The outlines of the modern papacy's "political iconography", as it might be called, have never been clearly defined. This is particularly true of the seventeenth-century papacy, which is best seen from the viewpoint of its changing position in the changed world of Europe's states as it emerged at the latest under the peace settlements of 1648 and 1659. An apparently symptomatic memorial in St. Peter's is linked with this, and not just in terms of time: Alessandro Algardi's colossal relief of Pope Leo the Great's encounter with Attila the Hun (fig. 1) on the Mincio in the year 452. [1] This is an altar painting in stone, whose preliminary history starts with the burial in 1607 of the remains of the first four popes named Leo under a prominent altar in New St. Peter's. Plans to furnish it with a painting did not come to fruition. It was not until the pontificate of Innocent X Pamphili that the project moved into its final phase. It is a new and surprising approach: sculpture instead of painting, a colossal marble relief rather than a picture. The sculptor received his commission on 27 January 1646. On December 1648 his modello in grande was set up on the site in St. Peter's. Algardi's successful work was unveiled on 28 June 1653, the day of the vigil before the important feast of Peter and Paul, when the pope ceremonially acknowledged the most important of the feudal rights remaining to him, over the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, by accepting tribute in the basilica in the form of a mule laden with silver coins, the so-called chinea. [2]

The work's direct link with the Holy Year of 1650 is not recorded. It is certainly tempting to assume that erecting such a spectacular work in a significant place was linked with an explicit intention: that of taking the historical but easily updated example of one of the papacy's great political and moral triumphs in a clash with worldly power, and using it as a means of presenting to the European public, represented by the pilgrims of the year 1650, the political and cultural achievement of rescuing Rome, Italy and indeed Europe from the barbarians, while showing the pope himself as pater patriae. But everything suggests that the creation and execution of the work were co-determined, if not triggered, by an event in the final phase of the Thirty Years' War; thus it too is part of a history of "politics in images", even in the concrete nature of its coming into being.

When on the morning of 15 September 1644, the conclave came to an end with the election of the Hispanophile Giambattista Pamphili, [3] the political situation was dominated by decades of war between the great powers, and by a series of unsuccessful preliminary negotiations for bringing it to an end. Curia politics were profoundly involved in these negotiations, with the Cologne nuncio Fabio Chigi as their exponent. In his diplomatic work as mediator between the Catholic powers, the pope's traditional claim to be the common father of the Christian princes and their arbitrator was once more laboriously sustained, although a little later, at the conclusion of the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659, the two great Catholic powers, France and Spain, were to exclude the self-same Fabio Chigi, now Pope Alexander VII, and his diplomats from the negotiations. The new pope, who called himself Innocent X (fig. 2), was elected in 1644, and did not have an easy legacy. He had to deal with the consequences of a war that he had warned against as a cardinal. It is well known that the Barberini nepotes had successfully persuaded Urban VIII to commit himself to the adventure of a war of aggression against the Duke of Parma, because they hoped to get their hand on the little dukedom of Castro, an enclave in the Papal States. It is only against this background that it can be fully understood why general hopes and expectations were directed so strikingly against the newly elected pope's person. This is the reason for the specifically peaceful ethos of his reign and the way it was addressed in artistic terms.

The colossal stone image in St. Peter's, at the tomb and in honour of a very significant pope and saint of the early Christian period, is a device for presenting historical merits, just like Raphael's frescoes in the Stanze in the Vatican palace (fig. 3). It also addresses the continuing role of the papacy and its tasks and ambitions. Leo the Great became a model pope for the post-Reformation papacy in its attempt to maintain power. This was not just because he formulated the idea of primacy in a fundamental way for the old church, laying the foundations of papal infallibility and, in his famous encyclical "Divinum Cultum", becoming a key figure in the relationship of the Holy See to Gallicanism. According to the Liber Pontificalis he is natione tuscus, an embodiment of Romanitas and undoubtedly one of the crystallisation points of papal ideology of Rome. In fact the historic Leo rose to the leading role, taking advantage of the weakened Western Empire. When Rome and Italy were threatened by the Huns in 452, it was he who headed the imperial delegation and persuaded Attila to turn back, and three years later, when the city was taken by the troops of the Vandal king Geiserich, it was he who protected the citizens. [4]

