R. A. Scotti (24 page)

I
n the first decade of the new century, near the gentle slope of the Pincio, Rome's eighth hill, twenty-seven-year-old Scipione Caffarelli Borghese, newly elevated to cardinal, was breaking ground for a beautiful park and charming palazzetto. Strolling through the gardens today or visiting the villa, now a museum, you might assume that Borghese is an old and noble name. By Roman standards anyway, the Borgheses were parvenus—an undistinguished family as recently as the Cinquecento. In those free-and-easy, pre-reform days, the Borgheses sought to better their lot by purchasing a venal office in the Curia.

Investing in Curial positions was a lucrative business. Families of modest means hoping to improve their status often begged, borrowed, and gambled their future to secure a post for an eldest son. If a young man was smart and shrewd, it was the first rung up the Curial ladder. After working in a venal office, he could sell it, often for a higher price than was paid, and with the profit, buy a better job.

For all its faults, the Church was a leveler. No special pedigree or piety was required to be pope, and the same was true for the men who worked under him. Curial jobs were open to all. Money might buy your way in the door, but brains and talent assured advancement. Church patronage served a variety of purposes, some of which, at first glance, seem incompatible. It was a means for powerful families to further entrench themselves. It was also a way for families of modest means to move up in the world.

The Borgheses scrimped, mortgaged their meager worldly goods, and bought the office of auditor of the Apostolic Chamber for the eldest son, Oratorio. No sooner was the transaction completed and Oratorio ensconced in the Curia than the family was threatened with ruin. Before any rewards could accrue to the Borgheses, Oratorio died.

Faced with financial collapse, the family appealed to the cardinal-chamberlain, who gave the position, bought so dearly, to the second son, Oratorio's brother Camillo. Few employment opportunities have had more lasting repercussions for St. Peter's Basilica, and few family gambles ever paid off as handsomely.

Camillo Borghese rose through the Curial ranks to become Pope Paul V. A stocky man, with a closely trimmed triangular beard and the stolidness of a prosperous burgher, Paul was a model of propriety. He was prudent, practical, and a paragon of most of the virtues that the Counter-Reformation deemed essential for advancement in the Church, but he had one conspicuous sin: nepotism. Perhaps because his family had risked so much, he could not resist lending a helping hand. His generosity made the Borgheses one of the most illustrious families in Rome.

While construction proceeded flawlessly on his nephew's villa, construction of St. Peter's halted abruptly. Except for the eastern apse and façade, the exterior of the Basilica was virtually finished, and anticipation was high throughout the city. Romans expected the new pope to consecrate St. Peter's at last. Instead of setting a date for the long-awaited ceremony, though, Paul called in the cardinals of the Fabbrica and sent them back to the drawing board.

He had several reservations about the Bramante-Michelangelo-della Porta design nearing completion—most notably its shape and its size. Paul dismissed the aesthetic and metaphorical concerns that had impelled the architects and their patrons. The Greek cross was Byzantine, he said—too obvious a reminder of the Orthodox schism at a time when the Holy See was recovering from the Protestant defection and redefining itself as the Church of Rome. Paul had practical concerns as well. The four equal arms would not accommodate the large crowds that attended the liturgical services, canonizations, and feasts; reduced in size by Michelangelo, the new Basilica did not even cover all the hallowed ground of the original.

In 1607, after much deliberation, Fabbrica officials proposed a competition to redraw the plans. The challenge was huge. The winner had to redesign a building that had already taken one hundred years, cost many fortunes, and was virtually complete. Even more daunting, he would be tampering with Michelangelo's final creation.

Five popes had given Michelangelo carte blanche and had refused to alter a stone in his plan. It was shocking enough that della Porta had redesigned the dome of “the divine Michelangelo.” Now the Basilica beneath it was about to change, as well.

In 1607 when the contest was announced, Constantine's church was still being used, protected from the construction site by Sangallo's dividing wall. More than 160 years after Alberti warned that its condition was dangerous and 100 years after Bramante began to raze it, about a fourth of the old church remained standing—the atrium, porch, and part of the nave. The hazard it posed was acute. The walls of the nave had cracked and were leaning in some three and a half feet from top to bottom. The wooden rafters and roof were on the verge of collapse. The situation had become urgent in 1605, when a large chunk of marble dislodged from a column and nearly crushed pilgrims at prayer, who ran screaming into the piazza.

