Mistress of the Vatican (32 page)

When he heard of Bernini’s latest papal commission, Borromini grumbled that the foundations had not been built to support the heavier weight and the façade would crack. But those who heard him were mindful of his sour grapes, and his warnings were ignored. Borromini kept a careful eye on his enemy’s construction and was delighted to find that as the south tower rose, alarming cracks appeared in the church façade. The added weight was indeed pushing the south part of the building into the shifting, sandy soil below.

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In 1642 work on the towers ceased. Pope Urban needed all available funds for the Castro war. Before his death in 1644, no decision was made as to how to proceed with the bell towers—whether to shore them up or tear them down. But the new pope was faced with the urgent decision his predecessor had put off. One of Innocent’s first decrees after his election was to form a committee of architects, engineers, and the eight cardinals of the Congregation of the Fabric to look into the problem. A shaft was dug to examine the foundations of the south tower, into which members of the committee descended on rope swings.

The first meeting was held on March 27, 1645. The most outspoken critic of the bell towers was none other than Francesco Borromini, who claimed the heavy towers would pull the façade with them as they settled, and the entire front of the church would collapse. Borromini presented mathematical calculations to show that the tower was three times higher and six times heavier than it should have been. “The prudent architect does not first erect a building and then make a sounding to see if he finds cracks in the foundation,” he declared, making it clear to all that Bernini was a most imprudent architect.
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Innocent attended the next meeting, on June 8, as did both Borro-mini and Bernini. Borromini presented new drawings to show that the whole thing was poised to topple with a thunderous crash. “He declared publicly against Bernini in the pope’s presence with all his heart and all his strength,” Domenico Bernini wrote in his biography of his father.
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Borromini and other jealous architects, wounded by years of papal neglect, beat their breasts. “These were the ruinous results visited on Rome,” they cried, “by those popes who were pleased to give all the work to one man alone, although there was an abundance of meritorious men in the city.”
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In the face of such vehement opposition to his bell towers, Bernini offered to work with other architects to study the foundations and perform tests over a period of time. Everyone on the commission except Borromini agreed that there was no imminent danger of collapse. The cautious pope found Bernini’s suggestion a wise one, and so the matter was left.

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But Bernini’s flamboyance got the better of his common sense. In February 1646, at the behest of Olimpia, he wrote and produced a Carnival play at her palazzo for a crowd of cardinals and nobility. Bernini made the sets and costumes and joined the young noblemen of Rome in acting. Unfortunately, the play made fun of the pope and the cardinal nephew. The ambassador of Modena, Francesco Mantovani, explained, “There was depicted in the play a youth who had good will but who never did anything and an old man who never could make up his mind.”
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Though the script has, tragically, been lost, we can still hear Olim-pia’s loud guffaws as she poked fun at her inept son and her indecisive brother-in-law. She must have seen no harm in it because other Bernini plays given at her palazzo poked fun at Olimpia herself, making her out to be a greedy, power-hungry vixen; she chuckled hardest at these.

When he heard about the play, the old man who could never make up his mind couldn’t make up his mind about it. Draped in his brittle dignity, Innocent had never been one to laugh at himself. He asked Cardinal Panciroli his opinion about Bernini’s play. The cardinal reassured him that it was just another silly piece of Carnival revelry that would soon be forgotten.

But the young man who never did anything was furious. Camillo complained bitterly to the pope that the play had his mother’s “tacit approval and reinforced the caricature of the cardinal nephew circulating at court.” He told his uncle the play was “foul.”
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Everyone in Rome was talking about it and making fun of him.

Camillo vowed to wreak his revenge. Though Olimpia seemed untouchable at the moment, Bernini was in a very delicate situation due to the bell towers. He was also fragile politically; the spoiled darling of the reviled Barberini family, he stood on a precipice, ready to tumble after them into the fissures of disgrace.

While the enemies of the Barberinis circled their prey, and the jealous architects of Rome pounced, it was the cardinal nephew who bit into the jugular. According to Bernini’s contemporary biographer, Filippo Baldi-nucci, when Innocent retired to an estate outside Rome for a few days, “enemies of Bernini and the Barberini family, especially a certain person

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semi-skilled in art whom the pope greatly trusted,” persuaded the pope “by intensive arguments” to have the bell towers torn down immediately.
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The certain person semi-skilled in art was Camillo.

It was reported that the pope also decided to fine Bernini the cost of dismantling and reconstructing the bell towers, a whopping 160,000 scudi. “It is a miracle that the
Cavaliere
has not been condemned to prison,” Mantovani marveled. But, the ambassador continued, Bernini tactfully gave Olimpia a thousand gold coins and presented Camillo with a valuable diamond ring given to him by Queen Henrietta Maria of England. The threat of a fine was dropped, but the beautiful half-built bell towers came down. Now Saint Peter’s would forever be too wide for its height.

For the first time in twenty-five years, Bernini was no longer the chief papal architect. Now Borromini, who had smoldered with ill-suppressed rage for decades, swaggered about the Vatican, dizzy with victory. It is not surprising that the stiff, uneasy pope was perhaps the only person in Rome who actually liked the stiff, uneasy Borromini. Bernini’s razzle-dazzle enthusiasm had frayed Innocent’s nerves.

Though disgraced, Bernini was allowed to complete the elaborate sepulcher of Urban VIII in Saint Peter’s that he had been sculpting on and off since 1628. It is just to the right of the far altar as the spectator looks at it, balanced by the equally magnificent monument of Paul III just to the left. The figure of Christ on the cross in the center caused some wits to call the statues of the nepotistic popes on either side the “two thieves.”

