The hills where its life rose,
And the sea where it goes.
Thus philosophically viewed, the baroque Rome—the Rome of Bernini, Borromini and Maderna, of Guercino, the Caracci and Claude Lorrain—becomes of great interest even to those who are not in sympathy with the exuberances of seventeenth-century art. In the first place, the great number of baroque buildings, churches, palaces and villas, the grandeur of their scale, and the happy incidents of their grouping, give a better idea than can elsewhere be obtained of the collective effects of which the style is capable. Thus viewed, it will be seen to be essentially a style de parade, the setting of the spectacular and external life which had developed from the more secluded civilization of the Renaissance as some blossom of immense size and dazzling colour may develop in the atmosphere of the forcing-house from a smaller and more delicate flower. The process was inevitable, and the result exemplifies the way in which new conditions will generate new forms of talent.
It is in moments of social and artistic transformation that original genius shows itself, and Bernini was the genius of the baroque movement. To those who study his work in the light of the conditions which produced it, he will appear as the natural interpreter of that sumptuous bravura period when the pomp of a revived ecclesiasticism and the elaborate etiquette of Spain were blent with a growing taste for country life, for the solemnities and amplitudes of nature. The mingling of these antagonistic interests has produced an art distinctive enough to take rank among the recognized “styles”: an art in which excessive formality and ostentation are tempered by a free play of line, as though the winds of heaven swept unhindered through the heavy draperies of a palace. It need not be denied that delicacy of detail, sobriety of means and the effect of repose were often sacrificed to these new requirements; but it is more fruitful to observe how skilfully Bernini and his best pupils managed to preserve the balance and rhythm of their bold compositions, and how seldom profusion led to incoherence. How successfully the Italian sense of form ruled over this semi-Spanish chaos of material, and drew forth from it the classic line, may be judged from the way in which the seventeenth-century churches about the Forum harmonize with the ruins of ancient Rome. Surely none but the most bigoted archæologist would wish away from that magic scene the façades of San Lorenzo in Miranda and of Santa Francesca Romana!
In this connection it might be well for the purist to consider what would be lost if the seventeenth-century Rome which he affects to ignore were actually blotted out. The Spanish Steps would of course disappear, with the palace of the Propaganda; so would the glorious Barberini palace, and Bernini’s neighbouring fountain of the Triton; the via delle Quattro Fontane, with its dripping river-gods emerging from their grottoes, and Borromini’s fantastic church of San Carlo at the head of the street, a kaleidoscope of whirling line and ornament, offset by the delicately classical circular cortile of the adjoining monastery. On the Quirinal hill, the palace of the Consulta would go, and the central portal of the Quirinal (a work of Bernini’s), as well as the splendid gateway of the Colonna gardens. The Colonna palace itself, dull and monotonous without, but within the very model of a magnificent pleasure-house, would likewise be effaced; so would many of the most characteristic buildings of the Corso—San Marcello, the Gesù, the Sciarra and Doria palaces, and the great Roman College. Gone, too, would be the Fountain of Trevi, and Lunghi’s gay little church of San Vincenzo ed Anastasio, which faces it so charmingly across the square; gone the pillared court-yard and great painted galleries of the Borghese palace, and the Fontana dei Termini with its beautiful group of adjoining churches; the great fountain of the piazza Navona, Lunghi’s stately façade of the Chiesa Nuova, and Borromini’s Oratory of San Filippo Neri; the monumental Fountain of the Acqua Paola on the Janiculan, the familiar “Angels of the Passion” on the bridge of Sant’ Angelo, and, in the heart of the Leonine City itself, the mighty sweep of Bernini’s marble colonnades and the flying spray of his Vatican fountains.
