The spiraling columns in Bernini?s Baldacchino in St. Peters refer architecturally to the famous spiraling columns of the Temple of Jerusalem, a familiar motif in earlier Renaissance depictions of that Jewish structure by Fouquet and Raphael (Peter and Paul Healing at the Golden Gate). This had special significance in the church of St. Peters ever since the Roman emperor, Constantine converted to Christianity, built numerous large churches in Rome and Constantinople, and donated 12 marble, spiraling columns supposedly taken from the Temple of Jerusalem (an impossibility since it had been destroyed centuries earlier). Legend triumphed over historical fact and the columns were symbolically used at the high altar of the Early Christian basilica of Old St. Peters. (They can be seen in Raphael?s Vatican fresco of the Donation of Constantine.) When Pope Julius II tore down that church to build a much larger St. Peters in the early sixteenth century, he and his successors preserved eight of the original twisted columns in the decorations under the four pendentives below Michelangelo?s dome.
In part, the use of Jewish spoils and imagery in Christian churches worked to express Christian ideas of triumphant world history with Judaism yielding to a victorious Christianity fulfilling (and replacing) the Old Testament. This was especially appealing in Renaissance and Baroque Rome as popes developed an increasingly triumphal, Roman Catholic piety informed by ancient Roman imperial themes. Implicit in all papal references to Solomon, David, or Moses was the idea of the pope as a new and more powerful, Christian king appointed by God. This is clear enough in the Sistine Chapel, which was constructed in the late Middle Ages using the dimensions of the Temple of Jerusalem (as they were known in literary tradition). This tradition of Jerusalem-Rome also shed slight on Perugino?s famous 1481 fresco in the Sistine Chapel showing Christ giving the keys to Peter, the supposed first pope. Of special interest is the inscription on the two depictions of the Arch of Constantine which flank Perugino?s scene. Replacing the words inscribed on the real arch, they hail Peter as the successor to Solomon for building a greater temple in Rome (i.e. the Sistine Chapel, and, more generally, the Roman church as a whole). That Constantine legitimized Christianity and supposedly brought pieces of the Temple of Jerusalem to build Old St. Peters only made his ties to Solomon all the more rich.
With his gigantic bronze canopy of honor erected over the tomb of St. Peter, Bernini surpassed the eight solomonic columns from the Temple of Jerusalem which were displayed all around his massive yet airy structure. Just as Catholicism surpassed and supposedly replaced Judaism, so Michelangelo?s and Bernini?s architecture far surpassed the scale and scope of Old St. Peters. With its architectural references to Jewish and Early Christian history, Bernini's Baldacchino flattered Pope Urban VIII as a Solomonic king presiding over a new Golden Age of Roman Catholic power and universal dominion, stretching across all time and space.
The eight solar faces decorating the top corners of Bernini's Baldacchino - seen in the next image on this web site - appear in the personal emblematic imagery of Pope Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini) who was a humanist poet long before he was pope. Like Pope Julius II with Raphael's Apollo on Mt. Parnassus and Paul III with the solar imagery of the Campidoglio, Urban VIII used art to flatter himself in in solar term as a Apollonian prince ruling over a new Golden Age of Catholic peace, prosperity, unity, global harmony, and cultural flourishing and enlightenment. Thanks to the rise of Renaissance humanism, most rulers were praised in these terms after 1500, long before Louis the Sun King plastered similar solar faces over his architectural commissions. Here Bernini's solar faces offer a pagan counterpart to the glowing light which falls from Michelangelo's dome and from the underside of the baldachin itself where the Holy Ghost appears in a blaze of glory.
