Those who have seen revolutions can guess at the desperate fighting in the barricaded streets, and at the well-guarded bridges from one end of the city to the other. Backwards and forwards the battle raged for days and weeks, by day and night, with small time for rest and refreshment.
Forward rode the Colonna, the stolid Germans, Henry himself, the eagle of the Empire waving in the dim streets beside the flag that displayed the simple column in a plain field. It is not hard to hear and see it all again--the clanging gallop of armoured knights, princes, n.o.bles and bishops, with visors down, and long swords and maces in their hands, the high, fierce cries of the light-armed footmen, the bowmen and the slingers, the roar of the rabble rout behind, the shrill voices of women at upper windows, peering down for the face of brother, husband, or lover in the dashing press below,--the dust, the heat, the fierce June sunshine blazing on broad steel, and the deep, black shadows putting out all light as the bands rush past. Then, on a sudden, the answering shout of the Orsini, the standard of the Bear, the Bourbon lilies of Anjou, the scarlet and white colours of the Guelph house, the great black horses, and the dark mail--the enemies surging together in the street like swift rivers of loose iron meeting in a stone channel, with a rending crash and the quick hammering of steel raining desperate blows on steel--horses rearing their height, footmen crushed, knights reeling in the saddle, sparks flying, steel-clad arms and long swords whirling in great circles through the air. Foremost of all in fight the Bishop of Liege, his purple mantle flying back from his corselet, trampling down everything, sworn to win the barricade or die, riding at it like a madman, forcing his horse up to it over the heaps of quivering bodies that made a causeway, leaping it alone at last, like a demon in air, and standing in the thick of the Orsini, slaying to right and left.
In an instant they had him down and bound and prisoner, one man against a thousand; and they fastened him behind a man-at-arms, on the crupper, to take him into Sant" Angelo alive. But a soldier, whose brother he had slain a moment earlier, followed stealthily on foot and sought the joint in the back of the armour, and ran in his pike quickly, and killed him--"whereof," says the chronicle, "was great pity, for the Bishop was a man of high courage and authority." But on the other side of the barricade, those who had followed him so far, and lost him, felt their hearts sink, for not one of them could do what he had done; and after that, though they fought a whole month longer, they had but little hope of ever getting to the Vatican. So the Colonna took Henry up to the Lateran, where they were masters, and he was crowned there by three cardinals in the Pope"s stead, while the Orsini remained grimly intrenched in their own quarter, and each party held its own, even after Henry had prudently retired to Tivoli, in the hills.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ISLAND IN THE TIBER]
At last the great houses made a truce and a compromise, by which they attempted to govern Rome jointly, and chose Sciarra--the same who had taken Pope Boniface prisoner in Anagni--and Matteo Orsini of Monte Giordano, to be Senators together; and there was peace between them for a time, in the year in which Rienzi was born. But in that very year, as though foreshadowing his destiny, the rabble of Rome rose up, and chose a dictator; and somehow, by surprise or treachery, he got possession of the Barons" chief fortresses, and of Sant" Angelo, and set up the standard of terror against the n.o.bles. In a few days he sacked and burned their strongholds, and the high and mighty lords who had made the reigning Pope, and had fought to an issue for the Crown of the Holy Roman Empire, were conquered, humiliated and imprisoned by an upstart plebeian of Trastevere. The portcullis of Monte Giordano was lifted, and the mysterious gates were thrown wide to the curiosity of a populace drunk with victory; Giovanni degli Stefaneschi issued edicts of sovereign power from the sacred precincts of the Capitol; and the vagabond thieves of Rome feasted in the lordly halls of the Colonna palace. But though the tribune and the people could seize Rome, outnumbering the n.o.bles as ten to one, they had neither the means nor the organization to besiege the fortified towns of the great houses, which hemmed in the city and the Campagna on every side. Thither the n.o.bles retired to recruit fresh armies among their retainers, to forge new swords in their own smithies, and to concert new plans for recovering their ancient domination; and thence they returned in their strength, from their towers and their towns and fortresses, from Palestrina and Subiaco, Genazzano, San Vito and Paliano on the south, and from Bracciano and Galera and Anguillara, and all the Orsini castles on the north, to teach the people of Rome the great truth of those days, that "aristocracy" meant not the careless supremacy of the n.o.bly born, but the power of the strongest hands and the coolest heads to take and hold. Back came Colonna and Orsini, and the people, who a few months earlier had acclaimed their dictator in a fit of justifiable ill-temper against their masters, opened the gates for the n.o.bles again, and no man lifted a hand to help Giovanni degli Stefaneschi, when the men-at-arms bound him and dragged him off to prison. Strange to say, no further vengeance was taken upon him, and for once in their history, the n.o.bles shed no blood in revenge for a mortal injury.
