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Updated: June 5, 2025
The next chapel to the Birth of the Virgin is that of the Sposalizio. There is no figure here which suggests Tabachetti, but still there are some very good ones. The best have no taint of barocco; the man who did them, whoever he may have been, had evidently a good deal of life and go, was taking reasonable pains, and did not know too much. Where this is the case no work can fail to please.
Upon the chapel of Saint Ives, unconsecrated now and turned into a lecture room of the University, a strange spiral tower shows the talents of Borromini, Bernini's rival, at their lowest ebb. So far as one can judge, the architect intended to represent realistically the arduous path of learning; but whatever he meant, the result is as bad a piece of Barocco as is to be found in Rome.
Ariosto's Alcina belongs to a different family of magnificent witches. Cremona, at this epoch, had a school of painters, influenced almost equally by the Venetians, the Milanese, and the Roman mannerists. The Campi family covered those grave Lombard vaults with stucco, fresco, and gilding in a style only just removed from the barocco.
For this emancipation of the art, all craftsmen owe him an infinite and everduring debt of gratitude, since he at one blow broke down the bands and chains which barred the path they trod in common." If I am right in thus interpreting an unusually incoherent passage of Vasari's criticism, no words could express more clearly the advent of Barocco mannerism.
It was typically a product of the Renaissance, but it came at the very end of that movement, when the freshness of its early vigour was past, when learning had declined into pedantry, and its graceful art was lost in barocco.
The grotesque barocco style of the Porta Pia, strong in its total outline, but whimsical and weak in decorative detail, may probably be ascribed to the same cause. It was sketched out by Michelangelo during the pontificate of Pius IV., and can hardly have been erected under his personal supervision.
Only those who have listened to a beautiful voice singing in the Lateran towards evening can understand that, in spite of the grievous disfigurements of the barocco age, and the exaggerated modern decorations of the nineteenth century, the 'Mother of all Churches, as the Basilica is called, can still seem the most deeply and truly hallowed place of worship in Christendom.
But it is most of all interesting for the nobility of its proportions and the simplicity of its architecture. It is undeniably, and almost undeniedly, the best building in Rome today, though that may not be saying much in a city which has been more exclusively the prey of the Barocco than any other.
Before this façade, on the marble pavement, prance the bronze equestrian statues of two Farnesi insignificant men, exaggerated horses, flying drapery as barocco as it is possible to be in style, but so splendidly toned with verdigris, so superb in their bravura attitude, and so happily placed in the line of two streets lending far vistas from the square into the town beyond, that it is difficult to criticise them seriously.
The next chapel to the Birth of the Virgin is that of the Sposalizio. There is no figure here which suggests Tabachetti, but still there are some very good ones. The best have no taint of barocco; the man who did them, whoever he may have been, had evidently a good deal of life and go, was taking reasonable pains, and did not know too much. Where this is the case no work can fail to please.
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