Borromini at the Lateran

by Joseph Connors, appearing in Volume 46

As splendid as the Lateran basilica is, it can be confusing to the first-time visitor. For one thing, one approaches and enters the church from the rear. The main roads from the historic city lead from the Colosseum or from Santa Maria Maggiore to a grand piazza. There one finds the largest obelisk in the world and an enormous palace that is technically the home of the pope, the Seat of the Holy See. All this is the work of Pope Sixtus V (1585-90). To create this ensemble, he swept away the venerable Lateran Patriarchate and the Early Christian Oratory of the Holy Cross. Until recent security measures, one entered the church under his imposing benediction loggia only to find that this is the entrance to the transept. Nevertheless, for the past few centuries a visit to the Lateran began at this end of the church.

The transept, added to the Constantinian basilica by Pope Nicholas IV (1288-92), is larger than most Roman churches. It was splendidly decorated under Pope Clement VIII (1592-1605) at the start of the Baroque period. One passes under a majestic organ on the inner façade designed by a famed woodworker and antiquarian, Giovanni Battista Montano. At the other end one sees the altar of the Sacrament, framed by four ancient bronze columns. The tabernacle in the center, made of semi-precious stones and gilt bronze, is like a miniature Saint Peter’s. The walls seem at first hung with tapestries, but these are frescoes which depict the Constantinian origins of the basilica. At its center stands a Gothic altar twice the size of any other altar of this period. It was built in 1367-70 by the Avignon pope, Urban V, who returned to Rome and intended to stay, though in the end, he returned to France and died there. Until the Napoleonic depredations, a cage on the upper level contained sliver reliquaries with the heads of the Apostles Peter and Paul, jewel-studded masterpieces of the medieval goldsmith’s art. Today one sees bland nineteenth-century replacements. To get an idea of their splendor one can go to Catania in Sicily, where the reliquary of the head of Saint Agatha, paraded once a year, is by the same Sienese goldsmith, Giovanni di Bartolo.

In the imagery on the transept ceiling, the visitor will find three images that mark the evolving dedication of the church. Constantine’s dedication was to the Savior, who appears in the center. The two Saints John are medieval accretions. John the Baptist, who was the patron of the baptistery from the beginning, moved into the church in the eighth century. John the Evangelist entered the dedication in 1144-45. Eventually both overshadowed the original dedication, though we are reminded of the Savior at key points, including a privileged position in the eighteenth-century façade.

It is only when one reaches the center of the transept that the visitor becomes fully aware that the main body of the church lies to the left. The nave could not be more different from the transept. It was restored with much rebuilding by the great Baroque architect Francesco Borromini (1599-1667) working for Pope Innocent X (1644-55). The pope had been raised in the heady days when Saint Philip Neri and his Oratorians were encouraging veneration of the early Christian antiquities of Rome. He did not want to repeat the wholesale destruction that had accompanied the construction of Saint Peter’s. He instructed Borromini not to change the plan of Constantine’s church but to keep it as a central nave with two aisles on each side. Where possible, some of the old walls were to be kept. The motto, put succinctly, was “antiquity preserved, beauty added” (“et vetustas servaretur, et venustas adderetur”).

The most precious spolia, the columns of verde antico marble that separated the inner and outer aisles, were to be re-used in the new church. Borromini incorporated twenty-four of them into the twelve statue niches that give the nave drama and color. Otherwise his color scheme was mostly white over a dark marble base. For richer areas of color in the nave, one must look at features that ante-date Borromini. These are easy to find by looking down or looking up.

The Cosmatesque floor was introduced (or at least restored) by Martin V Colonna (1417-31), the pope who definitively returned the papacy to Rome after the long “captivity” in Avignon. The symbol of his family, the heraldic column, was set into squares at the center of the opus sectile pavement, while Colonna shields were painted on the piers. Martin V commissioned the greatest painters of his time, Gentile da Fabriano and, after his death, Pisanello, to fresco the side walls of the nave with a cycle commemorating the medieval dedications. Neither Martin V nor his painters lived long enough to progress more than halfway down the north wall. Though only half-finished and today destroyed, the idea of a pope covering a space this majestic with a vast fresco program inspired a pope of the next generation to repeat the attempt. Fifty years after Martin V, Pope Sixtus IV (1471-84) called in a team of painters from Umbria and Florence to fresco a similar space, the chapel named after him at the Vatican.

