Alexander VII

Italian pope (1655-1667)

• Born: February 13, 1599
• Birthplace: Siena, Republic of Florence (now in Italy)
• Died: May 22, 1667
• Place of death: Rome, Papal States (now in Italy)

Before his rise to the Papacy, Alexander was a key if unsuccessful player at the negotiations for ending the Thirty Years’ War. As pope he was a major patron of the architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who greatly enhanced the Roman cityscape. Largely ignored by major European powers, Alexander was a caretaker who exchanged substance for style as he helped remake Rome into a world capital.

Early Life

Alexander VII, named Fabio Chigi at birth, was born into a noble family of Siena whose roots date back four centuries but whose fortunes had declined greatly. Chigi was a sickly child, and ill health would plague him his entire life. Chigi spent five years studying philosophy and law at the University of Siena and four years there earning his doctorate in theology (1626).

Pope Urban VIII presented his fellow Tuscan with a position on the Church’s highest court of justice and named him vice legate to Ferrara, a position he held for five years. In 1635, Urban appointed him bishop of Nardò and inquisitor in Malta, at which point he was ordained a priest. In June, 1639, Chigi was sent to Cologne as a Papal Nuncio. On October 5, 1644, he became the Papacy’s representative in the negotiations at Münster to bring about an end to the Thirty Years’ War. In the ensuing talks, the Protestant states of Germany and their ally, France, outmaneuvered or ignored Chigi and the pro-Catholic Habsburgs and framed a 1648 treaty called the Treaty (or Peace) of Westphalia, which no papal representatives signed.

Despite this failure to protect Roman Catholic interests, Chigi was named papal secretary of state in 1651 by Pope Innocent X and was named cardinal on February 19, 1652. He advanced his interests in art by cataloging all the paintings contained in Siena’s churches. The College of Cardinals elected Fabio Chigi pope on April 7, 1655, after nearly three months of deliberation. He received a single vote against his candidacy—his own. Though Cardinal Jules Mazarin of France, regent for King Louis XIV, did not attend, his supporters tried to block Chigi because of his opposition to France’s pro-Protestant stance in the Münster negotiations. The new pope’s relationship with Europe’s most significant Catholic power would always be rocky.

Life’s Work

Chigi took the name Alexander in honor of the twelfth century Sienese pope, Alexander III Bandinelli (1159-1181). An enemy of nepotism, Alexander VII went so far as to ban his Sienese kin from Rome in April of 1655, but after two years, he relented and family members rushed to Rome. He rewarded many with lucrative positions in his patronage, following the standard model of the day.

Alexander preferred the company of scholars, writers, and artists, and he shared the Humanistic interests of the era. He sought to transform Rome into a true world capital whose idealized beauty would reflect the power and glory of the Church. He wrote the dedicatory inscriptions for his many building projects in Rome, some of which were the incomplete projects of earlier popes; the list includes the churches of St. Andrea della Valla, St. Ivo, and St. Peter’s. He initiated another thirty-six major renovations across the city, which together changed the face of Rome. Major streets, such as the Corso, were widened and straightened, both for aesthetic reasons and for the convenience of the rapidly multiplying carriages that filled them. Alexander tried, but failed, to centralize Rome’s many marketplaces, and he drove merchants away from the Pantheon. Repairs to the Pantheon’s porch were completed, a project begun a century before. He had piazzas, or squares, in front of major churches or palaces expanded and regularized, with both utility and aesthetics in mind. At the northern gate into Rome—the entrance through which representatives of the great powers would pass—he created a wide piazza in which visitors were greeted by twin churches and long, straight avenues that reached deep into the city.

The most famous of Alexander’s projects was St. Peter’s Square. Under his patronage, the great Italian architect, sculptor, and painter Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) designed the open space bounded by the colossal colonnade that reaches out from the church like two great arms encompassing the world. Work began in August, 1657, and was completed in 1671. Like his other piazza projects, this new space was to serve as a great open theater for church ceremonies, in the dramatic Baroque tradition. At St. Peter’s, the theatrics were continued in Bernini’s creation of the grand staircase known as the Scala Regia (1663-1666), which led from the square to the papal apartments at the Vatican; in the Cathedra Petri (1657-1666), a multimedia shrine for the throne of Saint Peter; and in Alexander’s own tomb (1672-1678), which Alexander had ordered as soon as he became pope.