It is in the pictorial rather than the literary tradition that Leo the Great's diplomatic triumph at the Mincio became, through the support of the Apostles, an expulsion of the Hun king from Italy, and thus a triumph for papal authority in a clash with temporal power. This event acquired legendary status. It is obvious that the papacy's role in it, emerging as the saviour of Rome, Italy and the res publica christiana from the heathen barbarians, would suggest an ecclesiological gain. However, the papacy also sought to acquire contemporary political weight in the context of the Holy See's increasingly precarious position within Europe's changed perception of statehood in the seventeenth century. Confirmed by the apostle-princes, Leo the Great was the legitimate heir of imperial authority after it had failed and died out in the Western Roman Empire. But something else that should not be overlooked is the political significance that emerges for a territorial aspect in the narrower sense: the preservation of the Papal States. The model pope campaigned against the barbarian intruders to the borders of the future patrimony of St. Peter near Mantua, and rescued the fatherland. The people therefore gave him the imperial title pater patriae, in admiration "for its holy liberator, who twice, more and better than the ancient emperors, deserved the name of father of the fatherland". [5]

It is well known that Raphael raised the providential and political significance of the same event by placing it directly in front of the gates of Rome. The successor of Peter and the Roman emperors is accompanied by his senators, the cardinals, and wears the insignia of the Donation of Constantine. He is riding on the imperial white stallion, in sovereign calm and with imperial mien, to repel the barbarians. Their king, doubly impressed by the threatening heavenly appearance of the two apostle-princes in the clouds and the earthly appearance of their successor, the pope-emperor, is turning back, with all the signs of confusion. [6] But as Leo the Great originally bore the features of Julius II in Raphael's fresco, the picture of the heroic rescue of Italy by the papacy could and should be perceived as an image of current repulsion by the pope of the French invasion of Italy, which culminated in the conquest of Pavia. And logically in the new pontificate as well, when Raphael gave the mounted pope the features of Leo X, the political meta-thematics remained unchanged: Italy liberated and protected by the papacy.

Algardi's relief is a perfect and convincing reconstruction of an event in Christian antiquity, at a new level of historical faithfulness, or better of historical verisimilitude vis-à-vis Raphael. Only at one point does it break through the dimension of the historical: the pope in the relief bears the features of the reigning pope, in a slightly altered form, but unmistakable. [7] Exactly as in Raphael's case, here too the image of a past threat removed by the papacy of the time, Leo the Great and his historic deed, provide a model for the reigning pope with a view to the current problems of his pontificate. Innocent X is Leo's imitator, he is intended to and will play the same providential role as his great predecessor, he too, supported by the apostle-princes, is a defender, liberator and father of the fatherland, or however one chooses to verbalise the complicated semantics of this historical and political role-playing. Of course none of this is new in terms of the papal patronage of art; the closest example in both time and space is probably the tomb of Margravine Mathilde von Tuszien (fig. 4), in which Urban VIII's predecessor buried the bones of the great benefactress and co-foundress of the Papal States in St. Peter's. [8]

But what is the actual functional significance of the role-playing? What is to be achieved in concrete terms by identifying the reigning pope with the heroic model pope of early times in a portrait allusion? It is hard to overlook the fact that, against the background of the last phase of the Thirty Years' War, the planning history of the relief coincides with increasing political tension between the Holy See and France. In fact the pope's first visible decision to erect the relief, taken at the congregation of 27 January 1646, even coincides with the first climax in the 1646 crisis of internal and external policy triggered by the Barberini nepotes.

We should remember that the papal election of 1644 meant a defeat for French foreign policy. [9] As Innocent X was compelled for reasons of internal policy to make his predecessor's nepotes responsible for the Castro war, Mazarin subsequently exploited the Barberini problem to exert enormous diplomatic and military pressure on the pope. To escape the trials with which he was threatened, Cardinal Antonio Barberini was compelled to embark on his sensational flight to France on the evening of 28 September 1645, while his brothers Taddeo and Cardinal Francesco, who remained in Rome at first, put themselves under the protection of Mazarin on 15 October. On 6 January 1646 the refugee Cardinal Antonio was received by Mazarin in Paris with demonstrative ceremony. The situation in Rome was coming to a head. In the consistory of 13 January 1646 there were violent clashes between the pope and Cardinal Grimaldi, who pointed out the danger of a war with France. No fewer than six other cardinals also spoke in favour of the Barberini nepotes. On the night of 16 January Taddeo and Cardinal Francesco Barberini also fled to France. Their goods in the Papal States were confiscated, their palaces occupied and their offices distributed.

