Lessons In Piety From A Great Catholic Artist

BY JAMES MONTI

The battle on earth between good and evil has always been a war fought not only on a global scale, but first and foremost within the depths of each human soul. In the lives of the saints, this battle concludes with an unqualified victory of good over evil, whether it be as the culmination of a lifelong progression in virtue or the mature fruit of a dramatic and blessedly irrevocable conversion after earlier years of vice. Our Lord has preserved His Church largely through the holiness and example of these extraordinary men and women of faith.
Yet in His loving Providence Our Lord has also accomplished much of the evangelization and sanctification of the world through the lives of “lesser mortals,” Catholics whose lives were considerably more prone to repeated stumbles and falls than the saints, but who nonetheless sincerely sought to live and practice their faith, striving after each fall or relapse to return to the Lord and His service. And many of them, despite their flaws, have made stunning contributions to the salvation of the world, and even achieved a life of personal piety worthy of admiration and imitation.
It is scarcely possible to speak of the Church’s hugely successful “New Evangelization” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the “Counter Reformation,” and not mention the brilliant Italian artist and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). It was he more than any other who imparted to the city of the Popes, the city of Rome, the outward vesture of the Counter Reformation and all it stood for, most conspicuously in his artistic transformation of the Basilica of St. Peter. His achievements there, from the pillared baldachin of the high altar to the Cathedra of St. Peter and the circular colonnade encompassing St. Peter’s Square, are widely celebrated. What is less known is the man behind these masterpieces. Did Bernini fit the mold of the “profligate” that has unfortunately characterized all too many otherwise great artists, or was his sacred handiwork for the Church a sincere expression of his own convictions?
From virtually the very day of his elevation to the See of Peter in 1623, Pope Urban VIII personally befriended Bernini, telling the twenty-four-year-old artist in a private audience, “It is your great fortune, O Cavalier, to see Cardinal Maffeo Barberini Pope; but ours is much the greater, that Cavalier Bernini lives in our pontificate” (quoted in Filippo Baldinucci, Vita del Cavaliere Gio. Lorenzo Bernino, Florence, Vincenzio Vangelisti, 1682, p. 10). It was during the twenty-one-year reign of Pope Urban that Bernini accomplished several of his most magnificent contributions to the fabric of St. Peter’s Basilica.
As for Bernini’s personal life, accounts of his earlier years present a very mixed picture, indicating a man wavering between genuine religious devotion and jarring moral lapses, particularly during his thirties, when he fell into the vice of adultery and sins of violence. It was at this time that Pope Urban, clearly concerned by the disorders in his friend’s life, summoned him and pressed him to end his dissolute ways by entering into an honorable marriage.
The Pontiff left Bernini free to choose his bride, and Bernini chose well. In the words of Bernini’s son Domenico, the girl his father married at the age of forty, Caterina Tezio, was “docile without blame, prudent without guile, beautiful without affectation, and with such a mixture of gravity, affability, goodness, and industry that one could well call her a gift reserved by Heaven for some great man” (Domenico Bernini, The Life of Lorenzo Bernini, trans. Franco Mormando, University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011, chapter 7, p. 131). From their marriage arose a family of eleven children.
It was at this time, perhaps from the graces of the sacrament of matrimony or perhaps Caterina’s salutary influence, that Bernini’s spiritual life took a decisive turn. Remorseful for his past sins, he began to develop intense habits of piety that he would strive to adhere to for the remaining forty years of his life. The sincere religious conviction that he had always put into his works of sacred art now permeated his entire outlook on life. His days began with daily Mass, he received Holy Communion twice a week, and after work he would head to the Jesuits’ Church of the Gesu for Eucharistic adoration.
Bernini’s biographer Filippo Baldinucci tells of the artist’s highly acute perception of “the efficacy of the Blood of Christ the Redeemer, in which (as he was wont to say) he hoped to drown his sins” (Baldinucci, Vita del Cavaliere Gio. Lorenzo Bernini, p. 61). To satisfy his own devotion, Bernini drew a sketch of Christ on the Cross depicting His precious blood pouring down in torrents to form an ocean below, with the Blessed Virgin kneeling beneath her Divine Son to catch the blood in her hands and offer it to God the Father. Bernini’s inspiration for this picture may well have stemmed in large part from a devotional exercise he attended weekly at the Jesuits’ Church of the Gesu, the Passion-focused Friday “Devotion of a Good Death”
In a 1649 devotional manual published for those attending this devotion, Father Giovanni Batista Manni explains that the object of this devout exercise is to meditate in particular upon “those three last hours of the life of the Lord” spent on the Cross, thereby “making every Friday a Friday of the Passion” as “a most efficacious means for obtaining a good and holy death” (Breve Ragguaglio, e pratica instruttione degli esercitii di pieta Cristiana, che si fanno nel Giesu di Roma, ogni Venerdi mattina, e sera, per la Divotione della Buona Morte, Rome, Mascardi, 1649, pp. 86, 84, respectively).
