Gian Lorenzo Bernini

 Soul of an Age.

Most of the interior decoration of St. Peter's, including the high altar, is the work of Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). In the mid 1640s Bernini was the most grandly employed, and richly rewarded, artist in the world.  During thE long and intensive service, Bernini effectively completed the setting and interior of St Peter's.  He did three principal things: The main fabric was completed in 1626 and Bernini was charged with ennobling its interior. He did this first by constructing (1623-24) an enormous baldacchino over the high altar. He placed four immense marble bases at each corner, and on them constructed colossal gilt bronze columns, wrought into spirals and joined by a cornice, with angels, each twice life-size, guarding its crowned superstructure. It is a work of complete originality, for nothing like it has been built before or since (apart from smaller copies). It inspired the papacy to demand from Bernini a similar artefact, on an even larger scale, to complete the main decoration of the interior of St Peter's. This is the famous Cathedra Petri, or Peter's throne, in effect a gigantic reliquary, which forms the climax of the view along the nave, and is framed by the baldacchino columns. It is a complex piece of sculptural architectural confectionery, made up of red jasper, black Sicilian marble, masses of bronze, some gilt, stone, iron, marble statuary, a yellow glass eye, through which the light pours, and golden stucco clouds. The size is staggering but is perfectly in scale with the huge dimensions of the building. Bernini continued his work inside the church by shifting around various papal tombs, and designing new ones, and creating a suitably grandiose setting for the spectacular papal collection of relics - for most visitors their main object in coming to St Peter's. Finally, he put into the Vatican Palace, adjoining the church, a regal staircase, the Scala Regia, through which princes progressed upwards to the papal apartments. In an ideal world, he would have pulled down the entire palace, externally an eyesore which remains to this day and spoils the total prospect. But this could not be done, at any rate in those days, without demolishing the magnificent frescoes, by Raphael and others, on its internal walls. So Bernini was left with an awkward site for his stairs, a problem he solved by a brilliant piece of trompe l'oeil foreshortening which makes the stairs seem longer, grander and steeper than they actually are, and has to be seen to be believed.  Finally, Bernini transformed the small existing piazza in front of St Peter's into the largest and grandest square in the world, or rather a key shaped device of colonnades, which branch out from the church in a narrowing stem, then form into two halves of a circle, which encompasses an obelisk and two fountains. The circle was intended by Bernini to be closed by a third colonnade, which screened the whole from the visitor approaching from the Tiber. But this was never built, and in 1939 Mussolini hacked through an avenue which spoils the surprise. Even so, there is nothing like it anywhere in the world, for the colonnades, despite their grandeur, are low.