No man could count the tragedies that swept over the Region of Ponte from the first outbreak of war between the Orsini and the Colonna, till Paolo Giordano Orsini, the last of the elder branch, breathed out his life in exile under the ban of Sixtus the Fifth, three hundred years later. There was no end of them till then, and there was little interruption of them while they lasted; there is no stone left standing from those days in that great quarter that may not have been splashed with their fierce blood, nor is there, perhaps, a church or chapel within their old holding into which an Orsini has not been borne dead or dying from some deadly fight. Even today it is gloomy, and the broad modern street, which swept down a straight harvest of memories through the quarter to the very Bridge of Sant" Angelo, has left the mediaeval shadows on each side as dark as ever. Of the three parts of the city, which still recall the Middle Age most vividly, namely, the neighbourhood of San Pietro in Vincoli, in the first Region, the by-ways of Trastevere and the Region of Ponte, the latter is by far the most interesting. It was the abode of the Orsini; it was also the chief place of business for the bankers and money-changers who congregated there under the comparatively secure protection of the Guelph lords; and it was the quarter of prisons, of tortures, and of executions both secret and public. The names of the streets had terrible meaning: there was the Vicolo della Corda, and the Corda was the rope by which criminals were hoisted twenty feet in the air, and allowed to drop till their toes were just above the ground; there was the Piazza della Berlina Vecchia, the place of the Old Pillory; there was a little church known as the "Church of the Gallows"; and there was a lane ominously called Vicolo dello Mastro; the Mastro was the Master of judicial executions, in other words, the Executioner himself. Before the Castle of Sant" Angelo stood the permanent gallows, rarely long unoccupied, and from an upper window of the dark Torre di Nona, on the hither side of the bridge, a rope hung swinging slowly in the wind, sometimes with a human body at the end of it, sometimes without. It was the place, and that was the manner, of executions that took place in the night. In Via di Monserrato stood the old fortress of the Savelli, long ago converted into a prison, and called the Corte Savella, the most terrible of all Roman dungeons for the horror of damp darkness, for ever a.s.sociated with Beatrice Cenci"s trial and death. Through those very streets she was taken in the cart to the little open s.p.a.ce before the bridge, where she laid down her life upon the scaffold three hundred years ago, and left her story of offended innocence, of revenge and of expiation, which will not be forgotten while Rome is remembered.
Beatrice Cenci"s story has been often told, but nowhere more clearly and justly than in Sh.e.l.ley"s famous letter, written to explain his play.
There are several ma.n.u.script accounts of the last scene at the Ponte Sant" Angelo, and I myself have lately read one, written by a contemporary and not elsewhere mentioned, but differing only from the rest in the horrible realism with which the picture is presented. The truth is plain enough; the unspeakable crimes of Francesco Cenci, his more than inhuman cruelty to his children and his wives, his monstrous l.u.s.t and devilish nature, outdo anything to be found in any history of the world, not excepting the private lives of Tiberius, Nero, or Commodus. His daughter and his second wife killed him in his sleep. His death was merciful and swift, in an age when far less crimes were visited with tortures at the very name of which we shudder. They were driven to absolute desperation, and the world has forgiven them their one quick blow, struck for freedom, for woman"s honour and for life itself in the dim castle of Petrella. Tormented with rack and cord they all confessed the deed, save Beatrice, whom no bodily pain could move; and if Paolo Santacroce had not murdered his mother for her money before their death was determined, Clement the Eighth would have pardoned them.
But the times were evil, an example was called for, Santacroce had escaped to Brescia, and the Pope"s heart was hardened against the Cenci.
[Ill.u.s.tration: BRIDGE OF SANT" ANGELO]
They died bravely, there at the head of the bridge, in the calm May morning, in the midst of a vast and restless crowd, among whom more than one person was killed by accident, as by the falling of a pot of flowers from a high window, and by the breaking down of a balcony over a shop, where too many had crowded in to see. The old house opposite looked down upon the scene, and the people watched Beatrice Cenci die from those same arched windows. Above the sea of faces, high on the wooden scaffold, rises the tall figure of a lovely girl, her hair gleaming in the sunshine like threads of dazzling gold, her marvellous blue eyes turned up to Heaven, her fresh young dimpled face not pale with fear, her exquisite lips moving softly as she repeats the De Profundis of her last appeal to G.o.d. Let the axe not fall. Let her stand there for ever in the spotless purity that cost her life on earth and set her name for ever among the high constellated stars of maidenly romance.
