Urban VIII

Italian pope (1623-1644)

• Born: April 5, 1568 (baptized)
• Birthplace: Florence (now in Italy)
• Died: July 29, 1644
• Place of death: Rome, Papal States (now in Italy)

Urban guided the Catholic Church through most of the Thirty Years’ War by aligning it with France, continued the advance of the Catholic Reformation, saw his old friend Galileo be punished, combated Jansenism, and patronized the great sculptor and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the architect Francesco Borromini, and the painter Pietro da Cortona.

Early Life

The Barberinis were a prosperous Florentine cloth merchant family whose coat of arms sported three golden horseflies. Maffeo, the future Pope Urban (uhr-bahn) VIII, was the fifth son of Antonio and was groomed for a life in the Church. He was educated by Jesuits in Florence and then attended the Collegio Romano with the support of his uncle, Francesco Barberini, a well-placed papal bureaucrat. Maffeo obtained his doctorate in civil and canon law from the University of Pisa and then returned to Rome to work in the Papal Curia in a position purchased for him by Francesco for 8,000 crowns. He rose in the Curia and, in 1592, was named governor of the papal territory of F†nö.

Maffeo was affable and well-liked, noted for his horsemanship but also his temper. Pope Clement VIII sent him to Paris to congratulate King Henry IV on the birth of his heir. In 1604, Maffeo was ordained to the priesthood and became the papal nuncio to Paris. At Henry’s urging, Pope Paul V named Maffeo cardinal in 1606.

Two years later, Maffeo returned to Italy where he served as bishop of Spoleto, and from 1611 to 1614, he served as papal legate to the city of Bologna. When residing in Rome he occupied the large house (casa grande) of his uncle, who had died in 1600 and left it to Maffeo. He expanded and redecorated it and soon it became Palazzo Barberini, and the family’s coat of arms, the golden horseflies, was changed to golden bees, the most recognizable symbol of the Barberini pope. The palace served as an art gallery, library of rare books, and academy for an elite circle of writers and artists with whom he discussed his interests in poetry and astrology.

In the summer of 1623, the College of Cardinals met in conclave to elect the successor to Gregory XV, using a secret ballot for the first time. On August 6, with many suffering from malaria, Maffeo was elected the compromise candidate and assumed the name Urban VIII.

Life’s Work

Upon assuming the papal throne, Urban began a campaign of nepotism that was notorious even in an age notorious for nepotism. He linked familial control of key positions at the curia and in Rome with a keen desire to oversee personally every aspect of papal governance. In the face of militant Protestantism, Urban sought to posit a unified and powerful Catholic Church that acted under one will and spoke with a single voice. It was in this context that the Inquisition silenced Galileo in 1633, despite Urban’s earlier support of his ideas.

The court condemned Galileo’s Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, tolemaico e copernicano (1632; Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican , 1661) as a violation of the 1616 ban on the teaching of Copernican ideas. The aging scientist denounced his ideas under threat of torture and was placed under house arrest at his residence in Tuscany until his death in 1642. The Catholic Church, in the late twentieth century, formally acknowledged its mistake when it admitted that Galileo’s tribunal overstepped its bounds when it pronounced on a scientific and not strictly theological matter. Also, the Church recognized that Urban’s opposition to the ideas of the French bishop of Ypres, Cornelius Otto Jansen , was based on the same foundation as his opposition—as pope—to Galileo: Both men had challenged Church authority.

Jansen died in 1638, but in 1642, Urban condemned his major theological work, Augustinus (1640), which was gaining a powerful following in France. The work expounded an Augustinian/Calvinistic doctrine of grace that challenged the traditional Catholic teaching on the role of human free will, a position whose teaching had been banned in 1611 and 1625. French Jansenists organized themselves despite both political and papal opposition and defended Jansen’s teaching. Their defiance of papal opposition would continue late into the century.