The pope was aware of the dangers of the situation that had arisen: Mazarin had not only threatened to occupy papal Avignon, in order to make the revenues available to the Barberinis, who had fled to him, he was also threatening council and schism. The whole campaign was supported by arms. War was waged indirectly against the pope by attacking the Spaniards, who were occupying the fortresses on the coast of Tuscany. This would affect the pope in three ways: through his friends the Spaniards, through his nepote by marriage Ludovisi, who ruled Piombino under Spanish dominion, and through the security of his state, as the French could easily invade the Papal States from Tuscany. On 10 May 1646 they took the fortresses of Telamone and Santo Stefano on the border of the Papal States and started to cut off Orbetello. Their fleet advanced as far as Civitavecchia, the pope's main Tyrrhenian port. But the military situation changed unexpectedly in mid-June. Admiral Brézé was killed in a marine battle with the Spaniards, whereupon the fleet returned to Provence. On 16 July 1646 the troops, decimated by fever, had to give up the siege of Orbetello, which triggered great enthusiasm among their enemies in Rome.

It may have been chance, or it may suggest the hypothesis of a personal decision by Innocent X to pay a personal tribute to the former pope and saint. In either case, the plan to erect the colossal relief for Leo the Great was decided in the following context: against the general political background of the extreme threat to the church in the north; against the current background of a dramatically intensifying conflict in the early stages of the pontificate exactly ten days after the flight of the two Barberini nepotes; and at the height of the danger of war and the threat to the territorial interests of the Holy See at the congregation of 27 January 1646.

But what is the current message of the imitatio of Leo the Great that the reigning pope is intending to convey in the relief? One aspect is certain, yet again: the transcendent basis of papal rule, tangibly demonstrated in the appearance of the two apostle-princes. But one only reaches the core of this slightly cryptic message by considering a complex of meanings that involves repelling external enemies on the model of Leo the Great, being pater patriae like him, and offering the protection, sovereignty and paternal care of Papa Pamphili.

The colossal relief turns out to be an impresa of Pamphili's pontificate. This is all the more true as the ruler-image conveyed by him completely agrees with the ethical interpretation, self-interpretation and stylisation of Innocence X and his pontificate, as can be seen in a large number of written and pictorial panegyrics. [10]

The striking feature of these is the great stress laid on the idea of peace. The special expectation of peace, which was associated with the person of the new pope in the last years of the Thirty Years' War and immediately after the end of the Castro war, is discernible in a cumulative use of stock phrases that goes well beyond the usual extent.

The argumentum a nomine is fundamental to the interpretation and stylisation of the reign of the Pamphili pope in the sense of the general expectation of peace. His essence is to be found in the family name Pamphili. He is panphilos, omnium amicus, the friend of all, and his reign therefore nothing other than universal love: panphilia.

No less important is the interpretation of his papal name. Immediately after the election it was believed that Pamphili would take the name of Clement, promising mildness and mercy. An ethical programme was also detected in the name Innocent, which he took in memory of Innocent VIII, under whom his family had come to Rome from Gubbio: Innocentius, the innocent one, innocent of the blood of the Thirty Years' War and that of the smaller Castro war, for which his predecessor Urban VIII was to blame. It is also not without symbolic significance that Pamphili is the tenth pope of this name. Ten is a beautiful round number. It suggests order and harmony. The pope is decimus ad mundi integritatem. The writers thus welcome him as the Prince of Peace, rex pacificus eris et clementissimus, who will restore peace, harmony and morality.

All writers of panegyrics take a step into heraldry, and thus a step into the realm of visual expression. It was also possible to confirm the same moral values by interpreting the pope's coat of arms, as its consisted of the dove with the olive-branch and three lilies: the dove as the creature of Venus embodied the panphilia of the pope, the lily the purity and innocence of his person and his rule, and the olive-branch the particular peace ethos of his papacy. More than that: it was perceived that the family name of the all-loving panphilos was vividly expressed in the new pope's heraldic creature, the dove as the messenger of love. At the same time the white dove is the embodiment of innocence. The newly elected pope's name is also illustrated by the bird, and so, and in the same image, is his most outstanding moral quality, innocentia. The allegory of the newly elected pope's name and qualities come together in the image of the dove.

