Mistress of the Vatican (27 page)

She hired a team of famous architects, the father and son Girolamo and Carlo Rainaldi, to do the designs, and Francesco Borromini to oversee the project. Olimpia met frequently with her architects, studying

T

Eleanor Herman

their drawings, three-dimensional models, and watercolor sketches of paintings suggested for the ceilings. The palace would not be finished until July 1648, and in the meantime Olimpia would have to live once more with hammering, scaffolding, and the ever-present sneeze-inducing film of plaster dust.

The final façade was five stories high and eightcen windows across, with four doorways and a balcony over each. A painting of her finished palazzo in 1651 shows it painted pale gray with white woodwork. Olim-pia’s carriage entrance remained the same, though the high double doors were now in the center of the palazzo instead of on the far right side. To the left of the courtyard was the same covered triumphal staircase of the cardinal’s palace. But on the right of the courtyard she had the old de Rossi house demolished and built four stories on top of magnificent arches through which horses and carriages could travel to a second courtyard, where the stables were kept.

Her private apartments—some seven rooms across the front of the palazzo facing the Piazza Navona—were, in seventeenth-century terms, in restrained good taste. The carved doorways were of red marble, splashed with white. The floors were parquet. The sixteen-foot coffered gilded ceilings depicted mythological scenes. Beneath them for about a yard, matching frescoes adorned the walls.

The baroque era was a time of decline politically and economically. The peach was a bit overripe, still beautiful and fragrant, but mold was beginning to form. After the perfection of the Renaissance, there was no place for art to evolve other than into wild excess. Painting comprised the heroic, the theatrical, and the colossal. It attempted not to re-create reality but to idealize it. Amidst sea monsters, dragons, saints, and angels, human bodies twisted and writhed, muscular, fleshy contrasts of light and shadow. Waves crashed. Ships floundered. Among the larger-than-life figures, mouths hung open in shock and eyes blazed with fury. Arms were raised to bestow a heavenly blessing or a fatal blow. And above it all, plump laughing cherubs tossed rose petals.

An extravagant manifestation of the glories of militant Catholicism, Roman baroque art was a counterweight to the decline of papal power. In fact, the word
baroque
was first used derisively by those classicists

[ 162 ]

M i s t r e s s o f t h e Vat i c a n

who disliked its melodrama. The word was derived from a Portuguese term that meant “deformed pearl.”

Uneasy about leaving any surface unadorned, baroque artists paid particular attention to the ceiling, that most neglected part of a modern room. When those of the twenty-first century enter a neighbor’s house, we never automatically throw back our heads to gape at the ceiling. If we did, we would no doubt be rewarded by the sight of white paint and a lightbulb. But in the seventeenth century, the observer would look up immediately to see clouds parting, revealing Paradise, and must have felt as if he could climb a ladder and just keep going right into heaven itself.

The most awe-inspiring ceiling of Olimpia’s expanded palace was at the end of her seven chambers facing the Piazza Navona. The reception room, designed by Borromini, stretched from the piazza all the way back to the Via dell’Anima. This chamber, measuring one hundred feet long and twenty-four feet wide, was used for balls and large receptions. It is called the
galleria
of Pietro da Cortona because the famous artist painted the story of Aeneas on the thirty-foot-high curved ceiling. Oddly enough, the pope was depicted as the god Neptune, bare-breasted and holding a trident, his right arm extended to quell the wind and waves. Around him naked youths blow conch shells, as laughing nude girls swim by. In the sky, worried cherubs hold the reins of white horses rearing out of the water.

In addition to her
galleria,
Olimpia created an enormous music room in the central section overlooking both courtyards. Here she staged her operas and comedies. The acoustics were almost perfect, a great advantage in an era without microphones.

But Olimpia had another building project in addition to the Piazza Navona palace. On October 7, 1645, Innocent named her the princess of San Martino, a church-owned territory three miles outside of Viterbo. The site included a medieval church and abbey and a few hunting lodges of the rich, including one owned by her brother, Andrea Maidal-chini.

