Mistress of the Vatican (31 page)

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“ ’Tis a tedious thing to Princes’ Ministers who are old Stagers in Councils and Affairs, to have to do with raw unexperienced Persons,” wrote

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Gregorio Leti about the cardinal nephew.
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And indeed, Camillo’s favor-ite part of his vaunted position was the honor, precedence, and income he received, along with those dazzling red robes. We can picture him trying them on in front of a full-length mirror, tilting his biretta rakishly and admiring the result. The only thing he hated about his job was the work.

Camillo was horrified that his uncle expected him to sit in an office all day and meet with ambassadors and other cardinals who talked about the most
boring
subjects—politics, finance, defense, and trade agreements. His visitors, for their part, were insulted that as they spoke about matters of international urgency, the cardinal nephew was doodling on a piece of paper—sketching gardens and designs for his new villa.

As soon as his uncle became pope in 1644, Camillo decided to build a villa on a large property his father had bought in 1630. Located on the top of Janiculum Hill, with a magnificent view of Saint Peter’s dome, the land was just begging for a pleasure house with extensive gardens. As cardinal nephew, Camillo now had unlimited funds to build his dream villa, which he called Bel Respiro for its fresh, bracing air. He hired the sculptor Alessandro Algardi to work with him, and soon the villa began to rise.

While digging the foundations, Algardi realized he was actually building on an extensive ancient Roman cemetery that included the tomb of Nero’s bodyguard. This was a happy turn of events because the excavators unearthed quantities of statuary that Camillo wanted to use on the façade. Unfortunately, many torsos were lacking heads, and the heads they found were missing torsos; and arms and legs had disappeared during destruction by Goths, Vandals, and Saracens. Camillo solved this problem by having Algardi glue available heads on available bodies and sculpt the parts that were missing, then strew the finished product all across the façade.

At first glimpse the villa is an impressive confection, pale blue, covered with white statues and friezes that look like elaborate frosting on an ornate wedding cake. But upon closer inspection, the heads and bodies clearly don’t match—the heads are too big, or too small—and there

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seems to be no rhyme or reason for these statue parts and their placement. The overall impression is that the villa, while lovely, is also inexplicably strange. But Camillo thought it was wonderful, and during his meetings with high-level officials his mind wandered off from war with France to marble body parts for his villa.

Complaints about Camillo’s uselessness began to percolate up to the pope, who lectured him sternly. He must stop sketching and do something useful. When Camillo told Innocent that he had always been interested in the military—probably because he looked so dashing on a horse—his uncle gave him the commission of building ships for the papal navy. In his
avvisi
of August 5, 1645, Teodoro Amayden reported that Camillo’s first vessel was launched in a great ceremony attended by his mother and the pope. But the boat had been built so badly that it immediately listed to one side and was in danger of sinking. It was sent back to the boatyard, where it was probably scuttled.

Innocent, who had always worked diligently for the church, was furious over his nephew’s indolence. Leti explained, “The Pope, having created his Cardinal Nephew, had no other design than to instruct him bit by bit to render him capable of administering political affairs, already being aware of the little wit he had. But the Nephew, instead of advancing, seemed rather to reverse. So much so that, not profiting at all from the good instruction of his Uncle, he was incapable of managing the smallest negotiation, so that every day he was poorly treated by the pope who made always a thousand reproaches for his ignorance.”
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Some days the Vatican corridors echoed with the pope’s shouting at Camillo, tearing into him for being a lazy bum, leaving all the hard work to his poor elderly uncle. In response, the cardinal nephew locked himself in his rooms on the Piazza Navona and took to his bed for days on end, claiming illness.

Olimpia graciously offered to read those petitions that Camillo found too boring to bother with, and to write his answers. But Camillo certainly didn’t want his
mother
telling him what to do. One day after a particularly bitter argument with her, he raced in his carriage to the Vatican and begged the pope to lock Olimpia up in a convent, the proper place for meddling women.

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There it was again, the sound of the bolt grinding shut behind her. She would never forgive Camillo for that. She would make him pay for that.

Seeing Camillo’s uselessness, Olimpia’s son-in-law Niccolò Ludovisi hoped to be assigned high-level political offices. After all, it was the only reason he had married Costanza at such a bargain-basement dowry. Gregorio Leti asserted, “This Prince had enclin’d to this match, out of an opinion of making great advantages by it, as seeing at the time that Cardinal Camillo was made Cardinal, and altogether unfit for business, so that he flattered himself with an opinion of being the only Nephew and governing the Pope and Church.”
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But Olimpia wanted all the power herself and was certainly not going to let the fat prince acquire any at her expense. Luckily for her, the pope didn’t like him anyway. Innocent “had no great tenderness for him,” the French ambassador reported.
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Sometimes Prince Ludovisi had to fight even to obtain an audience with the pope. When he did see the pontiff, Innocent “had no other conversation than topics of drollery and never entered into anything of importance. And if he initiated some discourse, the pope always interrupted him with gossip and foolishness which seemed to the poor prince that the pope wanted him to serve as a court jester rather than as a nephew.”
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When he complained to his mother-in-law about the lack of honors and offices that were his due as pope’s nephew, “Donna Olimpia answered him in a haughty manner, that it was honor enough for him that he had been preferred to marry her Daughter over so many competitors of as great a quality as himself. Whereupon the Prince, being unwilling to come to a rupture with one who had so great an influence upon the Pope, would hold his tongue and be quiet.”
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The prince vented his rage by telling anyone who would listen that he would never have debased himself by marrying the daughter of a cheapskate nobody like Olimpia if he had known he wouldn’t be getting any Vatican power in return. Word got around Rome, and we can only imagine how Costanza felt.