But the pope's heraldic beast is not merely a symbol of his two names and his outstanding moral quality. It is also an auspicious sign of his future role in the war-torn world. As the Pamphili dove carries on olive-branch in its beak, it seemed reasonable to interpret it as a messenger of imminent peace. The dove appeared to Noah as he was still floating on the stormy waters of the Great Flood as the first sign of God's reconciliation with man in a covenant, and as a pledge of new life in a rejuvenated world. In the same way the Pamphili dove appears above the stormy floods of the times and brings, after the Great Flood of the Barberini war and the much bloodier Flood of the Thirty Years' War, the sign of reconciliation and new life. It has come down from heaven to the Vatican. The pope of peace, who proclaims himself in the image of the dove and through his two names, appears as the peoples' only hope. [11]

The second element of the Pamphili coat of arms, the lily, cannot be interpreted only as a sign of virtue, it also suggests a general anticipation of peace. Its name, iris, stands for the rainbow, the sign of God's reconciliation with man after the flood. The concrete political allegorical interpretation is this: it is not just the Pamphili olive-branch that will bear the fruits of peace in the garden of all Christian princes. The lily is the sign of future harmony, as the emperor, France, Spain, Tuscany, the Este and Farnese families and other princes as well as the pope included the sign in their coats of arms.

The fact that the arms of the newly elected pope symbolised peace not just in its elements but in its totality is another important motif of Pamphili panegyrics in word and image. [12] It is well known that the dove is sacred to Venus, the lily to Juno and the olive-branch to Minerva. If, following the usual scheme of heraldic connubialism, one also interprets the Pamphili coat of arms as the combination and reconciliation of its component parts, then the three goddesses agree peacefully within it. After the long quarrel caused by the epitome of war, the Trojan War, in which they had taken the side of either the Greeks or the Trojans, they are now at peace and in eternal alliance. They do not just join their hands together, they join their signs as well, so that out of three may come one. Venus contributes the dove, Minerva the olive-branch and Juno the lily. Peace is demonstrated and embodied in the Pamphili coat of arms.

It is only a small step from restoring peace, morality and happiness in panegyrics to something else that is also central to the specifically Pamphili panegyric, and that is the return of the Golden Age through the Messianic Ruler. The world will become paradise again through the Prince of Peace, Pamphili: mundus revertetur paradisus.

As early as the election evening, and in the following days and weeks, the Piazza Navona and other Roman squares were the scene of festivities both improvised and planned, in which expectations were conveyed to the newly elected monarch. [13] Thus, on the occasion of the coronation, a very direct statement was made outside the palace of the Spanish special ambassador to the conclave about what this great power expected from the new pope; the Spaniards rightly linked the notion of political success with their candidate's election. A macchina in the middle of the Piazza di Spagna showed Noah's Ark and on top of it the dove with the olive-branch. This was saying, as an eyewitness assures us, that peace was now restored urbi et orbi; the dove would never wage war, as the Papal States had suffered enough from the Great Flood of the last war.

On 23 November 1644 Innocence X carried out the possesso, his acceptance of the Lateran, which made him sovereign of the Papal States, in particularly solemn form, [14] and rode with the cardinals and a great retinue from the Vatican across the Ponte Sant'Angelo along the via papalis. At his birthplace near the Piazza Navona he met the Pasquino, the most famous of antiquity's speaking statues. A remarkable thing happened: the statue, otherwise an institution of criticism and opposition in the mantle of satire, had been redefined as an image of the new monarch and his role in the world in the spirit of anticipated peace. It was dressed as Neptune on his chariot with a trident in his hand. [15] Since the famous, explicitly political, interpretation that Virgil himself had given to the famous scene of "quos ego" in the first book of the Aeneid, where the ruler of the seas quiets the turmoil of the winds and calms the waves, this had become none other than an image of Augustus' reign of peace after the storm of the civil wars, an image of the restoration of peace by the sovereign ruler in general and a mythologically veiled early form of the absolutist statue of the ruler, which was also used by the papacy. [16] And so it is here as well! The image of Neptune calming the waves conveys the expectation that the pope himself, the embodiment of ratio superior in Virgil's exegesis, should appear as a reasonable ordering power over the turmoil and chaos of the parties, and thus restore peace.