Martin V was buried under a bronze slab tomb cast by Donatello or his workshop. It was originally placed in front of the Gothic altar, raised a few feet higher than the pavement. Today it sits on the floor of a neo-Gothic confessio sunk several meters below pavement level. This is an arrangement of 1853, an attempt to emulate the confessio of Saint Peter’s. However, it is important to remember that there was no underground dimension to Constantine’s church. It was built over the foundations of a huge barracks, that of the Equites Singulares, mounted cavalry who were disbanded after taking the wrong side at the battle of the Milvian Bridge. Unlike Saint Peter’s, the Lateran was not a funeral basilica focused on a sacred tomb but simply the place of assembly of the Christian community under its bishop.

One also finds color by looking up. Eighty years before Borromini began his restoration, Pope Pius IV Medici (1559-65) commissioned a sumptuous ceiling over the nave. The beams and emblems are gilt, while the backdrop is blue. Michelangelo was said to have made a design for it in old age but, whatever the truth of that story, his disciple Daniele da Volterra produced the model in wood and papier mâché with gilt highlights. The expert woodworker Flaminio Boulanger carried it out, beginning in 1562, when Pius IV had only two more years to live,  finishing it under his successor, Pius V. Today one sees three huge papal arms on the ceiling: those of Pius IV, of Pius V and of Pius VI Braschi (1775-99), the last pope to restore it. The coffers show profiles of Peter and Paul with their attributes, among which the cock that crowed had special significance since the column on which it perched was preserved among the relics of the church. Liturgical symbols, such as censers, thuribles, and candles, alternate with symbols of the two Saints John, a font for the Baptist and the chalice of poison “that harmed him not” for the Evangelist.

Borromini’s Nave

The ceiling was kept in place while Borromini rebuilt the nave below it. The two walls are made up of six piers separated by high arches. Each pier is a structural and visual unit, bounded by a pair of colossal pilasters. Each contains, from bottom to top, a colorful marble statue niche, a narrative scene in stucco and an oval wreath of flowers or palm leaves. In the niches one finds powerful marble colossi of the twelve apostles, statues that were envisaged from the beginning but carved only in 1706-18 by celebrated sculptors of the day. They seem to stride into the nave, passing through marble doors at the back of their niches as though through the gates of the heavenly Jerusalem.

The best place to take in this drama is the high altar, reserved exclusively for Masses said by the pope and the cardinal bishops. From this vantage, the piers seem to march down the nave in stately fashion, bending towards the entrance, which itself curves forcefully inwards. On a good day the nave can be brilliantly lit. “Luminous, decorated, and beautiful” are the words of an early Borromini biographer, Giovanni Battista Passeri, “and full of curiosities.” The cleverest of these features comes into sight over the entrance. Here the visitor, looking up, looks through an open oculus to what seems like a heavenly vision, a dove descending in clouds of glory.

The Lateran nave is one of the largest interiors in Rome. To find the human scale, one turns to the side aisles. They are among Borromini’s most impressive creations. Over the inner aisles, dark barrel vaults alternate with bright sail vaults irradiated with a glow from what the architect called light chambers (camere di luce). Over the outer aisles there are cove vaults supported on flat beams, twenty-one per aisle, which make a powerful repetitious sequence when seen from either end. Each beam is really a flat arch (piattabanda) reinforced with iron chains. An illusion of weightlessness is created by the pairs of seraphim who seem to hold up the beams, ninety-two for each pair of aisles. As one gets closer to the high altar these huge angelic infants turn towards it, their mouths open in song.

Under enormous pressure, after three tumultuous years at the worksite, the church was opened for the Holy Year of 1650. Borromini obeyed the injunction of Innocent X to follow the Constantinian plan and preserve elements of the original structure. The oval wreaths at the top of the piers, today filled with eighteenth-century canvases of prophets, were for the moment left empty to show patches of bare wall, proof that the older building had been preserved. After the fires of the Middle Ages, however, precious little of the original fabric remained. Borromini was celebrated in his day for restoring the Basilica Salvatoris of Constantine. But it would be more accurate to say that, in the name of Constantine, he encased a medieval ruin inside a Baroque reliquary.

