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Bernini and the superb fountain of Trevi derive from Michelangelo on one side; Vignola's cold classic profiles and Palladio's resuscitation of old Rome in the Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza emerge upon the other.
Peter's, Rome, was originally made by Giotto. It has been much restored and altered, but some of the original design undoubtedly remains. Giotto went to Rome to undertake this work in 1298; but the present mosaic is largely the restoration of Bernini, who can hardly be considered as a sympathetic interpreter of the early Florentine style.
And that was the end of all, for since then Rome has little by little withdrawn from life, from the modern world, as though she, who always lived on what she derived from others, were dying of her inability to take anything more from them in order to convert it to her own glory. "Ah! Bernini, that delightful Bernini!" continued Narcisse with his rapturous air.
I made a good suggestion to Miss Hosmer for the design of a fountain, a lady bursting into tears, water gushing from a thousand pores, in literal translation of the phrase; and to call the statue "Niobe, all Tears." I doubt whether she adopts the idea; but Bernini would have been delighted with it.
The names of Bernini and of Piazza Navona recall Innocent the Tenth, who built the palace beside the Church of Saint Agnes, his meannesses, his nepotism, his weakness, and his miserable end; how his relatives stripped him of all they could lay hands on, and how at the last, when he died in the only shirt he possessed, covered by a single ragged blanket, his sister-in-law, Olimpia Maldachini, dragged from beneath his pallet bed the two small chests of money which he had succeeded in concealing to the end.
The celebrated sculptor Bernini, when re-erecting it at the command of Pope Alexander VII. in 1660, had the exceedingly bad taste to balance it on the back of a marble elephant, the work of his pupil Ferrata; on account of which absurd incongruity Bernini received from the satirical Roman populace the nickname of "The Elephant."
One of the most striking objects in the first casino was a group by Bernini, Pluto, an outrageously masculine and strenuous figure, heavily bearded, ravishing away a little, tender Proserpine, whom he holds aloft, while his forcible gripe impresses itself into her soft virgin flesh. It is very disagreeable, but it makes one feel that Bernini was a man of great ability.
I may be gone a week." "All right, Miss Conover." Bernini hid a smile. He knew all about this trip, having been advised by Cutty over the wire. "Am I being followed any more?" "Not that we know of. Still, you never can tell. What's your destination?" Kitty told him. "Better not go by train. I can get a fast roadster and run you out in a couple of hours.
At last, toward sundown, we stopped at the Porta Cavalleggieri, where, thanks to our lascia passare, we were detained but a minute, and then we were in Rome. Over us hung the great bulging dome of St. Peter's, golden with the last rays of sunset. The pillars of the gigantic colonnade of Bernini, as we jolted along, "seemed to be marching by," in broad platoons.
The dome of S. Peter's, as seen from Tivoli or the Alban hills, like a cloud upon the Campagna, is Buonarroti's; but he has no share in the façade that screens it from the piazza. It lies beyond the scope of this chapter to relate once more the history of the vicissitudes through which S. Peter's went between the days of Alberti and Bernini.
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