This universal expectation of peace also made its mark on the other decorations in the possesso. On the very same evening a scene was presented in the new monarch's immediate surroundings that was without equal in its universal comprehensibility and the explicitness of its allegorical statement. A macchina representing Mount Ararat and Noah's Ark had been built over the fountain outside the Palazzo Pamphili in Piazza Navona. [17] Noah was turning to the Palazzo Pamphili and anticipating the arrival of the redeeming dove with outstretched arms. The following scene was then played out before the tightly packed crowd: a model of a dove flew towards the ark from the window of the palace in which Innocent X had been born. At the moment when it reached its destination it exploded, and everything went up in flames and fireworks. The allegorical statement of this spectacle was universally comprehensible: Innocent, by name and nature, leaves his birthplace in the image of the dove and enters the world. He brings the olive-branch, i.e. the new era of peace and God's reconciliation with man in a renewed and better world. He brings the branch to the ark, i.e. to all who are in the Church. He brings it after the Great Flood, i.e. after the war. The ark rests securely on the rock, i.e. on Peter and his successors.

It is well known that the considerable intellectual efforts made at the beginning of this pontificate had a series of monumental consequences in the course of it. In the Holy Year of 1650, the first after the peace settlement of Münster and Osnabrück, the Piazza Navona (fig. 5) appeared in a new form to the Roman and European public, the latter numbering in the hundreds of thousands. [18] But scarcely a single one of the visitors was able to guess the secret meaning of this strange accumulation of papal monuments in an urban piazza, the largest and most important in Rome at the time: an enormous family palace enlarged almost twice, a gallery with a benediction loggia added to it and thrusting towards the centre of the square, a future family church that was probably planned even then, a papal obelisk and a spectacular fountain in the centre of the square. It was not until the end of the pontificate that Innocent X was to come out with his plan, unique in the history of the modern papacy, to move to Piazza Navona with the curia, [19] and to reside in his birthplace for part of the year, effectively in the midst of his people. This also redeemed an ancient imperial disposition: the monumentally conveyed link between imperial palace and circus on the Palatine hill in Rome and in Constantinople.

Inside the gallery, Pietro da Cortona's frescoes represented a major epic-heraldic compliment to the papal monarch. [20] While the cyclical presentation of Aeneas' occupation of Latium shows the pope and the papacy as the heirs and fulfilment of Trojan-Roman rule, the providential meaning of the epic events represented is revealed in a target picture relating to this in the middle of the gallery. The goal and meaning of the Aeneid, peace, are here adduced to the pope's coat of arms and to his reign of peace. Under the form of Fatum the fresco shows the three goddesses Venus, Juno and Minerva, enemies until that point, settling for peace. By uniting their signs in peace they produce the heraldic marriage of dove, lily and olive-branch, the coat of arms of the peace-loving Pope Innocent Pamphili, innocent by name and nature.

He himself appears above the entrance to the camera del papa, mythologically veiled in the image of the majestic sovereign god Neptune (fig. 6), who is quelling the tumult of the winds with consummate stillness of attitude and gesture, restoring calm, order and peace in his empire solely by the power of his speech. [21] The figure B not by coincidence strikingly similar to the contemporary statue in honour of the pope on the Capitol by Alessandro Algardi and with the sign of threefold sovereignty, the trident in his hands B evokes the features of Innocent X. He is himself the sovereign restorer of peace. It is not he, but putti who are holding the reins of his carriage in their hands. In an eloquent metaphor "love holds the reins" B nothing other than the ethical stylisation of his rule as panphilia is illustrated here.

The sovereign ethos of the pontificate stamps itself on the two front sides of the gallery with enormous clarity (fig. 7). Above the royal motif on the serliana the coat of arms of the pope appears here flanked by the protecting wings of the Pamphili dove. The motto in the architrave shows that this is nothing other than an impresa of Pamphili rule: "Sub umbra alarum tuarum", a partial quotation of the psalm verse: "Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me under the shadow of your wings." The sovereign panphilia of the pope takes those entrusted to it under the wings of love and protects them, as it says in the Psalm, "against adversaries, evil-doers and foes". [22]

The outer façade of the gallery facing the square is also specifically papal (fig. 8). It is designed as a benediction loggia decorated with the coats of arms and a hieroglyph of the panphilia B the dove above the orb. [23] Borromini gave it the form of an architectural decoration. The structure with its clear dichotomy between rusticated base and crowning serliana follows a famous depiction of the power of papal blessing in the Vatican Stanze: the palace in the background in Raphael's City Aflame with Pope Leo V, who calms the flames with his appearance like a deus ex machina and turns the disaster into salvation with his blessing.

