It was Innocent X.’s ambition to remove the great obelisk (since called ‘Obelisco Pamfilio’) which lay in three pieces in the Circo di Massenzio, near the Appian Way, and to set it up in Piazza Navona. Bernini being, as I have said, in disfavour, other architects were commissioned to offer designs for the work; but the Pope was not satisfied with any of them, and the matter stood over. Meantime Piombino (Niccolò Ludovisi) who had married a niece of the Pope’s, and who was a great friend of Bernini, privately instructed him to send him a model of what he would suggest for the purpose, saying he wanted it for his own satisfaction, lest Bernini should refuse the unauthorised competition. Bernini then produced the elaborate conception which has been so warmly extolled by some and so hastily blamed by others, but which cannot be judged without a prolonged study of all the poetical allegories and conceits it was his intention to embody.
The Pope went to the house of Donna Olimpia in Piazza Navona to dine after the Procession to the Minerva on the Annunciation,[9] and she placed the model in a room through which the Pope must pass after dinner. It did not fail to arrest his notice, and he was so much struck with it that he spent half an hour examining it in detail and listening to the explanation of its emblematical devices. At last he exclaimed, ‘It can be by no other hand than Bernini’s! and he must be employed in spite of all that may be said against him!’ From that time Bernini was once more all that he had been before in Rome (Mercato, § ix.). When Innocent saw the great work completed, and the water of the four rivers for the first time gushing from it, he declared to Bernini he had given him pleasure great enough to add ten years to his life; and he sent over to Donna Olimpia for a hundred ‘Doppie’[10] to distribute among the workmen. Subsequently he had a medal struck with the inscription Agonalium cruore abluto Aqua Vergine, in allusion to the games of which Piazza Navona is supposed[11] to have been the scene, and the ‘Vergine’ aqueduct from which the fountains were supplied. ‘Papa Pamfili’ also restored St. John Lateran, and undertook many other works, but was somewhat hampered by the discontent of the people at the expense, expressed in the following pasquinades:
‘Noi volemo altro che guglie e fontane:
Pane volemo, pane! pane! pane!’
and
‘Ut lapides isti panes fiant!’
To return to Donna Olimpia. One of the pasquinades on her preserved in Cancellieri from Gigli’s diary, refers to an accusation against her, that she had been very liberal both to religious communities and to the people until her brother-in-law[12] was made Pope, and that when that object was attained she ceased her bounty. Pasquin wrote upon this, ‘Donna Olimpia fuerat olim pia, nunc impia.’
Another declared that the said brother-in-law ‘Olympiam potius quam Olympum respicere videbatur,’ an accusation he declares to have been invented solely for the sake of punning, and without any truth, on faith of the character given him by his biographers, and of the fact that he was more than seventy-one when raised to the Papacy, and so deformed and ugly that Guido put his portrait under the feet of the archangel in his famous picture of St. Michael. (Mercato, Appendix, n. 4 to N. x.) She was, however, sometimes inexcusable in her haughty caprices, as, for instance, when she invited five and twenty Roman ladies to see a pageant, and then asked only eight of them to sit down to table with her, leaving the remainder ‘mortificate alle finestre;’ and frequently more free than choice in her mots. Her grandchildren seem to have inherited this freedom of speech; Gigli (quoted by Cancellieri, Mercato § xvi. and xx.) records in his Diary that the eldest of them, Giambattista, being asked one day by the Pope, who took great notice of him, if he had seen St. Agnese in Piazza Navona, which he was then building, replied (though only seven years old), ‘I have not seen it yet; but you, if you don’t make haste, won’t live to see it completed.’ It would seem to have been a popular prophecy which the child had caught up, and it so happens that the event bore it out.
There is nothing, however, which shows the heartless character of Donna Olimpia more glaringly than her refusal to pay a farthing to bury the Pope, alleging she was ‘only a poor widow!’ and this, though the Pope had not only ‘favoured her so much as to endanger his reputation,’[13] but had handed to her all his disposable property on his deathbed. Donna Olimpia so utterly abandoned his body that it was carried down into a lumber-room where workmen kept their tools, and one poor labourer had the charity to buy a tallow candle to burn beside it, and another paid some one to watch it, to keep the mice off which abounded there. Finally, a Mgr. Scotti, his maggiordomo, paid for a coffin of ‘albuccio,’[14] and a former maggiordomo, whom he had dispossessed, gave five scudi (returning good for evil) to pay the expenses of burying him. It was not till twelve years later that he had a fitting funeral in S. Maria dell’ Anima.
When a few months after Innocent’s death Donna Olimpia endeavoured to put herself on her old footing at the Vatican Court, by sending a valuable present of some gold vases to Alexander VII., that Pope testified his appreciation of her by returning her offering; adding the message that she was not to take the trouble to visit his palace, as it was no place for women.[15] There was subsequently some angry correspondence between her and this Pope concerning the delays occasioned by her parsimony in completing the church in Piazza Navona, and the consequent obstruction of the Piazza, a great inconvenience to the public on account of its use as a market-place. Finally he banished her from Rome, fixing her residence at Orvieto, where she fell a victim to the plague two years after.