The Age of Louis XIV

by Will Durant

  In Rome art was recovering from the restraints of the Counter Reformation. The popes returned in subdued measure to the spirit of the Renaissance, encouraging literature, drama, architecture, sculpture, and painting. Innocent X restored the Capitol and the Church of San Giovanni in Laterano. Alexander VII commissioned Bernini to raise a quadruple cordon of granite guardsmen around St. Peter’s Square (1655–67)—284 columns and 88 pilasters, successfully transmuting gold into stone. In the same reign Pietro da Cortona rebuilt the Church of Santa María della Pace, where Raphael’s Sibyls still pondered fate; and Girolamo Rainaldi joined with his son Carlo in erecting the handsome Church of Sant’ Agnese in the Piazza Navona. Father and son collaborated again in designing the Church of Gesù e María; and Carlo reared the shrine of Santa María in Campitelli to shelter an image of the Virgin which was believed to have stopped the plague of 1656. Cardinals and nobles housed and buried themselves palatially. Now rose the Palazzo Doria and the exuberantly baroque gallery in the Palazzo Colonna; and for the Bolognetti family, in the Church of Gesù e María, Francesco Cavallini carved a tomb that must have made the living envious of the dead.

  Many painters testified to the survival of their art in Rome. Carlo Maratti was courted there, in the second half of the seventeenth century, as the pictorial protagonist of late baroque. His portrait of Clement IX 21 remembered Velázquez’ Innocent X, but it came off well enough; his Madonna with Saints in Paradise 22 repeated a hundred such, but it is beautiful. When Clement XI wished to have Raphael’s Vatican frescoes restored he assigned to Maratti this delicate operation, dangerous to the restorer as well as to the pictures; and it was competently done. Giovanni Battista Gaulli (“II Baciccio”) was chosen by the Jesuits to paint the vault of their mother church, II Gesù, but they had in their own order one of the ablest artists of the time. Andrea Pozzo, who joined them at the age of twenty-three, designed in II Gesù the altar of St. Ignatius—one of the chefs-d’oeuvres of baroque. In 1692 Pozzo published a treatise, Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum, which made a stir in several languages. As fascinated with his subject as Uccello had been two centuries before, Andrea developed his studies with subtleties of illusionism, as in his frescoes in Frascati. Invited to Vienna by Prince von Liechtenstein, he exhausted himself with a multiplicity of undertakings, and died there in 1709, aged sixty-seven.

  The greatest Italian painters were now in Naples. Everything flourished there—music, art, literature, politics, drama, hunger, murder, and always the gay, furious, melodious pursuit of feminine curves by agitated men. Salvator Rosa was moved by all these elements of life. His father was an architect, an uncle taught him painting, his brother-in-law was a pupil of Ribera, and Salvator himself was in time admitted to that august studio. Another teacher transmitted to him the technique of drawing battle scenes. Salvator became especially famous for such pictures, which can be seen in the Naples Museo Nazionale or the Louvre. From battles he passed to landscapes, but there too his wild spirit favored Nature in her tantrums, as in the Louvre canvas of heavy clouds and darkened earth abruptly illuminated by lightning that in a moment shatters rocks and withers trees. Lanfranco persuaded him to go to Rome and cultivate cardinals; he went and prospered, but in 1646 he hurried back to Naples to participate in Masaniello’s revolt. When that collapsed he returned to Rome, painted high ecclesiastics, and wrote a scornful satire of ecclesiastical luxury. He accepted the invitation of Cardinal Giancarlo de’ Medici to come and live with him in Florence; there he remained nine years, painting, playing music, writing poetry, taking part in plays. Again in Rome, he took a house on the Pincian Hill, where Poussin and Lorrain had lived. The dignitaries of the Church, smiling at his tirades, and loving his brush more than his pen, flocked to him for portraits; for a decade he was the most popular painter in Italy. He made the customary pictures of saints and myths, but in his etchings he indulged his sympathy for poor soldiers and harassed peasants; and these etchings are among his finest works.

