Bernini's “Triumph of Truth over England”

Abstract

In his discussion of Bernini's Tomb of Pope Alexander VII (Fig. 1) Professor Panofsky points out that the weird and frightening apparition of Death raising his hourglass (queste bizzarrie, as Cicognara put it)1 also the source or origin of a drama leading to a noble and conciliatory climax.2 The heavy shroud which covers the grave of the pope and the abode of Death also drapes the figure of Truth in the right foreground of the tomb. As Death, in his flight upwards, raises the shroud, he also reveals (and did reveal more grandly before the statue was given a kind of undergarment at the behest of Pope Innocent XI)3 Truth's graceful nudity, Truth assenting with a gesture of sovereign modesty, which perhaps only Truth can afford. Death, the ravisher, then here also a representation of Time.4 Unwillingly, or perhaps unknowingly, he brings about the good that the passing of time holds in store for Truth obscured by Falsehood and Ignorance-her eventual shining triumph.5 We must recognize, says Professor Panofsky, that the four allegories surrounding the tomb are not the usual ensemble of mourning virtues. Truth, unlike the other three allegories (Charity, Prudence, and Justice) is not, and was hardly ever considered to be a Virtue, that to say, she does not personify a maxim of commendable conduct. Rather she personifies-like Health, Wealth, Peace or Prosperity-the object and aim of a virtue: she is, to quote Thomas Aquinas' famous definition, not 'virtus sed objectum vel finis virtutis'.6 Our drama, in consequence, takes place in the future. The three virtues mourn the loss of the pope. Justice, if we may elaborate on Panofsky's exegesis, deprived of the pope's support, has put down her scales7 and musingly looks at Truth-and into the future. There she sees the plans and hopes of the pope, which were cut short by Death (as were his actions misrepresented by the envy and the ignorance of men), unveiled before posterity. If the kneeling pope's prayer answered these plans and hopes will be realized for the good of Christianity. The elevation of the mournful and so rudely demonstrative skeleton to a part in a drama with an ultimately lyrical plot, and the readiness of the figures more fully to come to life in the terms of this plot suffice, I think, to persuade us of the truth (a truth unveiled) of Panofsky's argument.8 Still, in its support, I should like to add an observation of a detail which, if I see it correctly, was used by Bernini to develop the plot of his visual drama i a very precise and literal manner. One of the attributes of Truth is, of course, the globe on which she stands. Her right foot, it will be observed, rests lightly, but unmistakably, upon the British Isles. (Fig. 2).9 That this not an accident may appear also from the curious constellation of the land and water masses on the globe. T e sphere is, like so many other details in the work of Bernini, distorted from its true shape for the sake of perspective, but the change has been complicated in such a fashion that the globe, placed as it is, exposes to our view, at the same time, Europe and a part of the Am rican continent.10 Though this displacement of America cannot be reconciled with the truth of geography (the size of the Atlantic Ocean much diminished whatever perspective corrections we may allow) it perfectly in keeping with the exigencies of a rhetorical truth. What we really are to see when w look at the globe (and at the foot of Truth) a Ca holic Europe, with Britain reconciled to the Faith, and the rule of Christianity in Africa and in the Americas as well. It for this, above all, that Alexander VII praying. If we recall his special concern for the Catholic missions, his ever-hopeful British politics, and the tribulations he suffered from a France that almost established a separate Church,