Monuments

The next pope, Alexander VII (1655-67) did not look kindly on the restoration. His main advisor, Monsignor Cesare Rasponi from Ravenna, was a canon of the Lateran who had been studying the church since his youth. He dedicated a great book to his papal patron, De Basilica et Patriarchio Lateranensi (1656). A chapter in it celebrates the restoration, and it includes the first plates to show Borromini’s interior. But a sense of loss pervades the text. Alexander VII was a partisan of Bernini, and though he showed some tolerance for Borromini, it was without enthusiasm. The architect was told to re-instate some of the medieval tombs that had been removed and close up shop.

From the death of Pope Leo the Great in 461 until the beginning of the tenth century, most popes chose to be buried in Saint Peter’s, hoping to be near the apostles on the Last Day. Beginning with Leo V, however, who died in 904, and then with some regularity around 1000, popes preferred the Lateran. In the end, about twenty popes were buried there. The first tombs were simple floor slabs, but in the twelfth century, popes began to show a preference for more visible monuments, especially re-used ancient sarcophagi.

Most of the tombs survived in fragments of disparate size, some little more than a portrait or an inscription. Borromini made them equal by attaching them to the backs of the great nave piers inside elaborate frames. The inner aisle on the north side became a kind of papal row. Here Borromini installed the monuments of Popes Sylvester II (d. 1003), Sergius IV (d. 1012) and Boniface VIII (d. 1303), the last great pope before the Avignon Captivity. This was neither a tomb nor a cenotaph but rather one of the largest picture frames ever made. At its center is a small fragment of a fresco by Giotto that came from the demolished benediction loggia of Boniface VIII. The top of the monument is heavy on heraldry, not only the shield of the Caetani, the pope’s family, but also the oak and acorns of the Chigi, honoring the reigning pope.

Alexander VII was annoyed when anyone suggested that he had taken his papal name from Alexander VI (1492-1503), the Borgia pope whose reputation was hardly stellar. He insisted that his role model was the Sienese pope Alexander III Bandinelli (1159-81), a great medieval diplomat who struggled to free Rome and the cities of the Lombard League from the heavy hand of Frederick Barbarossa. A boyhood friend of Alexander VII from Siena who was now a member of the papal court, Cardinal Volunnio Bandinelli, was a descendant of this noble family. He sponsored a monument to the medieval Alexander that was also meant to flatter the reigning Pope Alexander.

The Alexander III monument is the grandest of papal row. It takes the form of an Etruscan funeral urn of colossal size. Built of black marble and giallo di Siena, it has a long inscription. The tone is regal and triumphant. It mentions the saints that Alexander III canonized: Thomas à Becket of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, King Edward the Confessor of England and the Danish king Cnut Lavard. Perhaps the mention of two kings was meant to impress Alexander VII’s nemesis, the aggressive young king of France, Louis XIV, who would soon make the pope’s favorite artist, Bernini, travel to Paris against the pope’s wishes.

Lesser prelates also had tombs disturbed in the restoration. Fragments of some were re-erected in the outer aisles. The south outer aisle might be called penitential row for the sad inscriptions on some of the tombs. The monument to “Cardinal” Riccardo Annibaldi (who was not, in fact, a cardinal) in the last bay near the entrance is especially doleful. Borromini installed the gisant, the sculptural effigy of the deceased prelate, a precious work by the great medieval sculptor Arnolfo di Cambio, under the figure of Death crowned as king, surrounded by symbols of time (a broken hourglass) and sin (the serpent with an apple).

Time and decay also haunted the basilica. Before Borromini, it was structurally weak but was nevertheless a stirring sacred space. The Passion narratives of Holy Week were brought home to pilgrims when they saw the stone on which the soldiers rolled dice for the cloak or the column on which the cock crowed. The washing of the feet was re-enacted on Maundy Thursday in a church that claimed to have the vessels used by Christ and the table of the first Eucharist.

