Increasingly, too, Baroque artists had begun to understand the differences between ancient Roman, Etruscan, and Egyptian art, and to exploit those differences to deliberate effect. Ever since the fifteenth century, both Etruria and Egypt had figured as symbols of the most ancient strains of ancient wisdom, their high levels of civilization attested by ancient Greek and Roman authors, and, in the case of Egypt, by the Bible (where Moses is described as ‘‘learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians’’). In the fifteenth century, a series of problematic texts embroidered, and greatly complicated, the picture. First a series of Greek dialogues attributed to ‘‘Thrice-great Hermes,’’ Hermes Trismegistus, seemed to suggest that the Egyptians had anticipated crucial elements of Christian theology at the very dawn of classical history. Then a series of late-fifteenth-century forgeries by the Dominican friar Annius of Viterbo (1432?-1502) added a layer of pseudo-ancient and pseudobiblical evidence to round out the story: the first Etruscan had been none other than the biblical patriarch Noah. By the early seventeenth century, the Hermetic dialogues had been identified as post - rather than pre-Christian and the forgeries of Annius of Viterbo had been largely discredited, but no scholarly attack could possibly have dispelled the aura of wisdom and mystery that surrounded the Egyptians and Etruscans, not when their artifacts came forth from the earth inscribed in strange, incomprehensible scripts, carved, molded, and cast in shapes of odd, compelling beauty.
Rome in particular was a treasure house of Egyptian art: Roman emperors had imported more than 50 obelisks, some stripped from Egyptian temples and some made to order. The area around Piazza Venezia, the site of an ancient temple to Isis and Serapis, yielded up prizes ranging from a bronze table-top inlaid with silver figures and hieroglyphic inscriptions (an entirely Roman artifact with Roman pseudohieroglyphs, now in the Egyptian Museum in Turin) to marble statues in Hellenistic style (including the cult statues of Isis and Serapis, several images of the rivers Nile and Tiber, and a little, life-sized cat) to Egyptian images in basalt (lions, baboons, scribes, and a table leg). The Roman emperor Hadrian had been obsessed with Egypt, and his villa at Tivoli, just outside Rome, provided its own trove of Egyptian and Egyptian-revival sculpture; so did the ruins of the huge sanctuary of Fortune at Palestrina outside Rome, where a mosaic showing the Nile coursing from the African desert into Alexandria was discovered in the mid-seventeenth century. A painter with the historical interests of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) could not resist setting paintings like The Finding of Moses in a landscape dominated by the Egyptian buildings he saw in the Palestrina Mosaic (although nothing could prepare a European artist for the idea of the Egyptian desert - Poussin paints his obelisks and Nilometers amid the lush vegetation of the Roman countryside). To orient pilgrims on their journey through the streets of Rome, Pope Sixtus V (reigned 1585-90) reerected an impressive number of the city’s toppled obelisks, duly baptizing them and topping each with a cross (along with a star and mountains drawn from his own coat of arms) to symbolize the victory of Christianity over ancient ‘‘superstition.’’ In an amazing feat of technological bravado, the pope’s favorite architect, Domenico Fontana (1543-1607), moved the massive Vatican obelisk from the side of St. Peter’s basilica to the open space in front, employing 144 horse-drawn cranes to perform the feat. The bronze ball on top, rumored to contain the ashes of Julius Caesar, proved disappointingly empty - not every local legend was based on truth.