Close by the bridge, just opposite the Torre di Nona, stood the "Lion Inn," once kept by the beautiful Vanozza de Catanei, the mother of Rodrigo Borgia"s children, of Caesar, and Gandia, and Lucrezia, and the place was her property still when she was nominally married to her second husband, Carlo Ca.n.a.le, the keeper of the prison across the way.
In the changing vicissitudes of the city, the Torre di Nona made way for the once famous Apollo Theatre, built upon the lower dungeons and foundations, and Faust"s demon companion rose to the stage out of the depths that had heard the groans of tortured criminals; the theatre itself disappeared a few years ago in the works for improving the Tiber"s banks, and a name is all that remains of a fact that made men tremble. In the late destruction, the old houses opposite were not altogether pulled down, but were sliced, as it were, through their roofs and rooms, at a safe angle; and there, no doubt, are still standing portions of Vanozza"s inn, while far below, the cellars where she kept her wine free of excise, by papal privilege, are still as cool and silent as ever.
Not far beyond her hostelry stands another Inn, famous from early days and still open to such travellers as deign to accept its poor hospitality. It is an inn for the people now, for wine carters, and the better sort of hill peasants; it was once the best and most fashionable in Rome, and there the great Montaigne once dwelt, and is believed to have written at least a part of his famous Essay on Vanity. It is the Albergo dell" Orso, the "Bear Inn," and perhaps it is not a coincidence that Vanozza"s sign of the Lion should have faced the approach to the Leonine City beyond the Tiber, and that the sign of the Bear, "The Orsini Arms," as an English innkeeper would christen it, should have been the princ.i.p.al resort of the kind in a quarter which was three-fourths the property and altogether the possession of the great house that overshadowed it, from Monte Giordano on the one side, and from Pompey"s Theatre on the other.
The temporary fall of the Orsini at the end of the sixteenth century came about by one of the most extraordinary concatenations of events to be found in the chronicles. The story has filled more than one volume and is nevertheless very far from complete; nor is it possible, since the destruction of the Orsini archives, to reconstruct it with absolute accuracy. Briefly told, it is this.
Felice Peretti, monk and Cardinal of Montalto, and still nominally one of the so-called "poor cardinals" who received from the Pope a daily allowance known as "the Dish," had nevertheless acc.u.mulated a good deal of property before he became Pope under the name of Sixtus the Fifth, and had brought some of his relatives to Rome. Among these was his well beloved nephew, Francesco Peretti, for whom he naturally sought an advantageous marriage. There was at that time in Rome a notary, named Accoramboni, a native of the Marches of Ancona and a man of some wealth and of good repute. He had one daughter, Vittoria, a girl of excessive vanity, as ambitious as she was vain and as singularly beautiful as she was ambitious. But she was also clever in a remarkable degree, and seems to have had no difficulty in hiding her bad qualities. Francesco Peretti fell in love with her, the Cardinal approved the match, though he was a man not easily deceived, and the two were married and settled in the Villa Negroni, which the Cardinal had built near the Baths of Diocletian. Having attained her first object, Vittoria took less pains to play the saint, and began to dress with unbecoming magnificence and to live on a very extravagant scale. Her name became a byword in Rome and her lovely face was one of the city"s sights. The Cardinal, devotedly attached to his nephew, disapproved of the latter"s young wife and regretted the many gifts he had bestowed upon her. Like most clever men, too, he was more than reasonably angry at having been deceived in his judgment of a girl"s character. So far, there is nothing not commonplace about the tale.
At that time Paolo Giordano Orsini, the head of the house, Duke of Bracciano and lord of a hundred domains, was one of the greatest personages in Italy. No longer young and already enormously fat, he was married to Isabella de" Medici, the daughter of Cosimo, reigning in Florence. She was a beautiful and evil woman, and those who have endeavoured to make a martyr of her forget the nameless doings of her youth. Giordano was weak and extravagant, and paid little attention to his wife. She consoled herself with his kinsman, the young and handsome Troilo Orsini, who was as constantly at her side as an official "cavalier servente" of later days. But the fat Giordano, indolent and pleasure seeking, saw nothing. Nor is there anything much more than vulgar and commonplace in all this.
