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Updated: June 13, 2025
Her Majesty Christina was out on one of her sight-seeing expeditions, in which old Bernini felt himself highly honoured to play guide, though she sometimes, as now, insisted on seeing sights which he would not willingly have shown her, and on hearing explanations which he would willingly have omitted.
To his first wife, he married Louisa Bernini, second daughter of the Count della Salario, a lady yet more distinguished for the sweetness of her manners and the gentleness of her disposition, than for her beauty. She brought the marquis one son and two daughters, who lost their amiable mother in early childhood.
When Bernini had brought his poor little martyr to her last gasp, he added that, while he declined to disparage the work of a late fellow-artist, he considered Pomarancio's paintings beneath criticism; he then paused and took snuff. The Queen smiled sarcastically at his last words. 'Without speaking well of you, Cavaliere, she said, 'I consider you as agreeable as you are famous.
Cold, damp weather at the beginning of October, a projected essay on Bernini, which had succeeded the projected novel, had persuaded Carlino to satisfy Signora Albacina sooner than he had intended, by leaving Villa Diedo before winter set in for the milder climate of Rome. This to the great joy of his sister. Two or three days after his arrival he had a slight attack of bronchitis.
It is lavished everywhere; in the Piazza Navona alone there are three fountains, but then the Piazza Navona is very long, and three fountains are few enough for it, even though one is that famous Fountain of Bernini, in which he has made one of the usual rivers the Nile, I believe holding his hand before his eyes in mock terror of the ungainly facade of a rival architect's church opposite, lest it shall fall and crush him.
March 7. The greatness of the place had taken me, and quite unexpectedly, at once: the pale shimmer of the marble and the gold, the little encampment of yellow lights ever so far off close to the ground at the Confession; and, above all, the spaciousness, the vast airiness and emptiness, which seemed in a way to be rather a mode of myself than a quality of the place. I had come to see, if I could, Pollaiolo's tomb in the Chapel of the Sacrament. I found the grating closed; and kneeling before it, a foreign northern-looking man, with grizzled, curly hair and beard, and a torn fustian coat and immense nailed shoes. He was muttering prayers, kissing his rosary or medal at intervals, and slightly prostrating himself. But what struck me, and apparently others (for people approached and stared), was his extraordinary intentness and fervour. He was certainly conscious of no one and nothing save whatever his eyes were fixed upon either the sacrament or the altar behind that railing, or merely some vision of his own. And he seemed not only different from everyone else, but separate, isolated from that vast place which made all the rest of us so small, such tiny details of itself. He was no detail, but an independent reality he and his prayer, his belief, his nailed shoes: all come who knows how far in what loneliness! I got the sacristan to open, and went in to see the tomb a mad masquerade thing, everything in wrong relief and showing the wrong side, the very virtues or sciences flat on their backs, so that you could not see them. And in the middle, presenting his stark bronze feet, the brown, mummied-looking, wicked pope, with great nose under his tiara. An insane thing more so than any Bernini monument, I thought. Perhaps it was the presence of that man praying away outside which affected me to think this. There he was, as little likely to move away, apparently, as the bronze pope stretched out, soles protruded, among the absurd allegories. I went also to see the Piet
From the Etruscans to our days, from that people, more ancient than the Romans themselves, and who resembled the Egyptians by the solidity of their works and the fantastical nature of their designs, from that people to Chevalier Bernini, an artist whose style resembles that of the Italian poets of the seventeenth century, we may observe the human mind at Rome, in the different characters of the arts, the edifices and the ruins.
He told me that he had himself planted all the cypresses in the cemetery; that he had the greatest attachment to them and to his dead people; that since 1801 they had buried fifty-three thousand persons. In showing some older monuments, there was that of a Roman girl of twenty, with a bust by Bernini.
"Fiddlesticks! All I've got to do in danger is to press a button, and presto! here's Bernini." "Kitty, did Hawksley pay you for that meal?" "Good heavens, no! What makes you ask that?" "In his delirium he spoke of having paid you. I didn't know." Cutty's heart began to rap against his ribs. Supposing, after all, Karlov hadn't the stones?
In the meantime, though she had nothing so complete to offer, she invited the Romans to hear such poetry as she could provide, and some excellent music; and Bernini, who could make anything look like anything else by means of whitewashed wooden columns, coarse draperies stiffened and whitened with wet plaster, and caryatides modelled in plaster and pasteboard, had improvised a Temple of Art for the performance.
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