The centre of the square was already occupied by the obelisk in the Holy Year of 1650. It towered over the extension building, behind which the massive natural plinth and the colossal world of figures of Gianlorenzo Bernini's Fountain of the Rivers (fig. 9) was moving towards completion. [24] Unlike the obelisks that Pope Sixtus V re-erected, placing them all under the cross, which meant that paganism became the historical base of Christianity in an impressively antithetical historical-theological figure, the obelisk in the Piazza Navona [25] was a sovereign obelisk from the outset. Even in Francesco Borromini's preliminary project [26] it is placed beneath the peace-loving dove with the olive-branch in its beak, and so it is, comparably with the artificial obelisks of the Habsburgs and other dynasties, an "Obeliscus Pamphilius" occupied by the monarch's heraldic beast.

In his spectacular fountain project Bernini staged nothing other than the fundamental Egyptological commonplace of the early modern period that the Egyptians had mysteriously expressed the rays of the sun in the obelisk. [27] However its form, widening towards the base, expressed the flowing out of the spirit of the world embodied in the sun, or sun-genius, and its squareness, the enlivening and sustaining effect on the four parts of the world. He thus reformulated the metaphor attached to the obelisk of the sun flowing out to the four points of the compass as a monumental compliment to the sun-like universal monarch. Embodied in his heraldic beast, the gilded Pamphili dove on the tip of the obelisk, it is Pamphili himself who allows his illuminating and enlightening powers flow out to the four corners of the earth: Europe, the Christian part of the earth, which in the image of the Danube is looking straight up at him and "holding up", in a striking metaphor, the coat of arms, i.e. the pope's "name"; pagan Asia in the image of the Ganges, which is turning away; still-dark Africa, which in the image of the Nile is just starting to uncover its facies nigra, and thus its caput, i.e. its sources; America, which in the exotic image of the West Indian Moor as the Rio de la Plata is falling back, deeply upset. Athanasius Kircher would later say, in a brief phrase and as if it were the most natural thing in the world, when describing the Chigi obelisk erected for Alexander VII in front of S. Maria sopra Minerva, [28] that the pope himself, as the numen solare, is the spiritus or the anima mundi, but the obelisk is nothing other than a symbol of Pamphili himself, placed on earth in all his sun-like, illuminating, enlivening power.

The concept of the pope as spiritus mundi, illuminating and enlivening the world, can be seen as new version, to be understood spiritually, of the notion of the universal papal monarchy. However, the fact that there are personifications of the four quarters of the globe at the foot of the obelisk must equally reflect the mutual imitatio of the two old-world institutions of empire and papacy. It possibly even reflects the memory of a conflict that had been fought out at the time of the universal monarchy of Charles V in the sixteenth century, in the medium of mass communications and also in the medium of images, between the empire and the papacy. According to imperial theory the emperor was entitled to the right to rule all people in the human community, but the pope was entitled to rule only the Christians, and for this reason papal iconography, in Vasari's frescoes in the Palazzo della Cancelleria, had shown Pope Paul III as lord of the whole world, including the "Indians and Garamants", i.e. the peoples of the new world as well. The memory of the conflict-ridden and anything but undisputed aspect of the universal papal monarchy may live on in the four colossal figures of the world's rivers at the feet of the Pamphili dove, with the strikingly emphasised Rio de la Plata in the form of a West Indian Moor.

Only a limited public, the small circle of those familiar with early modern hieroglyph lore, could perceive that hieroglyphs had in fact been added to the fountain monument in the form of apparently realistic motifs like the palm and the snake at the foot of the obelisk. [29] Their meaning as hieroglyphs: the fountain is, in brief, a sign of a world that has been purified and renewed by the Holy Year of 1650. They make it into a symbol of religious, moral, social and political renewal, of repentance, forgiveness and the new beginning of the world under the influence of the pope. It is no longer recognisable today that the return of the Golden Age under the Pamphili dove B mundus revertetur paradisus B was once in fact directly and vividly perceptible. [30] The fountain used to be painted. Dove, cornucopias and the pope's coat of arms bore the vivid expression of the Golden Age, and that was gold.

It was a glimpse of another world. And even more so when, from the pontificate of Paul V onwards, Roman custom was followed in the hot summer months with the temporary flooding of the approach square to the Ponte Sisto, at what was then the end of the Via Julia. In the same way, the drainage tubes of the fountains in the Piazza Navona were blocked up and the whole square was flooded like a naumachia; [31] the fountains from which the water poured stood up like islands in the middle of this great expanse of water.