  His fame was rivaled only by another Neapolitan. Luca Giordano was already an artist at eight; then he painted, in the Church of Santa María la Nuova, two angels so graceful that the Viceroy, seeing them, marveled, and sent the boy some gold pieces, with a recommendation to Ribera. For nine years Luca studied with that brooding master, astonishing everyone with his readiness in copying masterpieces and imitating styles. He longed to go to Rome and examine the famous frescoes of Raphael, but his father, who lived by selling Luca’s paintings and drawings, protested. Luca absconded secretly; soon he was copying con furia in the Vatican, in St. Peter’s, in the Palazzo Farnese. His father followed him, and again lived by selling his son’s obiter picta; a story has it that Luca got his nickname, Fa-Presto, from his father’s urging him to speed.

  Having absorbed Rome, he went on to Venice and painted, in the manner of Titian and Correggio, pictures hardly distinguishable from their masterpieces. But he painted originals too, which won acclaim; we may judge them from the powerful Crucifixion and Deposition from the Cross in the Venetian Academy. Returning to Naples, he decorated a dozen churches and palaces with a competence and celerity that reduced his rivals to picking flaws. Invited to Florence by Cosimo III (1679), he won plaudits for his frescoes in the Cappella Corsini. His friend Carlo Dolci fell into such deep melancholy at seeing Luca’s success that he soon died; 23 fond Italy tells as many legends about her artists as about her saints. In another story the Spanish Viceroy at Naples commissioned a large panel for the Church of St. Francis Xavier; raged when, after long deferments, he found no work done on the assignment; and was amazed, two days later, to find it complete and beautiful. “The painter of this picture,” exclaimed the Viceroy, “is either an angel or a demon.” 24

  The fame of the demonic angel reached Madrid; soon Luca was pressed with invitations from Charles II to join the Spanish court. Though the King was approaching bankruptcy, he sent the artist a gratuity of fifteen hundred ducats, and put a royal galley at Luca’s disposal for the trip. When Giordano neared Madrid (1692), six royal coaches met him on the road. Soon thereafter, aged sixty-seven, Giordano began work in the Escorial. He adorned with frescoes the grand staircase of the monastery; and on the vault of the church he painted a “facsimile” of the heavens, showing Charles V and Philip II in Paradise—all their sins forgiven as a courtesy from the Trinity to the Hapsburgs. In the next two years he executed a large number of frescoes, which Spanish historians of art rank as the best ever made in the Escorial. 25 There and in the Alcazar, or royal palace, at Madrid, and at Buen Retiro and in the churches of Toledo and the capital, he painted so many pictures, with such industry, that his rivals taunted him with working eight hours a day and on holydays. Nor did it please them that he amassed an unseemly fortune, living abstemiously but buying costly jewels as a safe investment, since everything would change but human vanity. All the court honored him, and Charles II, in a lucid moment, called him greater than a king.

  Charles died in 1700. Giordano remained in Spain despite the consequent War of the Spanish Succession, and when Philip V came to the throne he continued to receive lucrative and difficult commissions. In 1702 he returned to Italy, stopped in Rome to kiss the papal foot, and reached Naples in triumph. On ceilings in the Certosa, or Carthusian Monastery, of San Martino, overlooking the city, he painted in forty-eight hours a series of frescoes that displayed an energy and skill almost incredible in a man of seventy-two years (1704). A year later he died, sighing, “O Napoli, sospiro mio!” (O Naples, breath of my life!) 26

  At his death his fame was equaled by that of no other artist in his generation. Dutch burgomasters competed with emperors and kings to buy his paintings, and in far-off England Matthew Prior sang the praises of “divine Jordain.” Laymen admired the richness of his colors, the force of his figures, the grandeur of his conceptions, the power of his presentation. But artists, recovering from this stupor mundi, pointed to the signs of haste in Luca Fa-Presto’s work, the incongruous mingling of pagan and Christian ideas
or subjects in the same scene, the strained or affected attitudes, the excessive glare of light, the absence of harmony and repose. Luca had long since replied to his critics by defining a good painter as one whom the public likes. 27 It is difficult to refute such a definition, since there is no objective standard of excellence or good taste; but we may find the least subjective test of greatness in the extent of a man’s influence in space and time, and the least subjective measure of a reputation in its ability to survive. Giordano had the happiness of a successful life, and feels no hurt from his dying fame.