Olimpia hired Francesco Borromini to design a suite of princely apartments on top of the fourteenth-century abbey and reinforce the

[ 163 ]

Eleanor Herman

load-bearing walls to sustain the extra weight. Suffering from arthritis in her knees, she could no longer walk up stairs. Borromini created a double snail staircase, a spiral within a spiral. The inside spiral comprised low, gentle stairs, and the larger outside spiral was a wider ramp of terra-cotta for her sedan chair or possibly her carriage.

She hired Gian Lorenzo Bernini to decorate the seven-room suite. The large room at the end of the palace was made into a papal audience chamber with a throne for Innocent when he came to visit. For this room Bernini designed a unique movable ceiling. Made of incredibly light wood, sculpted and painted with Innocent’s papal coat of arms, gilded garlands, and riotous flowers, the ceiling was attached to a series of ropes and levers. In cold weather it could be lowered by servants working from the crawlspace above. In warm weather, it could be raised.

Olimpia’s rooms are elegant, with intricately carved and gilded sixteen-foot ceilings and doorways of red marble spattered with white. The windows look out over the church and piazza, toward hills blue-gray in the mists. Oddly, Olimpia’s bedroom is very plain. It is the only room with a hidden spiral staircase in the wall going down to the first floor. The stairs were probably too steep for Olimpia’s aching knees, but perhaps they were used by messengers bringing her secret dispatches from Rome. As in the Piazza Navona palace, Olimpia’s bedroom was connected by a small inner door to the bedroom she designed for the pope. Unseen by servants or visitors, the pope and his sister-in-law could visit each other at night.

The new princess of San Martino set about creating a model town of some 250 houses around the church and palace; these she gave as dowries to dowerless girls who would otherwise have been forced to enter convents. Though documentation is lacking, it was said that she also invited fifty recently released convicts and fifty reformed prostitutes to San Martino with incentives to settle down.

Since time immemorial, European towns had always grown helter-skelter around a castle or river. San Martino, which Olimpia built in a slightly off-kilter form of the Piazza Navona, was one of Europe’s first planned towns and became a model for later urban design.

[ 164 ]

M i s t r e s s o f t h e Vat i c a n

While Olimpia rolled up her black silk sleeves to begin her construction projects, the new pope settled into his princely suites in the Vatican Palace, a rabbit’s warren of buildings, corridors, gardens, libraries, offices, and staircases connected to Saint Peter’s Basilica. Innocent lived surrounded by the greatest works of art of any palace in Europe.

From the 300s to the 1300s, the main Roman papal residence had been the Lateran Palace on the other side of town, connected to the Church of Saint John Lateran. Nicholas V (reigned 1447–1455) improved the Vati-can Palace, creating the clifflike pink building that still stands today, rising to the right of the basilica as the observer stands in the piazza. The papal apartments consisted of a series of antechambers, one leading into the other, culminating in an audience chamber, with the bedchamber behind that.

In the 1490s Pope Alexander VI had commissioned the famous artist Pinturicchio to paint the Borgia family in three large, dark rooms in the papal suite, which are today called the Borgia Apartments. But when his successor, the ill-tempered Julius II, moved into the rooms, he couldn’t bear to wake up each morning and look at his worst enemy, the fat-jowled Borgia pope, on his knees in prayer, sinking under the weight of his gold jewel-studded cope. Nor did Julius wish to see the pope’s daughter, the wiltingly beautiful Lucrezia, and her barbarous brother, Cesare, a sadistic gleam in his eye. In 1508 Julius moved into the suite of rooms a floor higher and commissioned Raphael to paint them. Here, when the pope woke up, he saw edifying works of ancient philosophers, saints, and popes disputing theology, and not a Borgia in sight.