Much of this was swept away in the restoration. Borromini imposed a unified design revolving around a few key themes: the presence of the Apostles in the Heavenly Jerusalem, the revival of the Constantinian typological cycle, and the exhibition of fragments of old wall in the twelve reliquary ovals at the top of the main piers. A portrait of Innocent X was positioned over the passage into the palace to remind future popes of the pontiff who refused to let the plan of Constantine’s church be altered, no matter how much else was changed.

After Borromini: Façade and Choir

Borromini offered the pope designs for a new papal altar and for a façade. Both were refused. After his death, his drawings for a façade circulated among other architects. There was a false start in the early 1700s. The wealthy prelate who wanted to finish Borromini’s façade, Cardinal Benedetto Pamphilj, the last of the family of Pope Innocent X, made a huge donation, but the work was sidetracked to complete the colossal sculptures in the nave. When it finally came time to begin the façade in 1731-32, cooler stylistic winds were blowing. The commission went to the Florentine Alessandro Galilei, an architect who had absorbed the principles of Palladian design while working in Ireland.

The Lateran façade may seem to us less energetic than the great scenographic creations of the Roman Baroque. However, to the world of reformers who clustered around its patron, Pope Clement XII Corsini (1730-40), it was a truer statement of the values of the early Church. What we see as somber and severe was for them a return to the spirit of the age of Constantine.

Galilei rejected curves and counter-curves in favor of a rigid straightness, both vertical and horizontal. He wanted to show how Maderno’s façade of Saint Peter’s could be reformed. He took over the giant order from Saint Peter’s but with only four columns, not eight. His columns and pilasters stand on high bases and rise uninterrupted until they encounter the heavy horizontals of the main cornice and balustrade.

Galilei pulled down the medieval portico but re-used four of its granite columns in his benediction loggia. He also copied a famous inscription from the portico in medieval lettering in the architrave that runs across the middle of the façade. It begins Dogmate Papali and goes on to affirm that, by decree of pope and emperor, the Lateran is the Mother and Head (mater et caput) of all churches. In the pediment, Galilei inserted a copy of the face of Christ that appears in the apse mosaic. Called the vultus Christi, this was thought to be older than the rest of the thirteenth-century mosaic and was venerated as a miraculous image from the age of Constantine. The inscription invokes the original dedication to “Christo Salvatori.” Galilei covered the entrance portico with lavish revetments. It is from this sea of colored marbles that, on the rare occasions when the antique bronze doors are opened, one enters the chaste whiteness of Borromini’s New Jerusalem.

The architectural history of the Lateran did not end with the façade. The medieval apse attached to the transept always felt cramped. There was hardly room for the pope and cardinals, not to mention canons and musicians. Enlarging it posed problems, however. There was the question of stylistic unity. Should a new choir match the transept of 1600 or Borromini’s entirely different nave?

The great printmaker and antiquarian Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) had always imagined himself to be an architect, though without opportunities to build. He was Venetian by birth, and when a Venetian from the Rezzonico family became Pope Clement XIII (1758-69) his hopes rose. The pope and the Lateran chapter felt it was time to expand the Lateran choir and in 1763-64 Piranesi submitted five projects in twenty beautiful drawings. All continue the architecture of the nave in the choir though with subtle transformations. The stucco reliefs in the nave become balconies for musicians in the choir, while the statue niches house organs. The kind of vault that Borromini was not allowed to build in the nave dominates the choir in some of the projects. In one, not only the choir but the transept is remade in the form of the nave. Piranesi’s project went nowhere. This was the last time that anyone thought the Borromini nave worthy to dominate the entire church.

When Pope Leo XIII Pecci (1878-1903) commissioned the architect Virginio Vespignani to build the new choir in 1878-84, it was the transept’s turn to dominate. Vespignani demolished the old apse and rebuilt it further back, thus allowing room for a spacious choir, complete with organ and balconies for musicians. He revetted the side walls with lavish marble panels on the model of the transept. Changing modes, he decorated the apse around the bishop’s throne with neo-Cosmatesque work in imitation of the medieval cloister. The craftsmanship is superb. Today even observant visitors tend not to realize that the choir is a work of the nineteenth century rather than 1300 or 1600. The tables have been turned from Piranesi’s time. Borromini’s nave now seems the interloper.