Paul signed a final decree ordering the last of Constantine's church torn down immediately. Protesters, as vociferous as those who had denounced Bramante as il Ruinante, filled St. Peter's Square. The final demolition proceeded slowly and with great care over three years. On November 15, 1608, the last mass in Constantine's basilica was celebrated, then workmen brought down the huge wooden beams, three feet thick and as long as seventy-seven feet. Still discernible on one massive truss, rotted by age and gnawed through by rats, were the letters
CON
.

While the old basilica was disappearing, nine artists submitted plans to redraw the new Basilica, a third of them from the same family: Domenico Fontana, his brother Giovanni, and their nephew Carlo Maderno.

Maderno had started working on the Basilica as a stonecutter and learned various trades. Now at fifty-one, he beat his elderly uncles and won the competition to reinvent St. Peter's one last time. A carpenter named Giuseppe Biancho made a wooden model of Maderno's extension. It was last seen in 1667, in a storeroom with older models made by Bramante and Michelangelo. All have disappeared.

To convert the Basilica to a Latin cross, Maderno added three bays to the eastern arm, extending it by almost two hundred feet. Maderno respected Michelangelo's plan and diverged from it so seamlessly that the three additional bays don't feel grafted. They seem to extend organically from Michelangelo's cruciform and draw attention to it. When you stand in the nave, the Basilica spreads out before you.

For his new bays, Maderno retained the same titanic internal order of Corinthian pilasters, the arches, barrel vaults, and coffered ceilings. Thirty-two marble columns formed a path leading to the transept crossing. The appearance of the long nave was simple and dramatic. Granite aisles rose from a brick wall. Stucco pilasters stood on travertine bases. The elaborate marble and mosaic were added much later.

Because of the length of the nave and its distance from the outer walls, lighting posed a challenge. Maderno opened lower windows and perforated vaulting to allow more light into the nave, and sloped the portico roof to allow light from the upper windows to enter.

While the nave was taking shape, construction started on the façade. On November 21, 1610, thirteen horses drew the first column into place at the main doorjamb. Because of its huge size, ninety feet tall with a nine-foot diameter, the haulers probably used the same oak winches that had raised the obelisk to lift the first column into place. Satisfied with the job done, Maderno gave the men a deposit for the remaining seven columns.

Maderno's redesign was strikingly similar to Raphael's plan a century before. Both artists proposed a Latin cross with a wide façade flanked by bell towers. Higher, showier, and more ornamental than Michelangelo's portico, Maderno's façade is wide and columned—three stories high plus an attic. The imposing façade is 375 feet wide by 167 feet high from the ground to the attic and balustrade. In the center of the portico, directly above the new nave and equal to it in width, is the Benediction Balcony, a dramatic loggia from which the pope blesses the city and the world—
urbs et orbis—
the purview claimed by the Roman empire and the Roman Church. Christ and his apostles, each nineteen feet tall, stand in heroic proportions over the five entrances.

On May 16, 1612, Maderno closed the last vault of the portico. Fireworks lit up the skies over Rome, and word went out to every bishopric across Europe. Church bells pealed and Catholics offered prayers of thanksgiving. Although construction of the bell towers would not begin until autumn and the interior embellishment would go on much longer, after 165 years of planning, a century of construction, and too many false starts to count, the body of the Basilica appeared finished at last.

But one integral element was missing
—
a suitable approach to the grave of St. Peter. From the first stone, the new Basilica had risen to enshrine the bones of the apostle. The altar and dome formed a direct line above the crypt, and because Peter was the “confessor of faith,” the whole was called il Confessio di San Pietro.

Paul announced a second competition to design a Confessio, and the winner was again Maderno. To point the way to the underground chapel and grave, Maderno formed an entranceway in front of the papal altar. A double flight of marble stairs from the altar curve left and right, then come together at the door of the crypt.

 

Maderno labored on St. Peter's for twenty years and has been excoriated for five hundred years. Criticism began while the foundations of the nave were being laid. Maffeo Barberini, a newly elected cardinal who would become the next pope, took issue with Maderno's solution. His criticism ranged from the most particular—the kind of flower carved on the capital of a column—to the general principle of the Latin cross.