  Francesco Solimena was forty-eight when Fa-Presto died, but his fourscore years and ten carried the Neapolitan school almost to the middle of the eighteenth century. Luca had painted the nave of the monastery at Monte Cassino; Francesco painted the choir; both works succumbed in the Second World War. But the museums preserve Solimena’s art: in Vienna The Rape of Oreithyia, a fleshly rapture of male muscles and female contours; in the Louvre an echo and challenge of Raphael in Heliodorus Driven from the Temple; and in Cremona a Madonna Addolorata accompanied by an angel so delectable that if heaven has many such we shall be reconciled to immortality.

  III. THE CHRISTINE ODYSSEY

  The arts were now but a small part of the cultural life of Rome. Here were also hundreds of musicians, poets, dramatists, scholars, and historians. Museums, libraries, and colleges offered the treasures of the past to the student, and academies gave encouragement to literature and science. The decorative conceits of Marini still infected Italian verse, but the sting of Tassoni’s satires, the fire of Marini’s sensualism, and the bubbling flow of Tasso’s stanzas had given Italian poetry a stimulus and an afflatus still felt in lyric souls.

  The greatest lyric poet of modern times, should we believe Macaulay, 28 was Vincenzo da Filicaia. He celebrated in grateful odes the deliverance of Vienna by Sobieski, he welcomed Christina to Rome with ecstatic flattery, and he voiced with angry shame the subjection of his country to foreign arms:

  Italia, O Italia, doomed to wear

  The fatal wreath of loveliness, and so

  The record of illimitable woe

  Branded forever on thy brow to bear!

  Would that less beauty and more vigor were

  Thy heritage! that they who madly glow

  For that which their own fury layeth low

  More terrible might find thee, or less fair! 29

  Henry Hallam, after wandering as a learned linguist through all the literature of Europe, thought that not Filicaia but Carlo Alessandro Guidi had “raised himself to the highest point that any lyric poet of Italy has attained,” and that “his ode on Fortune [was] at least equal to any in the Italian language.” 30 No one still uncomfortable in Italian can settle this dispute between Macaulay and Hallam, between Guidi and Petrarch, between Filicaia and Byron or Shelley or Keats.

  Guidi was one of several poets who warbled their rhymes in Christina’s Roman salon. The Queen of Sweden had formerly won renown not only as head of a great power but as a patron and paragon of learning, the eager hostess of Salmasius and Descartes. Now her abandonment of a crown for a faith, her conversion from the Protestantism that her father had died to save, and her pilgrimage through the courts of Europe to kiss the feet of the Pope—these were events that rivaled wars and revolutions in fascinating the European mind.

  She was twenty-eight years old when she left Sweden (1654). Her cousin Charles X, whom she had nominated to her throne, gave her fifty thousand crowns to gild her journey, and the Swedish Diet voted her a substantial income, and the rights of a queen over her retinue. Hurrying through Denmark, she reached Hamburg, where she scandalized the natives by putting up at the house of a Jewish financier, who as her financial agent had served her faithfully. She passed incognita through Protestant Holland, but in Catholic Antwerp she assumed her own dress. There she royally received the Archduke Leopold, and Elizabeth of Bohemia (another dethroned Queen), and Elizabeth’s daughter the Princess Elizabeth (another pupil of Descartes). Then to Brussels, where she was hailed with bonfires, fireworks, cannon salvos, and applauding crowds. For a time she gave herself joyously to balls, tournaments, hunting parties, and plays; Mazarin sent a company of actors from Paris to entertain her. On Christmas Eve she made private abjuration of the Lutheran faith, and announced her resolve to “listen to no more sermons.” 31 She dallied in Flanders while the Roman Curia prepared plans for her official reception into the Church and Italy. Leaving Brussels, she traveled leisurely into Austria. “At Innsbruck she made her formal profession of the Catholic creed. Her progress through Italy to Rome was as glorious as that of a victorious Caesar. Town after town adorned itself to greet her; fetes and spectacles were arranged in her honor at Mantua, Bologna, Faenza, Rimini, Pesaro, Ancona; at last (December 19, 1655) she entered Rome amid a blaze of illuminations that made a game of her disguise. On the morrow she proceeded to the Vatican and was welcomed by Alexander VII. After she had been three days in Rome she was escorted from it to make the formal entry that had been scheduled by the high ecclesiastics. Riding a white horse in prancing state, she passed through a triumphal arch and the Porta del Popolo into the city, between lines of soldiery and crowds of populace. It was as if the old Church felt that in the abjuration of one woman the whole Protestant Reformation had been annulled.