The most impressive Egyptian-revival monument of the seventeenth century, and perhaps the richest in symbolism, is the Fountain of the Four Rivers (1651) in Rome’s Piazza Navona, commissioned by Pope Innocent X (reigned 1644-55) in the late 1640s, and designed by Gianlorenzo Bernini with the help of the German Jesuit who claimed to be able to read Egyptian hieroglyphics, Father Athanasius Kircher (1602-80). Originally intended as an attraction for pilgrims to Rome in the Jubilee Year of 1650, the fountain was finally completed in 1651, an Egyptian obelisk set above a travertine cavern that gushes water beneath the colossal figures of river gods representing the great rivers of four continents: the Nile, Danube, Ganges, and Argentina’s Rio de la Plata. As Father Kircher explained in a companion volume to the glorious fountain, the Egyptian obelisk, surmounted by the Cross and symbols from the pope’s coat of arms, symbolizes the eternal ‘‘truths of religion and laws of nature,’’ anticipated by the ancient Egyptians and realized in full by contemporary Christianity. The travertine understructure represents the world in all its change and uncertainty, where the only sure foundation is that provided by God through the Church. For Kircher, who nurtured passionate interests in magnetism and geology as well as Egyptology, there is no conflict between science and religion, or between science and the classical tradition, or between the classical tradition and religion: they are all paths that lead to God, and he presents the fountain, still one of Rome’s most compelling tourist attractions, as a joyous testimony to religious faith.
A little over a decade later, Bernini and Kircher joined forces again, for Pope Innocent’s successor, Alexander VII, to design a pedestal for yet another obelisk, discovered in the gardens of the Dominican convent at Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. The bearer of this little spire, after Bernini had run through a delightful series of
Preliminary sketches (including a struggling Hercules who staggers with the obelisk alarmingly offkilter), is an elephant who expresses the wisdom of the ages in a knowing smirk, turning his fat tail towards the Dominicans’ front door (Roman legend has it that the elephant is protesting the condemnation of Galileo, which happened inside this very convent; it certainly seems more than possible that Kircher and Bernini, both notorious pranksters, are having a joke on the Dominicans with the collusion of their friend, Pope Alexander VII, who notably favored Kircher’s Jesuit order).
Because Etruscan culture was so thoroughly absorbed by ancient Rome, it was difficult for later artists to recognize, let alone establish for themselves, a recognizably Etruscan style in art. Vitruvius’ description of‘‘Etruscan design’’ (Tuscanicae disposition's) in his Ten Books on Architecture provided one of the few clues to how Etruscan temples might have looked, with four simple, unfluted columns widely spaced across the facade, and Tuscan artists like Baldassare Peruzzi (1481-1536) and Giuliano da Sangallo (1445-1516) used this form to convey the idea of Etruscan heritage in commissions for Tuscan patrons (Peruzzi in a painting of the Presentation of the Virgin for the Sienese banker Filippo Sergardi in Santa Maria della Pace, Rome, and Sangallo for the facade of the Villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano). Sixteenth-century architectural theorists, including Raphael (1483-1520) and Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola (1507-73), grouped classical columns into five canonical ‘‘orders,’’ enshrining unfluted columns with simple capitals and bases as the Tuscan Order; thereafter Tuscan columns became the most evident indicators of Etruscan style. At the very beginning of the sixteenth century the architect Donato Bramante (1444-1514), inspired by the forged Etruscan histories ofAnnius ofViterbo, employed a distinctive combination of Doric entablature, Tuscan columns, and rustication to create buildings that reflected the supposed Etruscan origins of the papacy, as in an elegant round church marking an alternative site for St. Peter’s crucifixion, the ‘‘Tempietto’’ (Little Temple) of San Pietro in Montorio (1502). Bramante repeated this same combination in his designs for St. Peter’s Basilica and the Vatican Palace, so that it became standard for the buildings commissioned by later sixteenth-century popes, from Paul III to Sixtus V (and also for the architecture ofthe Escorial in Spain - for Annius of Viterbo had also involved the Spanish monarchy in his Etrusco-Egyptian fantasies). When Gianlorenzo Bernini designed his dramatic oval colonnade for the piazza of St. Peter’s in the mid-seventeenth century, he continued to use Tuscan columns - his patron, Pope Alexander VII, was a native of Siena who prided himself on Etruscan ancestry - but topped them with an Ionic dentil frieze to match the friezes that adorned both the interior and exterior of the church itself.
World History