Although Barberini was appointed to the Fabbrica congregation too late to effect any substantial change, criticism of Paul V and Maderno continues to this day. The pope who had the audacity or foolishness to think he could improve on Michelangelo's design and the architect who committed the affront are often cast as the knaves of this creation story. But given the inflexible parameters set by Paul V—a Latin cross that covered the same ground as the original church and would accommodate great crowds—Maderno imagined a subtle solution. He gave the Basilica an interior space that holds fifty thousand people and a dramatic entrance.

A façade is always tricky. It is a two-dimensional form imposed on a three-dimensional space, and so it is inherently problematic. Maderno's façade is considered too wide in proportion to its height. But the arched openings at either end that create this impression were begun as bell towers. Construction of the campanili, which had reached the height of the Basilica attic, stopped when Paul V died in 1621.

Maderno's statues of Christ and the apostles that top the façade are also denigrated as grandiose and distracting. But no element of his design provokes louder lamentations than the nave. Although it may have been a practical imperative and an artistic compromise, Maderno's extension ruins the view of the dome from the piazza. The dream of Bramante, the marvel of Michelangelo, the achievement of della Porta, is blocked by Maderno's elongated nave. The full splendor of the Basilica dome can only be appreciated from a distance.

Both the Borghese pope and his Mannerist architect died before the Basilica was consecrated. Although their legacy has been debated ever since, they acted decisively and brought the grand enterprise to its conclusion. In case anyone forgets, incised across the portico in five-foot-high letters is a reminder:
IN HONOR OF THE PRINCE OF THE APOSTLES PAUL V BORGHESE BY NAME SUPREME ROMAN PONTIFF 1612 SEVENTH YEAR OF HIS PONTIFICATE
.

Camillo Borghese had made the most of his serendipitous career.

1,300 YEARS LATER

O
n November 18, 1626, thirteen hundred years to the day after Pope Sylvester I dedicated Constantine's church, Urban VIII consecrated the new Basilica of St. Peter. A row of cardinals in crimson cassocks and skullcaps, banked on each side of him like walls of flames, stood at solemn attention. Clouds of incense wafted over them and dissipated in the immense dome. The construction yard had been tidied for the occasion, the square swept clean, and long horizontal canopies of canvas extended from either end of the façade like the tails of the papal miter.

All of Rome turned out for the ceremony, just as it had when Julius II laid the first stone on that memorable April Sunday in 1506. Noble Roman families and Vatican bankers resplendent in the finest silks and brocades, the Swiss Guard halberd-straight and striking in their striped uniforms, the entire Curia, dignitaries, ambassadors, and legates from the courts of Europe, conquistadores back from the New World, artists and architects, stonecutters and carpenters, gilders and artisans of every kind, filled the nave of Maderno. They pressed against the piers of Bramante and crowded under the dome of Michelangelo and della Porta.

They came in carriages and cavalcades, intense young aspirants to the Society of Jesus in their black soutanes, Franciscan friars in rough brown habits, cinched at the waist with hemp, who had walked from Assisi, cowled Benedictines from as far south as the Abbey of Monte Cassino, princes and peasants, saints and sinners, clerics and laity. They streamed through the five doors and pushed into the aisles of the Basilica. The overflow crammed into the open square around the obelisk and jammed the surrounding streets.

Turning to face the throng, Urban VIII intoned the apostolic blessing, consecrating the new Basilica of St. Peter. It was a Roman holiday.

Bells pealed from every church in Rome, and those who couldn't attend in person paused in their homes and fields, in their shops and ateliers at the first chime. They looked to the west where the dome of all domes hung white on blue in the clarion day, and made the sign of the cross.

 

For sheer size, the building was a marvel. It was so high that the entire Pantheon could fit beneath its dome, and it covered an area so large that Notre Dame of Paris and Hagia Sophia in Istanbul could both fit inside it with room to spare.

Michelangelo had imagined a pure interior, the architectural space and articulation uncluttered by decorative embellishments, the porous and pockmarked travertine defining the space and giving the Basilica strength and transcendence. But infinitely patient artisans of mosaics and gilt were dressing the interior in a sumptuous display.

Since Nicholas V, twenty-seven popes over a span of 178 years had imagined this day. They had already spent 46,800,052 ducats
*
and paid an incalculable price—the Basilica of St. Peter had cost his successors the unity of the Church. And still the building was not done. The basic construction was complete, but the last genius to put his signature on the Basilica was just beginning his work.