Long married to a French princess, Philip saw seven of their eight children die, followed by their mother. The monarchy had no heir. In 1649, Philip, now forty-four, married his pious fourteen-year-old niece, Mariana, who was only four years older than her stepdaughter María Teresa and heroically spent the next decade giving birth to babies who died. Yet the grinding mission to procreate went on as Velázquez recorded the development of the family.
Philip often spent hours in Velázquez’s studio watching him paint. Velázquez was fascinated by his baroque peers: Rubens befriended him and the two visited the Titians at the Escorial. But Velázquez longed to make an aesthetic pilgrimage to Rome, drawn there by the other baroque titan.
‘You are made for Rome,’ Pope Urban VIII told a young sculptor’s son, Gian-Lorenzo Bernini, ‘and Rome is made for you.’ Urban had been introduced to Bernini when he was still a cardinal. ‘This child,’ Paul V told him, ‘will be the Michelangelo of his age.’ Now Urban appointed him to reinvigorate Rome. ‘It’s a great fortune for you, O Cavaliere, to see Cardinal Maffeo Barberini made pope,’ said Urban, ‘but our fortune’s even greater to have Cavaliere Bernini alive in our pontificate.’ Bernini agreed.
As papal curator and chief architect of St Peter’s, Bernini delivered the flashy gigantism of the basilica’s colonnade and the auric gaudiness of the baldachin inside – and, for later popes, the fountain of the four rivers on his Piazza Navona. His faith was embellished with creamy sexuality: his St Teresa was sculpted writhing in ecstasy, but the swagger of his Rome concealed a sexual brutality. Bernini had an affair with a married woman, Costanza Bonucelli, whom he adored and sculpted, but he was so outraged when she slept with his wild brother Luigi (a monster who later anally raped a young studio assistant) that he ordered a servant to slash her face with a razor blade. The furious pope forced Bernini to marry a young Roman woman at once and the razor-slashing servant was imprisoned – but so was Costanza, the victim, for adultery.
Bernini’s crime was forgiven. His contemporary, Artemisia Gentileschi, also an artist’s child recognized as a prodigy, was another victim treated as a criminal. Her father Orazio was son and brother of painters who had painted for Henrietta Maria in London and many other royal clients. In 1611, Artemisia, seventeen years old and a virgin with curly auburn hair, full lips and a wide face, was painting with the artist Agostino Tassi, twenty years older, when he and a male helper raped her, aided by a female tenant.* Tassi, who had been tried for incest and would later be tried for trying to kill a pregnant courtesan, promised marriage but then changed his mind, at which her father brought charges. Gentileschi had to relive the agony by giving testimony. Tassi, devious and violent, tried to suborn witnesses and taint her as a whore. Astonishingly, she was then taken to visit Tassi in prison and tortured with a thumbscrew to test her veracity. ‘È vero, è vero, è vero,’ she repeated. ‘It’s true!’
‘You’re lying in your throat,’ Tassi shouted. He was found guilty, though his sentence was later overturned.
Artemisia – passionate, independent, inconsistent – rebuilt her life. Soon after her ordeal, she painted