Paolo Giordano meets Vittoria Peretti in Rome, and the two commonplaces begin the tragedy. On his part, love at first sight; ridiculous, at first, when one thinks of his vast bulk and advancing years, terrible, by and by, as the hereditary pa.s.sions of his fierce race could be, backed by the almost boundless power which a great Italian lord possessed in his surroundings. Vittoria, tired of her dull and virtuous husband and of the lectures and parsimony of his uncle, and not dreaming that the latter was soon to be Pope, saw herself in a dream of glory controlling every mood and action of the greatest n.o.ble in the land. And she met Giordano again and again, and he pleaded and implored, and was alternately ridiculous and almost pathetic in his hopeless pa.s.sion for the notary"s daughter. But she had no thought of yielding to his entreaties. She would have marriage, or nothing. Neither words nor gifts could move her.
She had a husband, he had a wife; and she demanded that he should marry her, and was grimly silent as to the means. Until she was married to him he should not so much as touch the tips of her jewelled fingers, nor have a lock of her hair to wear in his bosom. He was blindly in love, and he was Paolo Giordano Orsini. It was not likely that he should hesitate. He who had seen nothing of his wife"s doings, suddenly saw his kinsman, Troilo, and Isabella was doomed. Troilo fled to Paris, and Orsini took Isabella from Bracciano to the lonely castle of Galera.
There he told her his mind and strangled her, as was his right, being feudal lord and master with powers of life and death. Then from Bracciano he sent messengers to kill Francesco Peretti. One of them had a slight acquaintance with the Cardinal"s nephew.
They came to the Villa Negroni by night, and called him out, saying that his best friend was in need of him, and was waiting for him at Monte Cavallo. He hesitated, for it was very late. They had torches and weapons, and would protect him, they said. Still he wavered. Then Vittoria, his wife, scoffed at him, and called him coward, and thrust him out to die; for she knew. The men walked beside him with their torches, talking as they went. They pa.s.sed the deserted land in the Baths of Diocletian, and turned at Saint Bernard"s Church to go towards the Quirinal. Then they put out the lights and killed him quickly in the dark.
His body lay there all night, and when it was told the next day that Montalto"s nephew had been murdered, the two men said that they had left him at Monte Cavallo and that he must have been killed as he came home alone. The Cardinal buried him without a word, and though he guessed the truth he asked neither vengeance nor justice of the Pope.
[Ill.u.s.tration: VILLA NEGRONI
From a print of the last century]
Gregory the Thirteenth guessed it, too, and when Orsini would have married Vittoria, the Pope forbade the banns and interdicted their union for ever. That much he dared to do against the greatest peer in the country.
To this, Orsini replied by plighting his faith to Vittoria with a ring, in the presence of a serving woman, an irregular ceremony which he afterwards described as a marriage, and he thereupon took his bride and her mother under his protection. The Pope retorted by a determined effort to arrest the murderers of Francesco; the Bargello and his men went in the evening to the Orsini palace at Pompey"s Theatre and demanded that Giordano should give up the criminals; the porter replied that the Duke was asleep; the Orsini men-at-arms lunged out with their weapons, looked on during the interview, and considering the presence of the Bargello derogatory to their master, drove him away, killing one of his men and wounding several others. Thereupon Pope Gregory forbade the Duke from seeing Vittoria or communicating with her by messengers, on pain of a fine of ten thousand gold ducats, an order to which Orsini would have paid no attention but which Vittoria was too prudent to disregard, and she retired to her brother"s house, leaving the Duke in a state of frenzied rage that threatened insanity. Then the Pope seemed to waver again, and then again learning that the lovers saw each other constantly in spite of his commands, he suddenly had Vittoria seized and imprisoned in Sant" Angelo. It is impossible to follow the long struggle that ensued. It lasted four years, at the end of which time the Duke and Vittoria were living at Bracciano, where the Orsini was absolute lord and master and beyond the jurisdiction of the Church--two hours" ride from the gates of Rome. But no further formality of marriage had taken place and Vittoria was not satisfied. Then Gregory the Thirteenth died.
During the vacancy of the Holy See, all interdictions of the late Pope were suspended. Instantly Giordano determined to be married, and came to Rome with Vittoria. They believed that the Conclave would last some time and were making their arrangements without haste, living in Pompey"s Theatre, when a messenger brought word that Cardinal Montalto would surely be elected Pope within a few hours. In the fortress is the small family church of Santa Maria di Grotta Pinta. The Duke sent down word to his chaplain that the latter must marry him at once. That night a retainer of the house had been found murdered at the gate; his body lay on a trestle bier before the altar of the chapel when the Duke"s message came; the Duke himself and Vittoria were already in the little winding stair that leads down from the apartments; there was not a moment to be lost; the frightened chaplain and the messenger hurriedly raised a marble slab which closed an unused vault, dropped the murdered man"s body into the chasm, and had scarcely replaced the stone when the ducal pair entered the church. The priest married them before the altar in fear and trembling, and when they were gone entered the whole story in the little register in the sacristy. The leaf is extant.
