Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Sant’Andrea al Quirinale, Rome

[0:00] [music]

Dr. Beth Harris: [0:05] We’re standing, the three of us, outside of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale. I don’t know how my Italian sounded there.

Dr. David Drogin: [0:13] Perfect.

Dr. Harris: [0:13] A church by Bernini.

Dr. Drogin: [0:16] A small church, because there was not much space to build in. He was told by the Jesuits that he should build and design the architecture within this limited area, and he’s done a magnificent thing.

[0:27] He’s used what’s called a giant order of architecture, which means that the steps that lead up to the church, or the porch, and the whole body of the church itself are enclosed within a single giant pilaster on each side, and a huge elevation which gives it a monumentality that really makes you forget how relatively small it is.

[0:49] He also has the steps spilling out into the street in a series of concentric ovals like ripples. He loved movement. There’s always movement in his architecture, which prepares us for the inside. As we will see, the inside has an oval plan. Let’s go inside.

Dr. Steven Zucker: [1:04] Absolutely. I can’t wait to see it.

[1:06] We’ve just entered into the church, and we’re in this beautiful oval form, and that’s actually as we walk in, it opens more broadly to our left and our right.

Dr. Drogin: [1:16] It’s a horizontal oval. Not what you expect. You would expect, first of all, a church, a quadrangular space of some kind, a cross-shaped space. This, too, is something which could not have happened during the Renaissance. There would have been a circular plan. This is an oval one.

[1:30] It’s interesting to see that we’ll come to an oval again, just down the street with Borromini’s — often compared as a kind of rival to this, and in some ways it is — San Carlino.

Dr. Zucker: [1:37] Also Saint Peter’s Square.

Dr. Drogin: [1:41] Yes, which is elliptical. Actually, it’s two ellipses. That sense of, well, it’s like the difference between classical ballet and modern ballet. There’s a sense of expansion while keeping to certain symmetries. This is rigorously symmetrical.

[1:53] The thing that most strikes us as we go in, is beyond and above the altar, we have light. It looks like theatrical light, but it’s actually real light filtered in through a window that we can’t see.

Dr. Harris: [2:04] Bernini does that often.

Dr. Drogin: [2:05] He loves doing that. He does that…

Dr. Zucker: [2:07] In the Saint Teresa.

Dr. Drogin: [2:07] …in the Saint Teresa and in Saint Peter’s. It filters down on this group of tumbling, well they’re moving up and down at the same time, joyous, musical angels and cherubs set against massive rays of light. They’re made of stucco and gold and bronze.

Dr. Harris: [2:27] Let’s go a bit closer.

Dr. Drogin: [2:27] Yes. As we approach the altar in the curve of the oval, and we have a richly appointed altar and seats and all of that, but we have a central painting of the martyrdom of Saint Andrew. Sant’ Andrea is Saint Andrew in Italian. That is the dedicatee of the church. He is very important in the Christian faith, not just for Catholics.

[2:49] He is the brother of Saint Peter, so there are many churches dedicated to him in Rome. He is the figure nailed to a X-shaped cross, which we call a Saint Andrew’s cross. That is what is framed within these cherubs and angels and fictive, but very solid, rays of light.

Dr. Zucker: [3:08] What’s so interesting is that the painting itself is framed in the same marble…

Dr. Harris: [3:13] As the columns and pilasters.

Dr. Zucker: [3:13] …as the pilasters, yeah, so that really is not a painting as we would normally understand it within an architectural space.

Dr. Drogin: [3:20] It’s fully integrated. Again, it’s that combination of solid and void, of rich material and sculpture and architecture and painting. It is this complete work of art again, and theatricality.

[3:30] If we get too close as it were, we’re standing right in front of the altar and look up, we see the source of that light that the congregation wouldn’t normally see, and whether it’s daylight or electric, but there is space for daylight. That is what bathes the area in light.

Dr. Zucker: [3:43] This beautiful second lantern.

Dr. Drogin: [3:45] Exactly. That, of course, is pure theatrical expedience. The color of the columns and the pilasters and the gorgeous colors of the different stone materials that were used to build this church are earthly colors. Some people have compared these columns to, I would think of prosciutto maybe. Some people say hamburger meat. We’re not being flippant. We’re looking at browns and whites and streaks of what would be the fat in the prosciutto. But this relates to food in a perfectly serious way, that is, something of the earth.

