Rome

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 decor, 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’eglise, 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 facade 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 protege 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.