Rome: Fontana, Maderno, Borromini and the Lombard nation

The papal building market after the Council of Trent

No single market mattered more to the lake masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than papal Rome. After the Council of Trent (1545–1563) the popes and the great Roman families rebuilt the city on a scale not seen since antiquity: new streets and aqueducts, the completion of St Peter's, dozens of churches for the new religious orders, and palaces for the papal nephews. The work was financed by the private fortunes of cardinals and banking families and by the Apostolic Chamber, the papal treasury. The Chamber drew on the taxes of the Papal States, which grew heavier from the middle of the sixteenth century, and increasingly on the funded public debt of the Monti, whose transferable shares (luoghi) of 100 scudi each represented a capital of more than 15 million scudi by 1619.¹ Building was therefore one of the channels through which the fiscal resources of the Catholic world were spent in Rome. A share of that spending flowed, as wages, fees and contractors' profits, to the villages on the Lake of Lugano.

The lake masters entered this market as stonemasons, stucco-workers and contractors. A small number rose to become the architects of the popes. In Rome they belonged to the nazione lombarda, the community of subjects of the Duchy of Milan and of neighbouring territories, which received a church dedicated to Saint Ambrose from Pope Sixtus IV in 1471 and later built the church of Santi Ambrogio e Carlo al Corso, begun to honour the Milanese archbishop Carlo Borromeo after his canonization in 1610.² Masters from the Luganese and Mendrisiotto villages, although subjects of the Swiss cantons after 1512, were counted among the Lombards in Rome. They married within the community, lent money to one another and were buried in its churches.

Domenico Fontana and the obelisk

Domenico Fontana was born in Melide on the Lake of Lugano in 1543.³ He came to Rome as a young man in 1563, drawn by the building projects of the Counter- Reformation.⁴ He began as a plasterer and builder and found his decisive patron in Cardinal Felice Peretti, for whom he built the villa Montalto and the Sistine Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore. When Peretti was elected pope as Sixtus V in April 1585, Fontana became papal architect and executed, in the five years of the pontificate, a building programme that transformed the city: the new Lateran Palace, the Vatican Library building, the Acqua Felice aqueduct, the new streets linking the pilgrim basilicas, and, with Giacomo della Porta, the completion of the dome of St Peter's between 1588 and 1590.⁵

The work that made his name throughout Europe was the removal of the Vatican obelisk. The monolith, which had stood since antiquity beside the old basilica, was moved in 1586 to the centre of the square in front of St Peter's. Fontana lowered it in the spring, transported it across the site and raised it again on 10 September 1586, using a timber scaffold known as the castello. Modern accounts put the effort at some 800 workmen, 160 horses and more than forty winches. Fontana described the operation himself in 1590 in a book entitled Della trasportatione dell'obelisco vaticano et delle fabriche di Nostro Signore Papa Sisto V.⁶ The operation was a public spectacle, commemorated by medals and prints, and Fontana's book is at once an engineering report, a record of the pope's building works and an advertisement for its author.

In figures. The Vatican obelisk is about 25 metres high without its base and weighs more than 300 tonnes.⁷ Fontana's team raised it in a single day, 10 September 1586. As a reward Sixtus V made him a knight of the Golden Spur, among other distinctions. Fontana displayed his rank for the rest of his life: on the column bases of the Royal Palace in Naples he signed as Dominicus Fontana patritius Romanus, auratae militiae eques et comes palatinus, that is Roman patrician, knight of the Golden Spur and count palatine.⁸ In July 1592, under Clement VIII, Fontana was removed from office after disputes over the accounts of the papal building works and left Rome for Naples, where he served the Spanish viceroys as royal architect and chief engineer of the kingdom until his death on 28 June 1607.⁹

Notes

1. Luigi De Matteo, "Un banco pubblico nello Stato pontificio. Il Banco di Santo Spirito dalle origini al 1814", Storia Economica 2 (1999), no. 3, https://www.storiaeconomica.it/pdf/1999.3.465.pdf (growth of temporal taxation from the mid-sixteenth century, Monti divided into luoghi of 100 scudi, capital above 15 million scudi by 1619 and 28 million by 1657, building programme of papal Rome continued from Julius II for two centuries); for the wider picture, Jean Delumeau, Vie économique à Rome dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle (2 vols, Paris 1957–1959). ↩
2. Wikipedia, "Sant'Ambrogio e Carlo al Corso", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sant %27Ambrogio_e_Carlo_al_Corso (used as a last resort). ↩
3. Repubblica e Cantone Ticino, OltreconfiniTI, "Vite di emigranti e discendenti", entry "Domenico Fontana (1543-1607). Un architetto di Melide al servizio del Papa", https://www4.ti.ch/can/oltreconfiniti/dalle-origini-al-1900/vite-di-emigranti-e-discendenti. ↩
4. Alessandro Ippoliti, "Fontana, Domenico", Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 48 (Rome 1997), https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/domenico-fontana_(Dizionario-Biografico)/. ↩
5. Ippoliti, "Fontana, Domenico" (cited above). ↩
6. Domenico Fontana, Della trasportatione dell'obelisco vaticano et delle fabriche di Nostro Signore Papa Sisto V (Rome 1590); for the figures see Wikipedia, "Vatican obelisk", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_obelisk (used as a last resort). Figures for men, horses and winches differ between accounts. ↩
7. Wikipedia, "Vatican obelisk" (cited above), which gives a height of 25.3 metres; Wikipedia, "Domenico Fontana", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domenico_Fontana, which gives a weight of 320 tons (both used as a last resort). Estimates of the weight vary. ↩
8. Wikipedia, "Domenico Fontana", https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domenico_Fontana, which quotes the Naples inscription, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domenico_Fontana (both used as a last resort). ↩
9. Ippoliti, "Fontana, Domenico" (cited above). ↩

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