[4:18] All of that gives way when your eyes are taken up into the vaulting of the whole church to pure colors, and they are heavenly colors. Down below it’s earth, up above it’s only white and gold, and those are the colors of paradise.

[4:33] As we’ll see, Saint Andrew dying on the cross in the painting yields to a statue actually exploding out of the level down below into the upper level. That is a white statue, and he’s being carried up to heaven.

Dr. Harris: [4:49] That gold in the lantern is just…

Dr. Drogin: [4:52] Yes. That gold is enhanced, of course, by having stained glass. A simple expedient ancient [inaudible]. We simply use glass that is, in this case, yellow, so even on a cloudy day like today, it gives this sense of a glow of the Holy Spirit above.

Dr. Harris: [5:05] The heavenly.

Dr. Drogin: [5:06] That is what is shown in that lantern.

Dr. Harris: [5:09] In the center.

Dr. Drogin: [5:10] In the very top of the building.

Dr. Zucker: [5:11] What I’m taken by is the way that the structural ribs of the dome are structured as rays that emanate from the dove.

Dr. Drogin: [5:20] It’s a two-way thing, and you’ve hit it on the head. It both emanates from that dove and brings us divine grace, which comes from the Holy Spirit, and inspiration. Also, it leads the eye upward, whichever way you look at it. It works to go from this very decorated oval shape that we have below to something that resolves into, as I said, pure gold and white and light.

[5:42] And that vaulting, the dome itself, which is also oval, is full of people in white. Now, they’re made of stucco. These are statues of both men and boys. The boys, of course, are little cherubs. We can see them and the angels.

[5:56] The men are fishermen, and they have nets. This is to remind us that Andrew was a fisherman, like his brother, Saint Peter. They are the first two apostles who were called to the ministry by Jesus of Nazareth.

Dr. Harris: [6:09] Some of the figures seem to be moving from the lantern down.

Dr. Drogin: [6:14] In the Renaissance, let’s say 150 years before this, Mantegna’s famous view through…

Dr. Harris: [6:20] Camera degli Sposi.

Dr. Drogin: [6:21] Camera degli Sposi. The view up or down, according to which way you look at it, included figures that looked down on us. We have the illusion that we’re being observed just as we observe them, and this does that perfectly.

[6:31] We have this dissolving of the earthly and the spiritual by having figures midway between one and the other. None is more obvious than Andrew himself, who stands in a white statue in the broken pediment. The pediment is broken so that he can be released from Earth up to heaven, where he is going.

Dr. Zucker: [6:51] There’s that fabulous contrast then between the suffering of Andrew in the painting and then the spiritual representation.

Dr. Drogin: [6:59] The spiritual release and eternity. Remember that everyone at that time would have believed in death as something that is almost comforting. We refer to this in the Gesù, this, “God’s time is the best time.” Whoever says that…

Dr. Harris: [7:13] The release from the body.

Dr. Drogin: [7:13] …it’s Martin Luther, of course. The release. The absence of what we now have, [which] is fear and apprehension and even terror of death because we don’t think much about the afterlife. Everyone was sure that they were going to an eternal place, not of ultimate happiness — you had to work your way through and that’s what purgatory is for, and as long as you weren’t going to hell, but it was a certainty.

[7:33] It was something that was seen as better than this life. And death was, of course, ubiquitous because of infant mortality, recurrent outbreaks of plague.

Dr. Harris: [7:39] People lived with it in a way we don’t.

Dr. Drogin: [7:41] People lived with it. We absolutely don’t. We don’t even like to talk about it.

Dr. Harris: [7:43] That’s right.

Dr. Drogin: [7:43] This kind of painting and sculpture and architecture is also reassuring and comforting, even. It sounds paradoxical, but about death, about, while it’s not death it’s a new life.

Dr. Harris: [7:53] That’s right. I think often about that when we see images of saints or the death of Christ or the death of Mary, being at a deathbed was not unusual. It was something that they could relate to that.

Dr. Drogin: [8:05] I’m glad you say that because I’m going to show you now the ultimate deathbed in Rome.

Dr. Harris: [8:09] Let’s go see.

Dr. Drogin: [8:09] That is a statue upstairs behind the church. Let’s go there.

[8:21] [music]