Within a few hours, Montalto was Pope, the humble cardinal was changed in a moment to the despotic pontiff, whose nephew"s murder was unavenged; instead of the vacillating Gregory, Orsini had to face the terrible Sixtus, and his defeat and exile were foregone conclusions. He could no longer hold his own and he took refuge in the States of Venice, where his kinsman, Ludovico, was a fortunate general. He made a will which divided his personal estate between Vittoria and his son, Virginio, greatly to the woman"s advantage; and overcome by the infirmity of his monstrous size, spent by the terrible pa.s.sions of his later years, and broken in heart by an edict of exile which he could no longer defy, he died at Sal within seven months of his great enemy"s coronation, in the forty-ninth year of his age.
Vittoria retired to Padua, and the authorities declared the inheritance valid, but Ludovico Orsini"s long standing hatred of her was inflamed to madness by the conditions of the will. Six weeks after the Duke"s death, at evening, Vittoria was in her chamber; her boy brother, Flaminio, was singing a Miserere to his lute by the fire in the great hall. A sound of quick feet, the glare of torches, and Ludovico"s masked men filled the house. Vittoria died bravely with one deep stab in her heart. The boy, Flaminio, was torn to pieces with seventy-four wounds.
But Venice would permit no such outrageous deeds. Ludovico was besieged in his house, by horse and foot and artillery, and was taken alive with many of his men and swiftly conveyed to Venice; and a week had not pa.s.sed from the day of the murder before he was strangled by the Bargello in the latter"s own room, with the red silk cord by which it was a n.o.ble"s privilege to die. The first one broke, and they had to take another, but Ludovico Orsini did not wince. An hour later his body was borne out with forty torches, in solemn procession, to lie in state in Saint Mark"s Church. His men were done to death with hideous tortures in the public square. So ended the story of Vittoria Accoramboni.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
REGION VI PARIONE
The princ.i.p.al point of this Region is Piazza Navona, which exactly coincides with Domitian"s race-course, and the Region consists of an irregular triangle of which the huge square is at the northern angle, the western one being the Piazza della Chiesa Nuova and the southern extremity the theatre of Pompey, so often referred to in these pages as one of the Orsini"s strongholds and containing the little church in which Paolo Giordano married Vittoria Accoramboni, close to the Campo dei Fiori which was the place of public executions by fire. The name Parione is said to be derived from the Latin "Paries," a wall, applied to a ma.s.sive remnant of ancient masonry which once stood somewhere in the Via di Parione. It matters little; nor can we find any satisfactory explanation of the gryphon which serves as a device for the whole quarter, included during the Middle Age, with Ponte and Regola, in the large portion of the city dominated by the Orsini.
The Befana, which is a corruption of Epifania, the Feast of the Epiphany, is and always has been the season of giving presents in Rome, corresponding with our Christmas; and the Befana is personated as a gruff old woman who brings gifts to little children after the manner of our Saint Nicholas. But in the minds of Romans, from earliest childhood, the name is a.s.sociated with the night fair, opened on the eve of the Epiphany in Piazza Navona, and which was certainly one of the most extraordinary popular festivals ever invented to amuse children and make children of grown people, a sort of foreshadowing of Carnival, but having at the same time a flavour and a colour of its own, unlike anything else in the world.
During the days after Christmas a regular line of booths is erected, encircling the whole circus-shaped s.p.a.ce. It is a peculiarity of Roman festivals that all the material for adornment is kept together from year to year, ready for use at a moment"s notice, and when one sees the enormous amount of lumber required for the Carnival, for the fireworks on the Pincio, or for the Befana, one cannot help wondering where it is all kept. From year to year it lies somewhere, in those vast subterranean places and great empty houses used for that especial purpose, of which only Romans guess the extent. When needed, it is suddenly produced without confusion, marked and numbered, ready to be put together and regilt or repainted, or hung with the acres of draperies which Latins know so well how to display in everything approaching to public pageantry.