On May 4, 1645, at Olimpia’s suggestion, the pope appointed Prince Ludovisi commander-in-chief of the fleet sent to aid Venice in defending

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Crete against invading Turks. That would get him out of her hair for a while and stop him spreading such nastiness around Rome. Maybe, if she was lucky, he wouldn’t return. But when the fleet finally arrived in the Aegean after many delays, they found that all but one of the Christian forts had fallen, and the Turks were in control. After a few inconclusive skirmishes at sea, the prince bounced back to Rome, a war hero, gloriously wounded in the finger.

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As if Innocent didn’t have enough on his hands, it appeared that the new façade of Saint Peter’s Basilica was in danger of falling down. The church was the grandest building in all the world, a marvel of engineering, and proof in stone of Catholic supremacy. Even a partial collapse would signal greater fits of laughter from the heretics, and louder sobs from the Catholics, than had yet been heard.

Clement VIII (reigned 1592–1605) had established a committee specifically for the building and maintenance of the basilica, the Congregation of the Fabric of Saint Peter’s. Working with this group, Innocent should have found it a simple task to have experts examine the cracks and propose solutions. But the pope was caught in a power struggle between the two most talented artists of his time, who, unfortunately, both happened to be living in Rome, competing for the same work, and nursing deadly hatred for each other.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, born in 1598, had achieved unheard-of success at an early age. Discovered by Cardinal Nephew Scipione Borghese as a child, Bernini sculpted some of the most phenomenal works of art ever created. Known as the new Michelangelo, Bernini had been the darling of Pope Urban VIII. The day Urban was elected in 1623 he called the young artist to the Vatican. “Great fortune is yours, Cavalier,” he proclaimed, “to see Cardinal Maffeo Barberini become pope. But even greater is our fortune, that Cavalier Bernini lives during our pontificate.”
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Bernini had entrée into Pope Urban’s apartments twenty-four hours a day and swashbuckled around the Vatican as if he owned the place. He was a handsome man with noble features, flashing black eyes, and

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high cheekbones. Sensual full lips poked out beneath his silky black mustache. His jaw was square, and an adorable cleft marked his chin.

He had quite a reputation as a womanizer and apparently sculpted the likeness of his rowdy mistress as Divine Love on the pope’s tomb. When Bernini turned forty, Urban announced that it was time for the loyal son of the church to marry and settle down. The pope had, in fact, already found him a wife, the most beautiful girl in Rome, Caterina Tezio, whom Bernini dutifully married and with whom he had eleven children.

Bernini’s extraordinary success at an early age, flamboyant personality, and dashing good looks irritated his fellow artists, who were less successful, less flamboyant, and less good-looking. But the most irritated of all was the sullen Francesco Borromini, born in 1599, the absolute antithesis of Bernini in appearance, demeanor, and personality. Borromini was not an attractive man, with his small, hard eyes, hooked nose, and thin lips. He had a disheveled appearance, and those who saw him must have restrained themselves from whipping out a comb and trying to tame his hair. There were no woman stories wafting about Borromini like cheap perfume, nor were there any boy stories, either. He lived a solitary existence, pouring his passions into his work and his vengeance.

Borromini felt that he would be Rome’s top architect if only that windbag Gian Lorenzo Bernini had not come into the picture. In terms of solid engineering skill and architectural originality, Borromini had the advantage over his rival. While keeping colors and costs to a minimum, he created designs that were unique, unexpected, employing inverted geometrical forms in ways that had never been done before.

For all his startling genius as a sculptor, Bernini’s architecture employed conventional forms overlaid with lavish colorful materials. Engineering was his weakest point. He had gone through a baptism of fire—literally—when casting the bronze baldachino in Saint Peter’s. Toward the end he realized the structure could not bear the weight of the risen Christ he had designed for the top. The four colossal statues Bernini had placed on the piers surrounding the baldachino had been designed to react to the figure of Jesus in the center. But they ended up

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gasping and gesturing in response to something that didn’t exist, which they still do to this very day.

Rome’s art commissions, like marriages and political appointments, were decided at the dinner table. Bernini’s wit sparkled like the crystal goblets he drank from. Draped in his eternal, old-fashioned black clothes, Borromini was more like Death eating an onion, his face scowling and puckered, lacking only a sickle to complete the picture. As it was unpleasant to have Doom as a dinner guest, he usually wasn’t invited back. When clients did give him work, he was often so temperamental that they fired him, or he stormed off the job in a blistering rage.

Borromini felt that Urban VIII should have given him the two great commissions of the 1620s—the construction of the Palazzo Barberini and the design and casting of Saint Peter’s baldachino. The pope gave both jobs to Bernini, and Borromini worked under his archrival for one tenth the pay. As Borromini saw it, he had crafted the guts of the projects while Bernini was toasted at all the best parties and took all the credit, never sharing a shred with his team of talented workmen. “I do not mind that he has the money,” Borromini would say, “but I do mind that he enjoys the honor of my labors.”
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Frowning in the shadows, Borromini waited for his chance to pounce on his despised competitor. And it came. The façade of Saint Peter’s was always meant to have bell towers, or campanili. In 1618 the great architect Carlo Maderno had begun to build foundations for low, modest towers at each end of the façade, but work stopped when Paul V died in 1621. In 1638 Urban VIII commanded Bernini to build magnificent three-story bell towers, some two hundred feet high, loaded with pilasters, arches, colored marble inlay, and marble columns.