Mistress of the Vatican (42 page)

But unlike royal courts, the Vatican court had a theological problem with the selling of offices. Simony was the name for the buying and selling of spiritual things. In the biblical book of Acts, a magician named Simon saw the miracles worked by Peter and the apostles and offered them money to buy their spiritual power. Peter responded, “Your silver perish with you because you thought you could obtain God’s gift with money!” Over the centuries, popes and church councils had harshly forbidden simony and declared offices purchased with it to be held illegally.

Faced with the contradictory requirements of theology and finance, by the fifteenth century the church reached a compromise—only midlevel positions could be sold. Top Vatican positions, such as papal ministers or the datary, were too important to sell and were given to truly qualified men. On the other end of the spectrum, minor positions were to be bestowed free of charge on worthy prelates as a reward for years of hard service. Many clerics, having worked for decades in poor parishes comforting the sick and feeding the hungry, came to Rome to make it known that they would like some modest bequest—the income that came with running a small diocese, perhaps. Church committees were supposed to investigate these requests and grant them to worthy candidates. But for centuries the pope’s family members had sold even the most minor positions, pocketing the sales price.

By seventeenth-century standards, Innocent was thought to be financially incorrupt. Though he had given and received bribes on the

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way up, as everyone did, he was never accused in any capacity whatsoever of stealing money from the church, and his lifestyle had always been abstemious. And so, when Innocent appointed a datary on his very first day as pope, he chose the most honest man he knew. In March 1645, Innocent further rewarded Cecchini by bestowing on him the cardinal’s hat.

Born in 1589, Cecchini exercised his functions with great rectitude, accounting for every
bajocco
that came in or went out of the datary. This was a problem for Olimpia, who like most papal relatives expected a cut from datary transactions. Innocent would not live forever, and she would need every penny to keep the family afloat and out of jail during the next pontificate. She was losing huge amounts of money because of Cecchini’s stubborn honesty.

Olimpia had another bone to pick with Cecchini. The cardinal lived with a widowed sister-in-law, Clemenzia, a greedy, ambitious woman who was said to have a tremendous influence over him. It was a situation oddly similar to that of Olimpia and the pope, and in this case, too, people whispered that the two were having an affair. Because the hon-orable Cecchini did not accept outright bribes, the bribers went to Clem-enzia and loaded her with jewels and gifts, which she cheerfully accepted. Everyone in Rome knew that Clemenzia influenced the da-tary and Olimpia did not. Olimpia found that she was losing power and money by Cecchini’s honesty and Clemenzia’s greed.

Having studied Olimpia’s career path, Clemenzia had become a kind of mini-Olimpia and hoped to wheel and deal her brother-in-law onto the papal throne in the next conclave. He was, after all, an important and highly respected cardinal, and in 1647 he was fifty-eight, just two years shy of the
papabile
age of sixty. But Clemenzia was not so clever by half as Olimpia, who had studied human nature for decades and worked subtly.

The brash Clemenzia made fatal mistakes. She did not court the first lady of Rome. She did not offer to share her commissions, gifts, and bribes with her. Instead, she tried to upstage her at every opportunity. If Olimpia trotted around town in an elegant new coach and six, Clemen-zia bought a more luxurious one. If Olimpia gave a party, Clemenzia

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gave a bigger one. If Olimpia appeared in public shining in diamonds, Clemenzia appeared wearing brighter ones.

Clemenzia was no worthy rival, and it was an easy matter for Olim-pia to carefully aim a poison blow dart, puff up her cheeks, blow hard, and send it flying. It found its mark. Olimpia pointed out to Innocent that Clemenzia was prancing around Rome in new carriages, ablaze in jewels. She insinuated that his datary was, perhaps, not so incorrupt. Money that came into the datary to send to Jesuit missions abroad or build hospitals for the poor was obviously funding Clemenzia’s extravagant lifestyle. Innocent had been certain of Cecchini’s honesty, but as time passed, and Olimpia whispered, and Clemenzia pranced, he became unsure.

