting to see if his young protégé could meet the challenge. It was a baptism by fire. The Basilica nave was more than six hundred feet long and the height beneath the dome was more than four hundred feet. Anything less than monumental would be lost in such a huge space.

For his Baldacchino, Bernini proposed an immense four-columned canopied structure of cast bronze to contrast with the marble and travertine in the Basilica. He worked continuously for three years fashioning his ideas. He began with a small wax model; then, with his father's help, he created a series of larger prototypes in plaster and wood; finally, he erected a rough full-size model. Bernini trusted his eye more than any geometric measure, and he studied the perspective from various points in the nave and transept, altering and experimenting with each aspect of the design until he was satisfied.

He had two inspirations for his Baldacchino: the cloth canopy that protected the Holy Father when he was carried aloft in his
sedia gestatoria
(today replaced by the pope-mobile), and a twisted column salvaged from Constantine's basilica. According to legend, the column was the very one that Jesus had leaned against in the Temple of Solomon.

Bernini's first construction became a seven-year exercise in virtuosity. He chose Francesco Borromini to assist him and to carve the marble bases for the bronze columns. Borromini incised on the pedestals seven graphic scenes of childbearing, culminating in the smiling face of a baby to emphasize that suffering is rewarded with joy.

Casting metal was a complex process. In his celebrated autobiography, the Renaissance goldsmith and braggadocio Benvenuto Cellini described the procedure. First, he built a funnel-shaped furnace by digging a pit and lining it with bricks. Next, he suspended a mold over the pit and lowered it into the furnace. A fire was built up gradually and kept burning day and night until the mold was well baked. The type of wood chosen affected the process. Pine or alder burned slowly, while young oak produced the strongest fire. A mold required several days to cool before it could be uncovered.

Bernini followed the ancient lost-wax process of casting. His molds had three components: a heat-resistant inner model, a wax coating, and a heat-resistant outer casing, perforated and sealed. He cast each column in five pieces: the base, the shaft in three sections, and the capital. As each mold heated, the wax melted and drained. Once the wax was “lost,” molten bronze was poured in to fill the space left. When the mold cooled, the casing was broken and the core removed. The pieces were then assembled with shims and the details added. Bernini made his own wax models, not only of the columns but also of the detailed ornamentation—every leaf, bee, and lizard. To achieve realistic effects in his wax designs, he often used actual lizards, bees, and branches, which would then be consumed in the firing. His detractors referred to it as “the lost-lizard process.”

The Baldacchino was extravagantly expensive to cast, costing Urban two hundred thousand ducats, one tenth of the Church's annual income, and work did not proceed smoothly. Its extreme weight required deep foundations beneath the pavement of St. Peter's, and the digging disturbed many graves in the ancient necropolis. When several workmen died mysteriously, rumors spread that the project was cursed. The men refused to return to work, until the pope bribed them with double wages. Once the curse was eased, Bernini faced engineering complications and a shortage of metal.

The Baldacchino required so much bronze that Bernini had to set up two foundries near the Swiss Guard barracks to melt it. Paul V had stripped the bronze covering off the ribs of the cupola to lessen the weight of the dome, and replaced it with lighter lead. The salvaged metal was melted for the Baldacchino. When Bernini needed still more bronze, Urban intervened again. With the imperiousness shown by every great builder-pope since Julius, he ordered the bronze stripped from the portico of the Pantheon.

Classical looting was nothing new, and the popes were egregious offenders. In justification, they argued that the material was going to a cause more pleasing to God than pagan temples, that there was no shortage of antiquities, and that many of the ancient ruins interfered with their plans to rebuild the city. Precedent not withstanding, plundering the Pantheon caused an outcry and prompted a famous pasquinade: “
Quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini
”—“What the barbarians did not do the Barberini did.”

So much bronze was taken from the Pantheon that there was enough to complete the columns of the Baldacchino and make eighty pieces of artillery for the papal guards.

In 1629, while Bernini was stripping the bronze from the Pantheon, Carlo Maderno, the
magister operae
of the Vatican, died. Urban chose Bernini to replace him. The pope gave Bernini the title architect of St. Peter's and superintendent of public works in Rome. “Bernini was made for Rome,” Urban said, “and Rome was made for him. He is a rare man, a sublime artist, born by Divine Disposition and for the glory of Rome to illuminate the century.”

Bernini would stay on the job for fifty-one years, until his death at the age of eighty-two. Like Michelangelo's, his life was driven by his art. In his final years, he never climbed a scaffold without an apprentice beside him for fear that he would become so absorbed in his construction that he might lose his footing and fall. At the end, paralysis stopped him. Bernini must have been exhausted because instead of raging, he accepted his fate philosophically, saying that a hand that had worked so hard in life should rest a little before death. If he added up the days in his life that he did not work, he calculated, they would amount to less than a month.

Bernini dominated the century and the city more completely than any artist before or since. In the caprices and spectacle of his Baroque, in his rhapsodies in travertine, Rome found its ideal expression. He made the city his workshop and filled it with his creations—palaces, piazzas, fountains, churches, and sculptures. He gave Rome Piazza di Spagna with the Barcaccia fountain, Piazza Barberini with the Triton and Bees fountains, Piazza Navona with the Fountain of the Four Rivers, Piazza della Minerva with his whimsical Elephant and Obelisk, and the remodeled Ponte Sant'Angelo lined with stone angels. His monopoly was so secure, his talent so huge, and his capacity for work so prodigious that Francesco Borromini, his closest rival and a gifted artist, despaired of ever surpassing him.
*