Bernini’s next job was to do something with St. Peter’s chair.
It wasn’t really St. Peter’s but it was a very old chair.
By Bernini’s time it was taken as the symbol of the Pope’s primacy. Each bishop had a “chair” (cathedra in Latin), and a cathedral (chair-church). The Pope “held” the most important “chair” of them all.
Bernini looked at the old wooden relic and decided he would invent his own great show-chair and lock the real one away inside it.
What would a proper chair for Christ’s representative on earth be like? He made some clay models like this one:
Then came up with this:
The Cathedra Petri
It is on the wall of the main apse, at the front of the basilica. Bernini wanted to give pilgrims some goal to walk towards once they had reached the great Baldachin in the center. He lined up the chair, raised it on the wall at just the right height, so that they could see it through the canopy.
Bernini’s sketch
They would stand on Peter’s grave, look up, and see a vision:
The Chair comes out of heaven, out of the clouds. It hovers. It appears with an almost frightening importance and immediacy, like a phantom or a genii. You might almost expect it to speak with a deep voice. Bernini always thought architecture should come more than half way. It ought to reach out and grab the viewer. It ought to rock him.
To make his chair look more like an airy vision, Bernini set it up in front of the general basilica decoration, partially blotting out the Corinthian columns and the wall, as though with clouds and vapor.
A vision is an event of light. In his best-known work, the Ecstacy of St. Teresa in the Santa Maria de la Vittoria Church in Rome, Bernini had drilled the wall to bring in what might seem divine light above his figure. Then he marked out the rays of light with shining strips of bronze.
Ecstacy of St. Teresa
Here in St. Peter’s the big window in the apse above the Cathedra blinded the eye. It was too big, too bright. Bernini decided to block it up and leave only a small oval. When that still seemed too bright, he gave it yellow glass and painted a dove on the pane. The little oval window would be the source of the light from heaven, and the dove would represent the Holy Spirit that guides the Church through the ages.
The project took Bernini nine years. Though he delegated most of the work to collaborators, of which there were many, including his old father and brother, he always stayed in perfect control. That was part of his genius.
See Bernini in St. Peter’s and read about the Great Canopy.
..
It ought to reach out and grab the viewer. It ought to rock him.
I’m afraid I’m still settling down from the rrrrrrrrrrocking……..
Actually it’s hard to know what to say. This reminds me of a certain mystery novelist I once read. She made me want to scream. Other people loved her. She was so EXCESSIVE! There is something, and maybe a whole lot of that, in Bernini.
I don’t want to say it’s bad. It’s just not to my taste. You can’t deny the skill. But do I enjoy it? No, I’m afraid not. Standing inside the Pantheon, now that’s another story. Unfortunately my memories of it are 30 years old or so. But I was amazed at how something so simple could seem so striking. I doubt Bernini would have agreed.
Ken: I know what you mean, it’s all too much. He decorates the decoration. Who in our time (maybe a scary movie director) could really take these works of Bernini’s as models to imitate? Today he would have made use of spotlights and maybe some kinetics, the chair swaying slightly, and sound (a voice or thunder or dramatic music).
The Pantheon is still impressive these thirty years later :) As you know, the original design for St. Peter’s by Bramante was based on the Pantheon and even Michelangelo couldn’t put up with its simplicity. He had to decorate everywhere and spruce up the original design with moldings and sham columns with their capitals and dozens of windows with their pediments, and so on. And Bernini obviously thought Michelangelo’s ideas were too sober.
Awesome work – you tell it well. So interesting.
How it still remains a simple chair goes on puzzling me. Within that grand setting the least one might expect would be a throne.