Urban had always been pro-French, a position that would become less and less tenable as the great conflict of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) dragged on. Fearful of Habsburg power in Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, Urban hampered Habsburg political interests in northern Italy and supported the French. When Cardinal de Richelieu allied France with the Swedish and German Protestant forces in 1635, however, the pope was incredulous. He certainly could not promote Protestant interests, even if France threatened to split from Rome along the lines of the English Reformation. Having long snubbed the imperial cause, Urban could not suddenly become a trusted ally of the Habsburgs. He accelerated his program of fortifying papal territorial possessions in Italy, including his own Roman fortress, the Castel Sant’Angelo, and managed to keep not only the Papal States but also most of Italy free from the ravaging that Germany was undergoing in the 1630’s and 1640’s. With France supporting the enemies of the Catholic Church, Urban became a weak arbitrator, though his efforts to broker a peace did lead to peace talks at Münster, Germany, in the year of his death (1644). In the end, peace was made in the face of papal opposition in 1648, and political Protestantism was vindicated.

Urban’s desire to magnify the prestige of the Papacy and his own family resulted in a program of outstanding architectural and artistic contributions to Rome’s heritage. Barberini support for the architects Gian Lorenzo Bernini , whom Urban made architect of St. Peter’s Basilica, and Francesco Borromini , who was entrusted with enlarging the University of Rome (the Sapienza), and the painter Pietro da Cortona began the High Baroque transformation of the city and its artistic patrimony. In honor of early Catholic victories in the Thirty Years’ War, Urban pushed completion of the interior of St. Peter’s, which he formally consecrated in 1626. He had Bernini build the great baldachin over the main altar, a bronze canopy atop four twisted columns. Bernini also decorated the huge piers that held up the church’s dome and contained important relics from the life of Jesus, and he executed Urban’s enormous tomb sculpture in St. Peter’s. The Palazzo Barberini on the Quirinal Hill in Rome underwent expansion at the hands of Bernini and Borromini, being transformed into a villa complete with a theater for lavish productions. On the ceiling of the Palazzo’s Great Hall, Pietro painted one of the century’s masterpieces.

Significance

When Urban died, the people of Rome rejoiced. They viewed him as a shameless nepotist ruled by his ambitious family and as a tyrant with an insatiable hunger for their tax money. History has softened this judgment, tempering and contextualizing the criticisms while admitting their validity. While Urban was profligate in granting his brothers and nephews high Church offices, they held sway over the pope in his waning years only. High taxes in the papal territories were necessary in part for military defense during perilous times. Large expenditures on churches and his palace added magnificence to the city that remains to this day. Both nepotism and architectural magnificence were aspects of political absolutism in the seventeenth century, and Urban, despite his affability, ruled the Church and its states as an absolutist monarch. By supporting the independent French position early in the Thirty Years’ War, Urban undermined the Catholic cause of the Habsburgs and their allies, and contributed to the ultimate collapse of militant Catholicism.

Bibliography

Hammond, Frederick. Music and Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Barberini Patronage Under Urban VIII. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994. A cultural study of the role of music and theatrics in Urban’s Rome and under his patronage.

Kerwin, William C., and Philipp P. Fehl. Powers Matchless: The Pontificate of Urban VIII, the Baldachin, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. New York: P. Lang, 1997. The first study of the baldachin over the high altar in St. Peters, Urban’s patronage, and Bernini’s early development.

Magnuson, Torgil. Rome in the Age of Bernini. Vol. 1. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1982. Chapter 3 of volume 1 contains an extended essay on Urban’s pontificate, “The Barberini Era,” which goes well beyond artistic considerations.

Nussdorfer, Laurie. Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992. Study of the relations between Urban and his famiglia and the civic government of Rome as the Papacy became ever more absolutist in theory and action.

Pastor, Ludwig. History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages. Vols. 28, 29, 30. Translated by Ernest Graff. St. Louis, Mo.: Herder, 1923-1969. The fullest discussion in English of Urban by the foremost historian of the post-medieval Papacy.

Prodi, Paolo. The Papal Prince, One Body and Two Souls: The Papal Monarchy in Early Modern Europe. Translated by Susan Haskins. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. A scholarly study of the pontificate of Urban in the larger context of seventeenth century popes.

Scott, John Beldon. Images of Nepotism: The Painted Ceiling of Palazzo Barberini. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. A study of the palace and the familial iconography of the ceiling painting that was commissioned by Urban.