Bernini’s very public downfall and the triumph of his inveterate enemy made him ill for a while, and it seems that he sank into a deep depression. When he recovered, he found he had countless high-priced commissions from noblemen and cardinals for paintings and sculptures. But Bernini first made a statue for himself, a giant female image of Truth, which he kept in his home. This prompted Pasquino to quip that the only truth to be found in Rome was in Bernini’s palazzo.

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13

The Despised Daughter-in-Law

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Between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law, the devil is at work.

—Italian proverb

hough Camillo was bored by his work, he had never been bored by beautiful women. And indeed, the dashing cardinal nephew, with his flashing black eyes, glistening black curls, and swirling red robes, was the object of fascination of numerous noble Roman ladies. But Camillo, who flirted with many, was particularly fascinated by one of them, Olimpia Aldobrandini, the princess of Ros-sano, who was, unfortunately, the wife of Prince Paolo Borghese.

A slender woman who took up a great deal of space in a room, the princess of Rossano was the spectacular amalgamation of sparkling wit, exquisite breeding, a peerless papal bloodline, and radiant beauty. She had a gloriously rich mane of chestnut curls, strong black brows, and sparkling dark eyes. Her complexion was peaches and cream, her nose straight, her lips full and wavy. Her figure was perfect, and her taste in clothing exquisite. When the princess of Rossano entered a gathering, jaws dropped—even those of the oldest, most chaste cardinals.

In addition to being beautiful, she was spirited, bold, and confident, one of the few women in Rome considered well worth listening to.

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Swishing into a room with her long silken train, smiling and nodding to the men assembled there, she opened her mouth and they were spellbound. “Highly gifted by nature and by fortune,”
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Cardinal Pallavicino wrote of the princess, who was “furnished with intelligence, grace, and excellent power of speech.”
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Clothing styles had changed since Olimpia’s youth. Gone were the clunky wheel-shaped farthingales sticking out from the waist. Gone were the enormous platter-sized ruffs, the heavily embroidered and stiffly bejeweled velvets. By the 1640s women’s fashions had a flowing ease to them that had not been seen in well over a century. Women gleamed in shining silk that threatened to slip entirely off the shoulders. Their dé-colletage was so low it barely covered the nipples. A puffy undershirt poked through full elbow-length sleeves sliced open in front and held loosely together by jeweled pins, as if they had been placed there as an afterthought.

Hair, too, had completely changed. In Olimpia’s day it had been severely scraped back from the face, secured over horsehair pads or metal frames, and loaded with gems. Now it was cut shoulder-length and curled, swinging and bobbing gently as a lady nodded, with tiny pin curls framing the face. Large teardrop-shaped pearls were worn in the hair and ears.

When the princess of Rossano—all bouncing curls, gleaming silks, and lustrous pearls—swept into Olimpia’s palazzo the day after Innocent’s election to render her congratulations, the usually loquacious Ca-millo appeared to be struck dumb, his mouth agape. Many visitors chuckled at his mute ecstasy, but little account was taken of it; it was known, that particular month, that Camillo was in love with a ballerina.

Olimpia Aldobrandini had a most interesting and romantic story. She was related to Pope Paul III (Alessandro Farnese, reigned 1534–1549) and was a cousin of the Farnese duke of Parma. She was also the great-grandniece of Pope Clement VIII (Ippolito Aldobrandini), who had died in 1605, leaving enormous wealth to his cardinal nephew’s nephew, Ippolito Aldobrandini. By the time Cardinal Ippolito died in 1638, his only surviving relative was his niece, Olimpia, a girl of fifteen. Father

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Ridolfi, general of the Dominicans and a friend of her deceased uncle, placed her immediately in the Monastery of Saint Sixtus outside Rome to prevent her being kidnapped and forced to marry a man who could then claim her wealth.

The Barberinis had their eye on her, and while they were figuring out which young family member she would marry, they instructed the abbots that she was not to receive any visitors whatsoever. However, Father Ridolfi, looking out for the girl’s best interests, arranged a marriage with the heir to the Borghese fortune. The handsome Prince Paolo, sixteen, also belonged to a papal family. His grand-uncle Paul V (reigned 1605–1621) had siphoned off untold riches from the Vatican coffers, most of which had descended to the young man. In addition to owning the principality of Sulmona and several palaces, Paolo reportedly had four million gold pieces stashed in his house. One day Father Ridolfi secretly took the princess bride from the monastery to marry the young prince.

A few days later, Donna Costanza Magalotti, the mother of the Bar-berini cardinals and Prince Taddeo, arrived at the monastery to claim the girl. To her grinding chagrin, she found that the heiress had gone, and worse, that she was already married. A luscious fortune had slipped from the Barberini hands while they dillydallied. There was nothing they could do other than fire Father Ridolfi from his post as Domini-can general.

The young couple moved into the Villa Borghese, surrounded by extensive gardens, orchards, fountains, aviaries, and a zoo, on a hill just outside the main gate of Rome. It was also known as the Villa del Sale— the salt villa—because Paul V had put a tax on salt to pay for it. The villa was not a home so much as a museum, built by Cardinal Nephew Scipi-one Borghese to showcase the sculptures and paintings that he had begged, borrowed, bought, and stolen. From his uncle’s election in 1605 to Scipione’s death in 1633, whenever men digging holes came across a gorgeous statue or elegant mosaic, messengers raced to him with the news. Scipione, in turn, raced to buy the new discovery.

In addition to his ancient works of art, he had bought paintings by

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the best Renaissance artists—Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio—and owned some of the largest, most inspired sculptures by the young Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Scipione was even known to steal paintings off church walls, causing howls of protests, which his uncle the pope had to smooth over. His palazzo was a gorgeous home for the bride, though she had to be careful when moving about her airy, frescoed chambers not to knock over a statue.