Cecchini’s subdatary, the number two man in the office, was not as incorruptible as his boss. Francesco Canonici, called Mascam-bruno, had been born a country bumpkin in 1610. As a young man he found a job as a scribe in the Roman law office of Camillo Mas-cambruno. The wealthy church lawyer became quite fond of his scribe, some said too fond, as a homosexual relationship was suspected. He adopted the younger man, giving him his name, and left him his entire estate.

Francesco Mascambruno first came to the attention of the Pamphili family in 1644 when Olimpia’s son-in-law Andrea Giustiniani hired him to transfer properties into his name from his uncle’s estate. The ambitious Mascambruno fastened himself to the new papal family like a leech, becoming especially close to Olimpia, rendering every possible service with great efficiency. At Olimpia’s instigation, the pope appointed Mascambruno the subdatary.

Mascambruno was an unusual Vatican bureaucrat. In contrast to the bright silks, frothy lace, and gleaming gold embroidery of his colleagues, he wore dark colors and plain fabrics. He seemed to be a frugal soul, a hardworking functionary with an obsequious manner. His winning formula was to slink silently into the background and pounce forward when needed, the indispensable man. He had a flat, broad face and strange eyes, his colleagues later recalled. Frightened eyes, as if always waiting for doom to strike. The French ambassador, Saint-Nicolas,

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wrote to Cardinal Mazarin that Mascambruno “was a dangerous type who was not thought of as very sincere.”
¹⁰

With Cecchini fired, Olimpia and Mascambruno could skim the datary profits. They set to work to convince the pope that Cecchini was not as honorable as he seemed. They were joined in their disparagement by Cardinal Panciroli, who was violently jealous of the pope’s affection for Cecchini. Panciroli told Innocent that Cecchini aspired to be the next pope—the sooner the better—and was supported in this aim by the grand duke of Tuscany. “Panzirole never missed an opportunity to vomit at me all his poison,” Cecchini wrote in his autobiography.
¹¹

The poison eventually had an effect. In a public audience on June 22, 1649, “the pope, saturated and stimulated by the slander of Donna Olimpia and Panzirole, was ready to burst . . . and called me a rascal, a rogue, and a simoniac.”
¹²
Innocent summoned the Swiss Guard and told them that Cecchini was never to show his face to the pope again.

After that outburst, everyone thought Cecchini was finished at the Vatican. Olimpia promised him she would convince the pope to send him away honorably to a bishopric far from Vatican intrigues. But it is likely that the pope was not so sure about the accusations after all; he did not take away Cecchini’s titles and incomes and allowed him to remain the datary in name. But Innocent no longer called for Cecchini to bring him the daily financial reports; he called for Mascambruno. Each day when Mascambruno returned from his papal audience, Cecchini, vegetating in his offices, asked him if the pope had mentioned him, and each day Mascambruno replied that he had not, but he certainly would soon. The datary waited uneasily, and his sister-in-law Clemenzia stopped prancing.

According to the Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Giustiniani, Olim-pia wrote up her own petitions and handed them to Mascambruno, who passed them on to the pope. Seeing they were from his sister-in-law, Innocent didn’t bother to read them but signed them and handed them back to Mascambruno.

Though the pope and Olimpia were unaware of it, Mascambruno began writing up his own petitions and presenting them as Olim-pia’s. The pope immediately signed them and handed them back,

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and Mascambruno found himself in the enviable position of selling papal indulgences and offices without having to split the money with a member of the pope’s family.

q

Throughout history, art has been a primary tool of propaganda, a means the powerful used to awe their subjects into submissive obedience. When poor wretches stood blinking in wonder at temples, pyramids, statues, and obelisks, they meekly emptied their pockets of their last penny to give to the tax man. It was clearly no use arguing with a power that could produce such marvels.