The plan to flood the Piazza Navona was a personal idea of the pope's, which he characteristically expressed at the moment when he stated his intention to reside there for part of the year. On 3 August 1654 the Florentine chargé d'affaires reported on the pope's intentions, including that of "ultimately improving the whole square in such a way that by allowing the water to rise the coaches can parade and the people can stand on the edges, things that need many years to bring to fruition, if one accepts that His Holiness will live in the said palace and make his chapel in the new church". [32]

The fact that Bernini planned to make this condition of temporary flooding the starting-point for a great allusive poetic concetto that would embrace the whole orbis of the square can be seen from his project preserved in a drawing in Windsor Castle [33] for one of the two adjacent fountains B it is the top one of the two B which he intended to crown with the statue of Neptune commanding the waves (fig. 10). Since the time of Gregory XIII the two ends of the square had been occupied by Giacomo della Porta's fountains.

Erecting the Fountain of the Rivers in the middle of the square had made these into subsidiary fountains. In 1652 Bernini had topped the structure in front of the palace first of all with a shell borne by dolphins, then with a much larger-than-life-size statue of a triton holding a water-spewing dolphin, and surrounded the existing pool with a second broad, polygonal basin. [34] The posture and body-language of the Moro, who is to be seen as Neptune's servant and helper, are directed at the centre and at the other end of the square. If the complete plan, which was interrupted by the death of the pope in 1655, had been realised, the figure would have related to a sovereign counter-figure over the full length of the square.

This is clearly documented in the project drawing in Windsor Castle: Neptune was to appear here in the midst of his retinue of tritons, held up higher than the Moro on a shell, appropriately to his sovereign status. The god and lord of the water, thrusting forward powerfully, carried the important sign of his authority, the three-pronged triregnum, in his left hand, while his right is extended commandingly. The meaning of the gesture is clear. Neptune was to "command" the waters of the flooded area from the caput of the square. As already in Bernini's early work, the Neptune and Triton now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London B but which once stood at the head of the broad, oval surface of the water in the fishpond at the Villa Montalto near S. Maria Maggiore [35] and there "ruled the waves" B the incomparably larger area of water of the lago in the Piazza Navona would have been raised to the plane of a poetic concetto by the dominant figure of Neptune.

His significance can be precisely identified. Everything suggests that Neptune's appearance above the broad surface of the water-filled stadium was not intended to allude to the famous storm at sea in Virgil's Aeneid, but to stir memories of a much greater disaster in the minds of educated observers: that of the flood in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Nothing else can have been meant in Bernini's project than an allusion to its happy outcome, as Neptune, at the sound of the conch blown by the triton, commands the waters to withdraw, whereupon the dry shores reappear. [36] The tritons at Neptune's feet were to blow the conch clearly enough, and repeat the call four times. This detail alone, together with the god's sovereign gesture of command, would have left informed observers certain that this was Ovid's Neptune who was ordering the floods to withdraw.

As in the Villa Mantalto before, Bernini was thus also planning to interpret the abundance and excess of the water here through the form of Neptune, and he intended to make the temporary lago in the Piazza Navona into a mythologically condensed version of the Great Flood. As there, here too it was intended to revolve around Neptune's command that the waters should withdraw: "The flood already has a shore, the land is growing". Redemption and rebirth of the earth to new life after the catastrophe of the Great Flood are to be shown.

In the middle of an ancient stadium, associated by its former interpretation and its actual form with the traditional notion that every circus is a copy of the world, Ovid's concluding line [37] would have acquired a particularly concrete and vivid meaning: with the "reappearance of the shores" the "globe was given back again" ("Redditus orbis erat"). The temporary flooding of the square would become a poetically mythological image of disaster, rescue and restoration of the orbis.

It this only a poetically mythological concetto? Neptune, interpreted as the rescuing Neptune of the Great Flood who makes it possible for the orbis to be restored, would have taken on more than merely mythological significance for the informed observer. The faked catastrophe and its overcoming by the ruler was not to be playfully shown and alluded to in a space that was free of politics. On the contrary! The mythologically veiled play of the rescue was to take place in the context of the square which was at the time completely monarchical in its characteristics, in a context in which everything could be understood in papal terms. The urban piazza had long been the forecourt of a papal palace. It was occupied and surrounded by papal monuments: the palace in which Innocent X intended to reside, with gallery and benediction loggia, the adjacent papal church in which he intended to make his chapel and to be buried, the papal obelisk and the fountain in the centre of the square.