The evening rite for this exercise would begin with the lighting of thirty-three candles in honor of the thirty-three years of Our Lord’s life on earth. The presiding priest, accompanied by a “good number” of the other Jesuit priests vested in surplices, would come to the altar and expose the Blessed Sacrament. The priest would then pray in a high voice,
“Open our lips, O Lord, for blessing Thy Holy Name; cleanse our heart also from all vain, perverse, and alien thoughts; illuminate our intellect, inflame our affection, that we may be able worthily, attentively, and devoutly, to accomplish this holy exercise, and may merit graciously to be heard in the sight of Thy divine majesty. Who live and reign…”
Remaining on his knees, the priest would then turn his face toward the people and exhort them to meditate upon the Passion of Our Lord and the sorrows of Our Lady. This was followed by the recitation of the “Chaplet of the Five Wounds,” said on a circle of beads like the Rosary, with five segments of five beads each. Following the Chaplet, all would sing together the Stabat Mater. Again, from his kneeler the priest would give another exhortation, urging the congregation to reflect specifically upon the death agony of Christ on the Cross and to connect it with one’s own death. The rite would conclude with Benediction.
From June until October of 1665, Bernini was in Paris at the invitation of King Louis XIV, accompanied all the while by the French nobleman Paul Freart Chantelou. The latter recorded the details of Bernini’s sojourn in personal notes that he later compiled in a journal account of the Italian artist’s visit. Chantelou’s entries reveal a visitor very much preoccupied with praying wherever he went. Describing Bernini’s activities on the feast of Corpus Christi in Paris, Chantelou relates:
“We had spread in the avenue the tapestries of the Crown for the procession of the Blessed Sacrament… After the Cavalier [Bernini] had considered them and found them very beautiful, he entreated me to take him to the chapel, where he remained in prayer for a long time…” (Journal du voyage du Cavalier Bernin en France, ed. Ludovic Lalanne, Paris, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1885, p. 16).
On another occasion, after an audience with King Louis XIV, Bernini spent a long time praying in the royal chapel, where “from time to time he kissed the floor” (ibid., p. 36). Elsewhere Chantelou speaks of Bernini “saying his office” in church (p. 51; see also p. 70), evidently the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin (according to his son Domenico, Bernini prayed on his knees this office together with the Rosary and the Seven Penitential Psalms every evening). On a visit to a church of the Oratorians, Bernini “prayed to God at three different places, at the high altar, at the altar of the Virgin and at that of the Infant Jesus” (p. 215).
Chantelou also describes an evening when Bernini withdrew to his room “to read some books of devotion” (p. 210). On another occasion Bernini had raised the topic of spiritual reading during a casual conversation with Chantelou:
“He asked me meanwhile about reading from Kempis [i.e., The Imitation of Christ], as a very excellent book. ‘It was,’ he told me, ‘the book of Saint Ignatius [i.e., recommended by Saint Ignatius of Loyola]. Each night I read a chapter from it with my son and the family; each always finds there something pertaining to himself. The book of Philothea [i.e., Saint Francis de Sales’ Introduction to the Devout Life] is also very excellent; it is the book that the Pope esteems the most’” (p. 113).
Following a visit to the Blessed Sacrament at a church where the Forty Hours rite of Eucharistic exposition was taking place, Bernini candidly expressed his disappointment with what he considered the meager adornment of the altar, explaining to Chantelou and his brother that in Italy the Forty Hours altar of exposition was adorned much more beautifully, with silver candlesticks that enshrined relics and bouquets of flowers in nobly shaped vases. As we have mentioned in an earlier essay, Bernini years earlier had played a key role in developing the magnificent scenographic adornments of the Forty Hours altars in Rome.
In keeping with Bernini’s special bond with the Jesuits of Rome, Chantelou records that the artist’s “foremost concern” upon arriving in Paris was to visit all the Jesuit houses there, telling Chantelou, “I want you to request in the congregation an Ave Maria for me” (p. 253).
Having striven for four decades to rehearse his soul for the moment of death, Bernini observed, “That transit was a difficult one for all because for all it was an entirely new experience” (Domenico Bernini, The Life of Lorenzo Bernini, pp. 230-231). But when death came at last, Bernini was well prepared for it, having had for many years a painted version of his sketch of Christ giving forth His Precious Blood facing his bed. In his life and death, as in his art, Bernini has left us a legacy of seeking the things that are above.