Art was also a means of grasping at eternity from beyond the grave. Olimpia knew that the pope would not live forever. Even worse, she would not live forever. And the line started by Camillo might dwindle and die out, as so many noble families did. But if she left behind her extraordinary palaces, gardens, and fountains, a part of Olimpia Maid-alchini Pamphili would live for all eternity, proclaiming the wealth, power, and position to which the dowerless girl from Viterbo had risen.

As work finished up on her magnificent Piazza Navona palace, Olimpia took a long hard look out her front windows and didn’t like what she saw. The vegetable sellers were long gone, by papal decree. But the plain fountains in the piazza—low enough for donkeys and horses to drink from—were unimpressive. She resolved to turn the area into a worthy replacement of Emperor Domitian’s grand marble stadium.

There was no room for a garden, of course, in the highly trafficked piazza, but Olimpia could create pleasure grounds nonetheless, complete with a resplendent fountain in the center, unique in all the world. When she discussed her plan with the pope, Innocent liked the idea of a fountain. He was also interested in resurrecting an obelisk that the emperor Caligula had brought to Rome from Egypt in the first century. The obelisk had been knocked down by Totila the Goth in a.d. 547 and now lay in five pieces, poking out of the dirt outside the Saint Se-bastian Gate. Innocent decided to incorporate the obelisk into the design of the fountain.

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He asked Francesco Borromini for ideas. Borromini suggested representing the four major rivers of the world—the Nile in Africa, the Danube in Europe, the Ganges in Asia, and the Plate in South Amer-ica, as the obelisk towered above them. Innocent was intrigued by Bor-romini’s idea and instructed him to divert water from the nearest aqueduct—the Acqua Vergine—to the Piazza Navona. The pope made tin and lead available for the pipes.

Moving the fallen obelisk to the Piazza Navona was an arduous engineering task. The heavy slabs were dug up and hoisted out of ditches with ropes and pulleys. Once on flat ground, each slab was harnessed to four pairs of buffalo and hauled, inch by painful inch, to its new location.

With the pipes in place and the obelisk ready for resurrection, Innocent held a competition for several artists to make models of the fountain, but he wasn’t thrilled by the results, not even by the model created by Borromini, which was stiffly somber. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who had been on the outs with the pope since 1646 when his bell towers had been dismantled, had not been invited to compete.

But Prince Ludovisi was a good friend of Bernini’s who felt that the artist had been given a raw deal. One day the prince asked Bernini to call on him, and when the sculptor arrived Ludovisi told him his secret plan. If Bernini would craft a model for the fountain, he would make sure that the pope saw it. A short time later, on August 15, 1647, when Innocent visited Olimpia for lunch, he walked by a table on which the prince had placed Bernini’s model of wood and gesso. The pope was thunderstruck by its originality and beauty. The rivers were represented by four enormous river gods; in its breathtaking entirety, the fountain was a baroque jumble of dramatic surprises.

“This design must be by Bernini!” Innocent cried. Bernini’s son Do-menico wrote that the pope walked around the model for half an hour, studying it from all angles. “The pope called for Bernini and apolo-gized for not having him work for him before, and ordered him to make the fountain according to his design.”
¹³

When Borromini heard that his ancient rival, whom he thought he had vanquished once and for all, had been given the enviable commission, he was foaming-at-the-mouth angry. It had been
his
idea to represent the

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four rivers.
He
had done the dirty, thankless grunt work of diverting the aqueduct and laying down the conduits. And now Bernini was to plunk his frothy creation on top and have all the credit and glory. Several times Borromini stormed into the pope’s presence screaming and stomping his feet. Many people thought that the episode had so unhinged the emotionally unstable Borromini that he would throw himself into the Tiber as the most dramatic protest possible.

To create his fountain, Bernini first built the travertine base, into which the obelisk was set in August 1649. He hired other sculptors to create four river gods according to his specifications. It is debatable exactly how much of the fountain Bernini carved. But he certainly created the design and supervised construction from beginning to end.