It was across one of these glorious frescoes that during the Sack of 1527 a German soldier used his sword to scrawl, in three-foot-high letters, “Martin Luther.” As soon as the pope returned to the Vatican after the Sack, the graffiti was painted over, of course. But at certain times of day, when the light hit it just so, the name of the arch heretic could be seen as big as life in the pope’s apartments, and it can still be seen by tourists. Sixtus V (reigned 1585–1590) built a new wing of the Apostolic Palace with far more light and fresh air than the old residence. It was

[ 165 ]

Eleanor Herman

this wing that Innocent inhabited in 1644, and where popes have resided ever since, though they moved to the top floor in 1903.

Innocent’s Vatican household included countless secretaries, translators, notaries, accountants, scribes, and decoders. His kitchen served hundreds of meals a day to visitors and servants and employed squadrons of cooks, waiters, and wine stewards. A team of men looked after his clothes, working with launderers, tailors, and embroiderers. Others cared for his jewels, keeping them polished and in good repair.

Innocent had four masters of ceremonies, who planned all ceremonial events down to the last detail and dealt with the irksome issue of which individuals would have the seats of greatest honor. He had his own Sistine Chapel choir, consisting of men, boys, and castrati, who sang for him during his meals. It was said that the unnatural sweetness of the eunuchs’ voices caused the listeners’ hearts to break.

Though the new pontiff was pampered in every way by his efficient palace servants, Olimpia was not about to give up the homely services she had always performed for her brother-in-law. She personally looked after laundering his undergarments, which were delivered to her at the Piazza Navona. There she made certain that his shirts, stockings, and underpants were washed, bleached, starched, and pressed just the way the pope liked it. For this service Olimpia received a monthly salary of eighteen scudi from the papal treasury.

Olimpia’s shirt laundering for the pope would not have disturbed the Vatican power structure. This was a womanly task, the kind that many papal sisters- and nieces-in-law had performed over the years to the approbation of onlookers. That was, after all, what women were supposed to do, stay in the laundry to look after the needs of men. But naturally Olimpia did not limit her ambitions to a tub of hot soapy water.

One of Olimpia’s first acts after her brother-in-law’s election was to search for the priest of Viterbo whom she had accused of trying to sexually molest her nearly forty years earlier. The priest was found. His career had never gone anywhere due to the scandal of 1606. Olimpia called him into her audience chamber at the Piazza Navona and asked him where she would be at that moment if she had followed his advice and become a nun.

[ 166 ]

M i s t r e s s o f t h e Vat i c a n

The priest said with a sigh, “Most Excellent Signora, my goal was not to advise you to do evil.”

Olimpia replied, “No, but if I had done it, I would not have done well because I would not have become what I now am.”
¹

Then, to show him her absolute power, and to assuage the guilt that must have rankled subtly over the years, she had Innocent make him a bishop. Having made amends with the priest—sort of—Olimpia turned to helping oppressed women. She continued giving generously to nuns and was now in a position to assist another group of women forced into a life they would not have chosen under different circumstances—prostitutes.

Rome, a city with a large population of single men—priests and monks—and men who had left their wives back home—pilgrims and laborers from the countryside—had always boasted a thriving sex trade. The 1650 census reported 73,978 male residents of all ages and 52,214 females. These figures, however, did not include visitors, which would have inflated the preponderance of men even more. The census also listed 1,148 “courtesans” and 32 “concubines.” We are not sure what the difference was, but possibly a concubine was rented by one wealthy client for months at a time. And these were only the women who kissed and told. We can assume there were many more who kissed and clammed up.

In the Renaissance the
cortigiana onesta,
or honest courtesan, played the role of a geisha girl, reciting poetry, strumming the lute, and singing at Rome’s best gentlemen’s parties. Many of these women owned their own palaces and rode through the streets in luxurious carriages attended by several servants on horseback. Then there were the lowly
cortigiane alla candela
—candle tarts—who lit a little candle when their customers arrived and stopped working the moment the candle burned out.