At dark, on the Eve of the Epiphany, the Befana begins. The hundreds of booths are choked with toys and gleam with thousands of little lights, the open s.p.a.ces are thronged by a moving crowd, the air splits with the infernal din of ten thousand whistles and tin trumpets. Noise is the first consideration for a successful befana, noise of any kind, shrill, gruff, high, low--any sort of noise; and the first purchase of everyone who comes must be a tin horn, a pipe, or one of those grotesque little figures of painted earthenware, representing some characteristic type of Roman life and having a whistle attached to it, so cleverly modelled in the clay as to produce the most hideous noises without even the addition of a wooden plug. But anything will do. On a memorable night nearly thirty years ago, the whole cornopean stop of an organ was sold in the fair, amounting to seventy or eighty pipes with their reeds. The instrument in the old English Protestant Church outside of Porta del Popolo had been improved, and the organist, who was a practical Anglo-Saxon, conceived the original and economical idea of selling the useless pipes at the night fair for the benefit of the church. The braying of the high, cracked reeds was frightful and never to be forgotten.
Round and round the square, three generations of families, children, parents and even grandparents, move in a regular stream, closer and closer towards midnight and supper-time; nor is the place deserted till three o"clock in the morning. Toys everywhere, original with an attractive ugliness, nine-tenths of them made of earthenware dashed with a kind of bright and harmless paint of which every Roman child remembers the taste for life; and old and young and middle-aged all blow their whistles and horns with solemnly ridiculous pertinacity, pausing only to make some little purchase at the booths, or to exchange a greeting with pa.s.sing friends, followed by an especially vigorous burst of noise as the whistles are brought close to each other"s ears, and the party that can make the more atrocious din drives the other half deafened from the field. And the old women who help to keep the booths sit warming their skinny hands over earthen pots of coals and looking on without a smile on their Sibylline faces, while their sons and daughters sell clay hunchbacks and little old women of clay, the counterparts of their mothers, to the pa.s.sing customers. Thousands upon thousands of people throng the place, and it is warm with the presence of so much humanity, even under the clear winter sky. And there is no confusion, no accident, no trouble, there are no drunken men and no pickpockets. But Romans are not like other people.
In a few days all is cleared away again, and Bernini"s great fountain faces Borromini"s big Church of Saint Agnes, in the silence; and the officious guide tells the credulous foreigner how the figure of the Nile in the group is veiling his head to hide the sight of the hideous architecture, and how the face of the Danube expresses the River G.o.d"s terror lest the tower should fall upon him; and how the architect retorted upon the sculptor by placing Saint Agnes on the summit of the church, in the act of rea.s.suring the Romans as to the safety of her shrine; and again, how Bernini"s enemies said that the obelisk of the fountain was tottering, till he came alone on foot and tied four lengths of twine to the four corners of the pedestal, and fastened the strings to the nearest houses, in derision, and went away laughing. It was at that time that he modelled four grinning masks for the corners of his sedan-chair, so that they seemed to be making scornful grimaces at his detractors as he was carried along. He could afford to laugh. He had been the favourite of Urban the Eighth who, when Cardinal Barberini, had actually held the looking-gla.s.s by the aid of which the handsome young sculptor modelled his own portrait in the figure of David with the sling, now in the Museum of Villa Borghese. After a brief period of disgrace under the next reign, brought about by the sharpness of his Neapolitan tongue, Bernini was restored to the favour of Innocent the Tenth, the Pamfili Pope, to please whose economical tastes he executed the fountain in Piazza Navona, after a design greatly reduced in extent as well as in beauty, compared with the first he had sketched. But an account of Bernini would lead far and profit little; the catalogue of his works would fill a small volume; and after all, he was successful only in an age when art had fallen low. In place of Michelangelo"s universal genius, Bernini possessed a born Neapolitan"s universal facility. He could do something of everything, circ.u.mstances gave him enormous opportunities, and there were few things which he did not attempt, from cla.s.sic sculpture to the final architecture of Saint Peter"s and the fortifications of Sant" Angelo. He was afflicted by the hereditary giantism of the Latins, and was often moved by motives of petty spite against his inferior rival, Borromini. His best work is the statue of Saint Teresa in Santa Maria della Vittoria, a figure which has recently excited the ecstatic admiration of a French critic, expressed in language that betrays at once the fault of the conception, the taste of the age in which Bernini lived, and the unhealthy nature of the sculptor"s prolific talent. Only the seventeenth century could have represented such a disquieting fusion of the sensuous and the spiritual, and it was reserved for the decadence of our own days to find words that could describe it. Bernini has been praised as the Michelangelo of his day, but no one has yet been bold enough, or foolish enough, to call Michelangelo the Bernini of the sixteenth century.
