Mistress of the Vatican (17 page)

ith her masculine tastes, Olimpia was interested in science and often discussed scientific advances with great animation at her dinner parties. The most salacious scientific news in decades was the 1633 trial of the astronomer Galileo Galilei by the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The highly respected sixty-nine-year-old Florentine had been hauled before the tribunal for heresy because his new book suggested that the earth moved around the sun. Scripture, which the church considered infallible in matters of science, clearly stated that the sun traveled around the earth. When Joshua, for instance, had prayed for enough daylight to finish smiting the Amorites, God had heard his plea and made the sun stay its course. Nothing was said about God making the
earth
stay its course.

Galileo had not come up with the theory himself but had picked it up from Copernicus (1473–1543), whose work, ironically, had been admired by the Catholics as a scientific advance and lambasted by Martin Luther as anti-biblical. But attitudes had changed by the early seventeenth century. The church felt threatened by the increasing power of

W

M i s t r e s s o f t h e Vat i c a n

Protestant nations, by Rome’s decreasing importance in international politics, and by a flurry of new scientific theories that contradicted Catholic dogma. In 1616 the Inquisition had warned Galileo not to publish any more books on a heliocentric planetary system. “The view that the sun stands motionless at the center of the Universe is foolish, philosophically false and utterly heretical,” the Holy Office declared, “because contrary to Holy Scripture.”
¹

But in 1632 Galileo published a book called
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems,
a fictional discussion among three men on the structure of the solar system. The imbecile character Simplicio blindly defended the old cosmology with stupid arguments, which his more learned friends tore to shreds. Unfortunately, Simplicio greatly resembled Pope Urban VIII, who argued that God had the power to create whatever absurdities he wanted, and make it
look
like science. The blockheaded Simplicio explained that he clung to old science because its sheer antiquity made it more venerable than new discoveries.

“I must tell you I laughed my heart out when I came across Signor Simplicio,” one of Galileo’s friends wrote him.
²
But the pope didn’t think it was very funny. Since he’d become supreme pontiff, Urban’s ego had swollen. It was, most likely, not Galileo’s science as much as his ridicule of the pope that landed him in boiling water.

The Inquisition found him “vehemently suspected of heresy” for supporting the Copernican hypothesis. He was required to make a solemn recantation in which he “abjured, cursed and detested [his] errors and heresies.”
³
Due to his compliance, Galileo avoided being burned at the stake and was sentenced to life imprisonment. This sentence was commuted to house arrest due to Cardinal Francesco Bar-berini’s impassioned intercession for leniency. In addition, the scientist was required to recite the Seven Penitential Psalms once a week for three years.

Many churchmen with scientific interests warned the pope that condemning Galileo would unleash a rabid anti-Catholic reaction across Europe. They were right. Up north the heretics, who had been so violently opposed to Copernicus a century earlier, switched sides and now

[ 99 ]

Eleanor Herman

accused the superstitious Catholics of being stuck firmly in the muck of the Dark Ages. How, they asked between chuckles, could an entire sixteen-hundred-year-old theology be threatened by a telescope and a book?

The prestige of the Catholic Church dropped precipitously in learned and scientific circles, even among devout Catholics. Those in the Vatican knew that the quickest way to send Pope Urban into a foaming-at-the-mouth rage was to whisper the name
Galileo
. Fortunately for his reputation, Cardinal Pamphili would not be appointed to the Holy Office of the Inquisition until later in the decade, or else his name would have joined the list of numskull cardinals who had signed Galileo’s condemnation.

In 1634 Olimpia bought the two neighboring Teofili houses, one of which Gianbattista had been renting, and incorporated them into her own, thereby tripling the size of her residence and creating a true palazzo. As an important cardinal with papal aspirations, Gianbattista needed an impressive palace to hold audiences and entertain, and the narrow, jumbled Pamphili house had become an embarrassment. The architect Francesco Peperelli was hired to create a harmonious layout and an imposing façade.

For the better part of two years, from 1636 to 1638, the house bristled with scaffolding inside and out. Roofers crawled over the eaves, while carpenters, plasterers, and painters swarmed through the rooms, saws and paint buckets in hand. The sound of hammers rang throughout the corridors, and plaster dust coated the furniture. Olimpia kept a firm eye on the renovations, frequently meeting with artisans and inspecting their work.

Peperelli made a servant’s entrance out of the narrow alleyway that had separated the two houses and extended the rooms above. In the new part of the palazzo, he created a large ceremonial entrance, which led to a wide courtyard, with room for horses and carriages, and a monumental staircase that swept up to the cardinal’s waiting room.

The waiting room was where ambassadors, noblemen, and cardinals sat, chatting with the
maestro di casa,
eating snacks and drinking wine until Cardinal Pamphili could see them. This room was constructed

[ 100 ]

M i s t r e s s o f t h e Vat i c a n

from two floors of the old Teofili palace, each consisting of several rooms, to create one imposing chamber measuring some fifty by twenty-five feet, with twenty-five-foot ceilings. The new palace, though a great improvement over the old, was still not quite up to cardinalatial standards. The architect designed a false door at the end of the waiting room so visitors believed the house extended beyond it. It didn’t. Beyond the door was the de Rossi house.

Nor could the new house hold all the horses and carriages required for a cardinal. Records show that from 1639 to 1644 Olimpia paid the monthly rent for nearby stalls and a carriage-storage area at the request of her brother-in-law. Though Gianbattista was now wealthier than he ever had been, he was not one of the richest cardinals. He was, in fact, on the pope’s list of “poor cardinals,” those beneath a certain income level who received an honorarium to help them maintain the requisite princely lifestyle. While some cardinals had a staff of two hundred servants, Gianbattista employed only twenty-five. Records show that Pam-philio and Olimpia had another fifteen servants between the two of them.