The disease-ridden pontiff (he had serious bladder and kidney problems and had lost all of his teeth to dental disease while in Münster) meditated often on death, and he slept with his own coffin in his bedroom. Given all the work proceeding at the Vatican, Alexander tended to reside in the fifteenth century Quirinal Palace in Rome, and he had it redecorated by Italian painter and architect Pietro da Cortona, one of the pope’s few commissions for painting.

When, in 1659, Catholic Spain and Catholic France signed the Peace of the Pyrenees, which ended their fifteen-year-long war, they did so without having notified the pope. This was a clear sign of the political irrelevance to which the Papacy had fallen. First Cardinal Mazarin and the young King Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715) seemed to relish Rome’s decline and impotence, perhaps because of the Papacy’s attempts to interfere with French diplomacy at Münster. From 1653 to 1662, the French refused to send an ambassador to the Holy See. Perhaps the ultimate insult was Mazarin’s offer to landscape the area in Rome now known as the Spanish Steps. Its centerpiece would have been a fine equestrian statue of young King Louis, a gesture usually reserved for conquered cities. The offer was declined.

Alexander was, however, able to support the Poles against the Protestant Swedes and Orthodox Russians, and the Habsburgs in Vienna against the Turks. In neither case was Alexander’s diplomacy or his aid of much value. It was helpful, though, in the imperial election of Leopold Habsburg, on July 18, 1658. In support of Catholic missionary efforts, Alexander expanded the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, and inaugurated Rome’s university, the Sapienza, at which the study of non-European languages played a central role. Under his auspices a new edition of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Forbidden Books) was released, and Francis de Sales, bishop of Geneva, Switzerland, and a doctor of the Church, was canonized a saint (1665). From early in 1667, Alexander suffered from kidney disease. He died peacefully on May 22 in the Quirinal Palace.

Significance

Alexander VII’s greatest contribution as pope was his attention to the architectural beauty of Rome. In grand baroque fashion he refashioned Rome for political and religious theater by creating the grand northern entrance at the Porta del Popolo and the terminus of the processional route in St. Peter’s Square. The streets and piazzas that he cleared and widened have given visitors a vision of the Eternal City that reflects the Church universal and triumphant. Ironically, Alexander’s architectural work was accomplished at a time when papal power was in many ways at its lowest ebb. Alexander was unable to make a mark on the politics of his day, however, because the era’s absolutist rulers, especially Louis XIV, brushed the Church aside as a player.

Bibliography

Croxton, Derek, and Anuschka Tischer. The Peace of Westphalia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. A detailed reference work on the peace negotiations, including Chigi’s role as papal representative.

Habel, Dorothy Metzger. The Urban Development of Rome in the Age of Alexander VII. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Habel concentrates on Alexander’s urban planning and the execution of his plans, which she sees as being rooted in late classical, Eastern Roman models.

Kegley, Charles W., and Gregory A. Raymond. Exorcising the Ghost of Westphalia. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2001. A close discussion of the negotiations behind the treaty in the context of modern diplomacy.

Krautheimer, Richard. Rome in the Age of Alexander VII, 1655-1667. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985. A masterful overview of the artistic and architectural patronage of Alexander, including the projects that were completed and those of which he only dreamed.

Magnuson, Torgil. Rome in the Age of Bernini. 2 vols. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982-1986. Chapter 2, volume 2, contains an extended essay on Urban’s pontificate entitled “The Pontificate of Alexander VII,” which goes well beyond artistic considerations.

Pastor, Ludwig. History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages. Vol. 31. Translated by Ernest Graff. St. Louis, Mo.: Herder, 1940. The fullest discussion in English of Alexander by the foremost historian of the post-medieval Papacy.