This enumeration includes but a small number of the baroque buildings of Rome, and the villas encircling the city have not been named, though nearly all, with their unmatched gardens, are due to the art of this “debased” period. But let the candid sight-seer—even he who has no tolerance of the seventeenth century, and to whom each of the above-named buildings may be, individually, an object of reprobation—let even this sectary of art ask himself how much of “mighty splendent Rome” would be left, were it possible to obliterate the buildings erected during the fever of architectural renovation which raged from the accession of Sixtus V to the last years of the seventeenth century. Whether or no he would deplore the loss of any one of these buildings, he would be constrained to own that collectively they go far toward composing the physiognomy of the Rome he loves. So far-spreading was the architectural renascence of the seventeenth century, and so vast were the opportunities afforded to its chief exponents, that every quarter of the ancient city is saturated with the bravura spirit of Bernini and Borromini. Some may think that Rome itself is the best defence of the baroque: that an art which could so envelop without eclipsing the mighty monuments amid which it was called to work, which could give expression to a brilliant present without jarring on a warlike or ascetic past, which could, in short, fuse Imperial and early Christian Rome with the city of Spanish ceremonial and post-Tridentine piety, needs no better justification than the Circumspice of Wren. But even those who remain unconverted, who cannot effect the transference of artistic and historic sympathy necessary to a real understanding of seventeenth-century architecture, should at least realize that the Rome which excites a passion of devotion such as no other city can inspire, the Rome for which travellers pine in absence, and to which they return again and again with the fresh ardour of discovery, is, externally at least, in great part the creation of the seventeenth century.
V
In Venice the foreground is Byzantine-Gothic, with an admixture of early Renaissance. It extends from the church of Torcello to the canvases of Tintoretto. This foreground has been celebrated in literature with a vehemence and profusion which have projected it still farther into the public consciousness, and more completely obscured the fact that there is another Venice, a background Venice, the Venice of the eighteenth century.
Eighteenth-century Venice was not always thus relegated to the background. It had its day, when tourists pronounced Saint Mark’s an example of “the barbarous Gothick,” and were better acquainted with the ridotto of San Moisè than with the monuments of the Frari. It is instructive to note that the Venice of that day had no galleries and no museums. Travellers did not go there to be edified, but to be amused; and one may fancy with what relief the young nobleman on the grand tour, sated with the marbles of Rome and the canvases of Parma and Bologna, turned aside for a moment to a city where enjoyment was the only art and life the only object of study. But while travellers were flocking to Venice to see its carnival and gaming-rooms, its public festivals and private casini, a generation of artists were at work brushing in the gay background of the scene, and quiet hands were recording, in a series of memorable little pictures, every phase of that last brilliant ebullition of the joie de vivre before “the kissing had to stop.”
Longhena and his pupils were the architects of this bright mise en scène, Tiepolo was its great scene-painter, and Canaletto, Guardi and Longhi were the historians who captured every phrase and gesture with such delicacy and precision that under their hands the glittering Venice of the “Toccata of Galuppi” lies outspread like a butterfly with the bloom on its wings.
Externally, Venice did not undergo the same renovation as Rome. As she was at the close of the Renaissance, with the impress of Palladio and Sansovino on her religious and secular architecture, so she remains to this day. One original architect, Baldassare Longhena, struck the note of a brilliant barocchismo in the churches of Santa Maria della Salute and the Scalzi, and in the Pesaro and Rezzonico palaces on the Grand Canal; and his pupils, developing his manner with infinitely less talent, gave to Venice the long squat Dogana with its flying Fortune fronting the Lagoon, the churches of Santa Maria Zobenigo, San Moisè and the Gesuiti, the Monte di Pietà, and a score of imposing palaces. The main effect of the city was, however, little modified by this brief flowering of the baroque. Venice has always stamped every new fashion with her own personality, and Longhena’s architecture seems merely the hot-house efflorescence of the style of Sansovino and Scamozzi. Being, moreover, less under the sway of the Church than any other Italian state, she was able to resist the architectural livery with which the great Jesuit subjugation clad the rest of Italy. The spirit of the eighteenth century therefore expressed itself rather in her expanding social life, and in the decorative arts which attend on such drawing-room revivals. Skilful stuccatori adorned the old saloons and galleries with fresh gilding and mirrors, slender furniture replaced the monumental cabinets which Venice had borrowed from Spain, and little genre-pictures by Longhi and landscapes by Canaletto and Battaglia were hung on the large-patterned damask of the boudoir walls. Religion followed the same lines, adapting itself to the elegancies of the drawing-room, and six noble families recognized their social obligations to heaven by erecting the sumptuous church of Santa Maria degli Scalzi, with its palatial interior, in which one may well imagine the heavenly hostess saying to her noble donators: “Couvrez-vous, mes cousins.”