In the extended palace the Pamphilis continued to rent out shops on the ground floor. Architectural sketches show room for sixteen shops, though some tenants might have rented two adjoining rooms. Tenants included a fruit seller, a flax vendor, a leather-goods store, a restaurant, a lute maker, a grocer, a barber, and a tailor.

As a cardinal, Gianbattista now trumped his brother in position and was given the best suite of rooms, facing the Piazza Navona. Olimpia moved to the back corner of the house, overlooking Pasquino. Pam-philio’s suite was at the rear of the house, overlooking the narrow Via dell’Anima. Olimpia’s rooms had inner doors opening onto the suites of her husband on the one side and her brother-in-law on the other.

With her larger palace, Olimpia was now in a position to hold musical events for Rome’s rich and powerful. If science was on the decline in the 1630s, theater and opera were on the upswing. The church limited theatrical performances to the anything-goes period of Carnival each Febru-ary, but many nobles, including Olimpia, spent months preparing for their shows. They held amateur performances in their palaces, writing

[ 101 ]

Eleanor Herman

the plays and music, creating the sets and costumes, and even acting and singing in them. Tragedies were popular—suicidal lovers, sacrificial virgins, and breast-beating heroes dying on the battlefield. But comedies were even more popular, and Olimpia particularly enjoyed putting on humorous plays poking fun at contemporary figures.

Theater made use of “machines,” contraptions of floats, pulleys, and levers that could lift actors and even horses into the air by means of almost invisible wires. Some machines held up to a hundred singing angels. Others were decorated as dragons, with flapping wings, swishing tails, and mouths that opened with a shriek to emit a fiery blast. Allegorical figures were extremely popular at the time; actors and actresses representing Divine Justice, Holy Religion, and Saintly Sacrifice would declaim onstage and then fly straight up to heaven.

Rome’s foremost artists contributed to these events. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an artist did not keep strictly to one discipline but was expected to be the master of many. Painters sculpted, sculptors painted, and both were hired as architects for palaces and churches. They were called upon by the powerful to design carriages, furniture, clothing, and even spun-sugar desserts in the shape of statues and buildings. And the rich commissioned them to design machines, extensive sets, and costumes for their Carnival performances.

The darkly handsome Gian Lorenzo Bernini, though known primarily for his genius in sculpting marble, undertook his many theatrical commissions with gusto. He was a showman, a ringmaster who loved to surprise, startle, and frighten with his elaborate stage sets and special effects. Bernini was particularly admired for creating a gradual sunrise and sunset, and for darkening the stage at the approach of a sudden storm, followed by thunder, lightning, hail, and rain. This was an impressive feat, considering he had only torches, oil lamps, and mirrors to work with.

But his most impressive effect was his frightfully realistic simulation of the flooding Tiber for Carnival 1638. The river, which had been represented onstage in the form of wide tanks with actors canoeing on them, was suddenly diverted into the audience as the stage sets collapsed. Thinking this was an accident, the alarmed spectators stood up

[ 102 ]

M i s t r e s s o f t h e Vat i c a n

ready to rush off but soon realized there was a large basin in front of them to catch the roaring waves, and it had all been part of the show.

Opera became popular in Venice in 1637 and spread like wildfire to other Italian cities. While most nobles held performances on a temporary stage set up in their largest room—the reception hall or ballroom— in 1640 Cardinal Antonio Barberini built a theater seating three thousand attached to his palazzo. He and his brother Francesco tried to surpass each other in giving the best operas, each spending thousands of scudi on a single performance.

The brothers were often so immersed in their competing productions that they forgot to visit their uncle the pope, leaving him cooling his heels in the Vatican while they fidgeted with stage sets. Particularly troubling was when the pope went to hear Mass sung in the Sistine Chapel and the pontifical choir was missing; they were at the Palazzo Barberini theater, rehearsing for the next opera.

Olimpia attended the Barberini operas and must have had a good laugh at the 1642 première of Antonio’s
The Enchanted Palace.
The performance, which had cost the cardinal eight thousand scudi, flopped due to malfunctioning machines. “His Eminence became fearfully enraged, threatening prison and similar things,” wrote the musician Ot-taviano Castelli to Cardinal Mazarin in France.
⁴

We aren’t told exactly how the machines malfunctioned, but it is tempting to imagine Divine Dignity toppling out of her flying chariot and landing on the stage below with a thud. Or perhaps a flying Christian Glory belting out an aria became stuck in the air, unable to descend, legs flailing helplessly until he was plucked to safety by a stagehand with a ladder. The audience, which was supposed to have been swept away by the glorious rapture of the moment, fell into paroxysms of laughter.

According to Castelli, the most irritating thing about it was that An-tonio’s own brother was seen laughing loudest of all. “It was believed that Cardinal [Francesco] Barberino laughed at seeing these disorders, as if from jealousy that Antonio had wished, with the display of a celebration superior to all the others, to obscure his own.”
⁵

Problems cropped up not only onstage but sometimes in the audience

[ 103 ]

Eleanor Herman

of noble guests as well. Competition for seats was fierce, and Cardinal Antonio kept order by marching up and down the aisles wielding a heavy stick, which he used to push unruly guests out of the way or to force people to sit more closely together. One evening before the performance started, the cardinal and several princely guests were seen giving one another the finger—yes, that particular gesture has been around for centuries—and calling one another sodomites.

Olimpia loved to attend her friends’ operas as well as their tragic and comedic plays. But she preferred to give her own performances, in which she reconstructed the world as she saw it—a colorful place of ridiculous characters, with everything supervised and directed by herself.