Barely sixty years elapsed between the death of the one and birth of the other, and the s.p.a.ce of a single lifetime separates the zenith of the Renascence from the nadir of Barocco art.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PIAZZA NAVONA]
The names of Bernini and of Piazza Navona recall Innocent the Tenth, who built the palace beside the Church of Saint Agnes, his meannesses, his nepotism, his weakness, and his miserable end; how his relatives stripped him of all they could lay hands on, and how at the last, when he died in the only shirt he possessed, covered by a single ragged blanket, his sister-in-law, Olimpia Maldachini, dragged from beneath his pallet bed the two small chests of money which he had succeeded in concealing to the end. A bra.s.s candlestick with a single burning taper stood beside him in his last moments, and before he was quite dead, a servant stole it and put a wooden one in its place. When he was dead at the Quirinal, his body was carried to Saint Peter"s in a bier so short that the poor Pope"s feet stuck out over the end, and three days later, no one could be found to pay for the burial. Olimpia declared that she was a starving widow and could do nothing; the corpse was thrust into a place where the masons of the Vatican kept their tools, and one of the workmen, out of charity or superst.i.tion, lit a tallow candle beside it.
In the end, the maggiordomo paid for a deal coffin, and Monsignor Segni gave five scudi--an English pound--to have the body taken away and buried. It was slung between two mules and taken by night to the Church of Saint Agnes, where in the changing course of human and domestic events, it ultimately got an expensive monument in the worst possible taste. The learned and sometimes witty Baracconi, who has set down the story, notes the fact that Leo the Tenth, Pius the Fourth and Gregory the Sixteenth fared little better in their obsequies, and he comments upon the democratic spirit of a city in which such things can happen.
Close to the Piazza Navona stands the famous mutilated group, known as Pasquino, of which the mere name conveys a better idea of the Roman character than volumes of description, for it was here that the pasquinades were published, by affixing them to a pedestal at the corner of the Palazzo Braschi. And one of Pasquino"s bitterest jests was directed against Olimpia Maldachini. Her name was cut in two, to make a good Latin pun: "Olim pia, nunc impia," "once pious, now impious," or "Olimpia, now impious," as one chose to join or separate the syllables.
Whole books have been filled with the short and pithy imaginary conversations between Marforio, the statue of a river G.o.d which used to stand in the Monti, and Pasquino, beneath whom the Roman children used to be told that the book of all wisdom was buried for ever.
In the Region of Parione stands the famous Cancelleria, a masterpiece of Bramante"s architecture, celebrated for many events in the later history of Rome, and successively the princely residence of several cardinals, chief of whom was that strong Pompeo Colonna, the ally of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, who was responsible for the sacking of Rome by the Constable of Bourbon, who ultimately ruined the Holy League, and imposed his terrible terms of peace upon Clement the Seventh, a prisoner in Sant" Angelo. Considering the devastation and the horrors which were the result of that contest, and its importance in Rome"s history, it is worth while to tell the story again. Connected with it was the last great struggle between Orsini and Colonna, Orsini, as usual, siding for the Pope, and therefore for the Holy League, and Colonna for the Emperor.
Charles the Fifth had vanquished Francis the First at Pavia, in the year 1525, and had taken the French King prisoner. A year later the Holy League was formed, between Pope Clement the Seventh, the King of France, the Republics of Venice and Florence, and Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan. Its object was to fight the Emperor, to sustain Sforza, and to seize the Kingdom of Naples by force. Immediately upon the proclamation of the League, the Emperor"s amba.s.sadors left Rome, the Colonna retired to their strongholds, and the Emperor made preparations to send Charles, Duke of Bourbon, the disgraced relative of King Francis, to storm Rome and reduce the imprisoned Pope to submission. The latter"s first and nearest source of fear lay in the Colonna, who held the fortresses and pa.s.ses between Rome and the Neapolitan frontier, and his first instinct was to attack them with the help of the Orsini. But neither side was ready for the fight, and the timid Pontiff eagerly accepted the promise of peace made by the Colonna in order to gain time, and he dismissed the forces he had hastily raised against them.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PALAZZO Ma.s.sIMO ALLE COLONNA]
[Ill.u.s.tration: PONTE SISTO
From a print of the last century]