  All that consummated, Christina was allowed to rule her own days, receiving prelates, potentates, and pundits, visiting museums, libraries, academies, and ruins, and astonishing her guides by her knowledge of Italian history, literature, and art. The great families overwhelmed her with banquets, gifts, and compliments; Cardinal Colonna, aged fifty, fell in love with her, serenaded her, and had to be banished to save the dignity of the Church. Soon she found herself entangled in the rivalries of French and Spanish factions at the papal court. Sweden, financing with difficulty a war with Poland, interrupted the payment of her allotted revenue. She pawned her jewels, and received a loan from the Pope.

  In July, 1656, she set out on a visit to France. There too she was honored as a queen. She entered Paris on a white charger richly caparisoned; a thousand cavaliers rode forth to meet her; crowds cheered her; officials smothered her with oratorical flowers. The current Duc de Guise, sent by Mazarin to escort her, described her as

  not tall, but she has a plump waist and large hips, handsome arms, a white and well-made hand, but more that of a man than a woman. . . . The face is large without being out of shape. . . . Nose aquiline, mouth rather big but not disagreeable; . . . eyes very fine and full of fire. . . . A very odd headgear . . .: a man s wig, thick and high. . . . She is shod like a man, and she has the tone of voice and nearly all the actions of a man. She affects to play the amazon . . . She is very civil and cajoling, speaks eight languages, principally French—as well as if she were born in Paris. She knows more than our Academy with the Sorbonne added; understands painting admirably, as she does all other things. A very extraordinary person. 32

  She was lodged in the King’s apartment in the Louvre. Later the Duc de Guise led her to Compiègne, where she was received by Louis XIV, then a handsome lad of eighteen. Court ladies fluttered about her, but were disconcerted by her masculine dress and speech. Mme. de Motteville thought she “looked at first sight like a disreputable gypsy,” but “after . . . I began to get accustomed to her clothes . . . I noticed that her eyes were fine and sparkling, that there was gentleness in her face, and kindness mingled with pride. Finally I perceived with amazement that she pleased me.” 33 Generally, however, the women who embroidered French manners, fashions, gaiety, tact, and grace were offended by Christina’s carelessness in dress, her “immoderate laughter, [and] her freethinking in speech, as much on religion as on topics about which the proprieties of her sex demanded more reserve. . . . She professed to despise all women on account of their ignorance, and took pleasure in conversing with men, on evil topics as much as good ones. She observed none of the rules.” 34 Voltaire thought that the ladies of France judged this unruly queen t
oo harshly for her failure to follow the norm. “There was not,” he said, “one woman at the French court whose intellect was equal to hers.” 35 Christina, for her part, set down the court ladies as too affected, the men as too feminine, and both as insincere. At Senlis, on the way back from Compiègne to Paris, she asked to see “a demoiselle named Ninon [de Lenclos], celebrated for her vice, her loose way of living, her beauty, and her wit. To her alone, of all the women she saw in France, did she show any signs of regard.” 36 She found Ninon temporarily confined to a convent. Christina conversed gaily with her, and approved her avoidance of marriage. 37 After visiting the cultural institutions and notable art of France, Christina returned to Italy (November, 1656).

  In September, 1657, she visited France again. She was not as formally received as before, but she was lodged semiregally at Fontainebleau. There she alarmed France by what she appears to have thought a legitimate use of her royal rights over her retinue. The Marchese Monaldeschi, her equerry, entered into a conspiracy against her, which she detected by intercepting his letters. He made matters worse by accusing another on her staff of the plot. She confronted him with his incriminating letters; she ordered a priest to hear his confession and give him absolution, and then she had the Marchese put to death by her guards. France was shocked, and even those who recognized the rights which the Swedish Diet had granted her over her attendants were scandalized that so sudden and arbitrary a use of her authority had been made in rooms belonging to the King of France. Though Christina was allowed to spend that winter in Paris, enjoying plays and balls, the court was much relieved when she left for Italy (May, 1658).