THE BAROQUE IN ITALY
partly under the influence of Paris. For the Paris of Richelieu,
Colbert and Louis XIV had become the centre of European art, a
position which until then Rome had held unchallenged for well
over 150 years.
The popes and cardinals of the I7th century were enthusiastic
patrons, eager to commemorate their names by magnificent churches,
palaces and tombs. Of the severity of fifty years before, when the
Counter-Reformation had been a militant force, nothing was left.
The Jesuits became more and more lenient, the most popular saints
were of a lovable, gentle, accommodating kind (such as St. Francois
de Sales), and the new experimental science was promoted under
the very eyes of the popes, until in the 18th century Benedict XIV
could accept books which Voltaire and Montesquieu sent him as
presents.
However, a general decline in the religious fervour of the people
can hardly be noticed before 1660 or even later. Not the intensity
of religious feelings, only their nature changed. Art and architecture
prove that unmistakably. "We can here analyse but a few examples,
and it is therefore advisable not to choose the most magnificent, say
the nave and facade of St. Peter's, as Carlo Maderna designed them
in 1606, and as they were completed in 1626, but the most significant.
Maderna was die leading architect of his generation in Rome.
He died in 1629. His successors in fame were Gianlorenzo Bernini
(i 598-1680), FrancescoBorromini (1599-1667) andPietrodaCortona
(1596-1669). Bernini came from Naples, Maderna and Borromini
from the north of Italy, the country round the lakes, and Cortona,
as his name shows, from the south of Tuscany. As in the i6th
century, so there were in the lyth only very few Romans amongst
the great men of Rome. In architecture the influx from Lombardy
had a considerable effect on the appearance of the city. A breadth
and freedom were introduced in distinct contrast to Roman gravity.
Thus Maderna's ground plan of the Palazzo Barberini (fig. 63)—
its facade is by Bernini and a good deal: of its decorative detail by
Borromini—is of a kind wholly new in Rome, but to a certain
extent developing what Northern Italian palaces and villas (especially
those of Genoa and its surroundings) had done in the later i6th
century. As against the austere blocks of the Florentine and Roman
palaces (cf. the Palazzo Farnese, fig. 57), the Barberini Palace has
a front opened in a wide loggia and with short wings jutting forward
on the right and the left. The Roman plan with colonnaded inner
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