They, in the mean time, treated with Moncada, Regent of Naples for the Emperor, and at once seized Anagni, put several thousand men in the field, marched upon Rome with incredible speed, seized three gates in the night, and entered the city in triumph on the following morning. The Pope and the Orsini, completely taken by surprise, offered little or no resistance. According to some writers, it was Pompeo Colonna"s daring plan to murder the Pope, force his own election to the Pontificate by arms, destroy the Orsini, and open Rome to Charles the Fifth; and when the Colonna advanced on the same day, by Ponte Sisto, to Trastevere, and threatened to attack Saint Peter"s and the Vatican, Clement the Seventh, remembering Sciarra and Pope Boniface, was on the point of imitating the latter and arraying himself in his Pontifical robes to await his enemy with such dignity as he could command. But the remonstrances of the more prudent cardinals prevailed, and about noon they conveyed him safely to Sant" Angelo by the secret covered pa.s.sage, leaving the Colonna to sack Trastevere and even Saint Peter"s itself, though they dared not come too near to Sant" Angelo for fear of its cannons. The tumult over at last, Don Ugo de Moncada, in the Emperor"s name, took possession of the Pope"s two nephews as hostages for his own safety, entered Sant" Angelo under a truce, and stated the Emperor"s conditions of peace. These were, to all intents and purposes, that the Pope should withdraw his troops, wherever he had any, and that the Emperor should be free to advance wherever he pleased, except through the Papal States, that the Pope should give hostages for his good faith, and that he should grant a free pardon to all the Colonna, who vaguely agreed to withdraw their forces into the Kingdom of Naples. To this humiliating peace, or armistice, for it was nothing more, the Pope was forced by the prospect of starvation, and he would even have agreed to sail to Barcelona in order to confer with the Emperor; but from this he was ultimately dissuaded by Henry the Eighth of England and the King of France, "who sent him certain sums of money and promised him their support." The consequence was that he broke the truce as soon as he dared, deprived the Cardinal of his hat, and, with the help of the Orsini, attacked the Colonna by surprise on their estates, giving orders to burn their castles and raze their fortresses to the ground. Four villages were burned before the surprised party could recover itself; but with some a.s.sistance from the imperial troops they were soon able to face their enemies on equal terms, and the little war raged fiercely during several months, with varying success and all possible cruelty on both sides.
Meanwhile Charles, Duke of Bourbon, known as the Constable, and more or less in the pay of the Emperor, had gathered an army in Lombardy. His force consisted of the most atrocious ruffians of the time,--Lutheran Germans, superst.i.tious Spaniards, revolutionary Italians, and such other nondescripts as would join his standard,--all fellows who had in reality neither country nor conscience, and were ready to serve any soldier of fortune who promised them plunder and license. The predominating element was Spanish, but there was not much to choose among them all so far as their instincts were concerned. Charles was penniless, as usual; he offered his horde of cutthroats the rich spoils of Tuscany and Rome, they swore to follow him to death and perdition, and he began his southward march. The Emperor looked on with an approving eye, and the Pope was overcome by abject terror. In the vain hope of saving himself and the city he concluded a truce with the Viceroy of Naples, agreeing to pay sixty thousand ducats, to give back everything taken from the Colonna, and to restore Pompeo to the honours of the cardinalate. The conditions of the armistice were forthwith carried out, by the disbanding of the Pope"s hired soldiers and the payment of the indemnity, and Clement the Seventh enjoyed during a few weeks the pleasant illusion of fancied safety.
He awoke from the dream, in horror and fear, to find that the Constable considered himself in no way bound by a peace concluded with the Emperor"s Viceroy, and was advancing rapidly upon Rome, ravaging and burning everything in his way. Hasty preparations for defence were made; a certain Renzo da Ceri armed such men as he could enlist with such weapons as he could find, and sent out a little force of grooms and artificers to face the Constable"s ruthless Spaniards and the fierce Germans of his companion freebooter, George of Fransperg, or Franzberg, who carried about a silken cord by which he swore to strangle the Pope with his own hands. The enemy reached the walls of Rome on the night of the fifth of May; devastation and famine lay behind them in their track, the plunder of the Church was behind the walls, and far from northward came rumours of the army of the League on its way to cut off their retreat. They resolved to win the spoil or die, and at dawn the Constable, clad in a white cloak, led the a.s.sault and set up the first scaling ladder, close to the Porta San Spirito. In the very act a bullet struck him in a vital part and he fell headlong to the earth. Benvenuto Cellini claimed the credit of the shot, but it is more than probable that it sped from another hand, that of Bernardino Pa.s.seri; it matters little now, it mattered less then, as the infuriated Spaniards stormed the walls in the face of Camillo Orsini"s desperate and hopeless resistance, yelling "Blood and the Bourbon," for a war-cry.