Note 6 — SCIARRA COLONNA.

It was at her house in Piazza Navona that Bernini was rehabilitated in his character of first sculptor and architect of his time. ‘Papa Pamfili,’ though only the son of a tailor,6 was yet a patron of art. Highly famed under Urban VIII. the preceding Pontiff, Bernini had been misrepresented by his rivals to Innocent. In an unpublished Diary of Giacinto Gigli, Cancellieri finds that he was taken so seriously ill on St. Peter’s Day, 16417 that his life was for some time despaired of, in consequence of his Campanile—a specimen one of two he had designed for St. Peter’s—being disapproved by the Pope and ordered to be taken down. Another cognate tradition he gives from a MS. Diary of Valerio is, that in digging the foundations for this tower a ‘canale d’acqua’ was discovered deeper than the bed of the Tiber and wide enough to go on it in a boat; Mgr. Costaguti, maggiordomo of his Holiness, told me about it himself, and he had had himself let down to see it. As it had a sandy bottom, it washed away the foundations of the tower, and rendered it impossible to leave it standing. The water came from Anguillara’ (on Lake Bracciano, about 28 miles) ‘and the Pope had the old conduit reconstructed and used the water for many fountains in imitation of Sixtus V.8 He goes on to add an extraordinary account of a Dragon quite of the legendary type, that was found in charge of this water, and was killed, not by a hero or a knight, but, by the labourers working at the conduit.

It was Innocent X.’s ambition to remove the great obelisk (since called ‘Obelisco Pamfilio’) which lay in three pieces in the Circo di Massenzio, near the Appian Way, and to set it up in Piazza Navona. Bernini being, as I have said, in disfavour, other architects were commissioned to offer designs for the work; but the Pope was not satisfied with any of them, and the matter stood over. Meantime Piombino (Niccolò Ludovisi) who had married a niece of the Pope’s, and who was a great friend of Bernini, privately instructed him to send him a model of what he would suggest for the purpose, saying he wanted it for his own satisfaction, lest Bernini should refuse the unauthorised competition. Bernini then produced the elaborate conception which has been so warmly extolled by some and so hastily blamed by others, but which cannot be judged without a prolonged study of all the poetical allegories and conceits it was his intention to embody.