If the statue project at the upper, rounded end of the square had come to fruition, then the semantic weight of the other monuments assembled here would have been sufficient to give papal meaning to it and to the temporary flooding, interpreted as the Great Flood. The image of Neptune above the floods would have been interpreted as an allusion to the spiritual universal monarch as the person who brought the Great Flood to an end, and as the sovereign saviour of the orbis. It would have been easy for the semantics of the "end of the Great Flood" and the "restored orbis" to be linked with the renewal and peace symbolism of the Fountain of the Rivers in the centre of the square. In a condition of apparent danger and redemption, the whole of the Piazza Navona would have been changed into an abbreviation of the "restored orbis", and a "great compliment" to the monarch.

Athanasius Kircher's ambivalent formula mentioned above of the pope as the spiritus mundi, and the inspiring obelisk as a metaphor of papally initiated out-flowing and impact on the world, also affected the pontificate of the next pope, Alexander VII, Fabio Chigi. He was associated with the notion of a further loss of power by the Holy See and an increasingly weakened position in the world of European states, and also with the hypothesis of a reactive and compensatory attitude by the papacy to the "trauma of Münster", [38] to which he responded with an increased emphasis on papal majesty and a somewhat unnatural recourse to architectural and artistic devices.

The Holy See had certainly been active at the Peace of Westphalia as a mediator between the Catholic powers, but papal diplomacy was excluded from negotiations for the conclusion of the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659 by the two great Catholic powers France and Spain. [39]

The papacy and Fabio Chigi were able to be involved in the Peace of the Pyrenees only by presenting a plea in the form of an image. And it is with this, the image of Leo the Great's meeting with Attila re-interpreted and used differently, that we shall return to the starting-point of the sketch submitted here.

There is a 98-centimeter-high gilded silver reproduction of the colossal relief in St. Peter's in the royal palace in Madrid. Features that correspond with a bronze casting in the Treasury of the Hofburg in Vienna show that the two reliefs were cast from the same model. It remains to be seen whether it is a coincidence that expensive reductions of the Roman relief, with its content as meaningful for the historical role of the papacy as it was for its current status in the political world, arrived in the two Habsburg courts in Madrid and Vienna. In the case of the Madrid version, it is certain, as Jennifer Montagu has shown, that it was cast in Rome in 1657, sent to Madrid in a frame by Petro da Cortona and handed over as a diplomatic gift to King Philip IV in the preliminary stages of the Peace of the Pyrenees by the dean of the College of Cardinals and vice-chancellor of the Church, Francesco Barberini. [40]

It was an eloquent, indeed an entreating diplomatic gift. It was not only that, using the devices of synonymy and heraldic allusion, two lions added to the frame established the connection between the leonine Pope Leo the Great and Philip IV, who had a lion in his coat of arms. A motto added to the relief made the gift into a papal impresa for peace. For the three words "pax christiana subiecit" ("the pax christiana subjugated them") added to interpret the image of the Huns shrinking back before the power of the papacy produce, jointly with the image, a pictorial and literary statement of "Christian peace": the peace brought about by the pope between the Christian princes was what "subjugated the Huns". The scarcely cryptic message to King Philip IV is a challenge to create a pax christiana, i.e. to conclude peace with France under papal mediation, and to establish a future European alliance against the Turks, under papal leadership.

The image that is so lucid and eloquent in his motto is an unusually clear reminder of the dual task that the papacy was increasingly taking upon itself in its secular conflict with the empire over the monarchia universalis, above all since the abdication of Charles V, as the pope attempted to replace the emperor as the universal ruler. The pope held himself responsible for the commune bonum of the respublica christiana in a more comprehensive sense than the emperor. His first task was to maintain peace among the rulers, the second, to protect the respublica christiana against threats from the outside. He therefore had two authorities: he was arbiter or moderator between the princes, and secondly had the leading role in the struggle against the Ottoman threat to Europe, in which he could use any other rulers as helpers.

At a low point of real political influence for the Holy See, Cardinal Barberini's diplomatic gift was a reminder that could not be overlooked or go unheard. It presented the eloquent image of the threat to the papacy's continuing claim to a dual leadership role. And by and large it was not unsuccessful! In a subsequent pontificate, with the successful alliance before Vienna of Emperor Leopold I, the Doge of Venice and Pope Innocent XI, the papacy was to be involved in a victory that was ultimately lasting. Ironically, then, more than just "politics in images".

FOOTNOTES