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(piano playing)
Dr. Beth Harris: We're standing,
the three of us, outside of Sant' Andrea al Quirinale.
I don't know how my Italian sounded there.
Male: Perfect, perfect.
Beth: A church by Bernini.
Male: A small church because there was not
much space to build it.
He was told by the Jesuits that he should
build and design the architecture
within this limited area.
And he's done a magnificent thing.
He's used what's called a giant order of architecture,
which means that the steps that lead up to the church
or the porch and the whole body of the church itself
are enclosed within a single, giant pilaster
on each side and a huge elevation,
which gives it a monumentality that really
makes you forget how relatively small it is.
He also has the steps spilling out into the street
in a series of concentric ovals, like ripples.
He loved movement.
There's always movement in his architecture
which prepares us for the inside
as we will see, the inside has an oval plan.
Let's go inside.
Dr. David Drogin: Absolutely.
I can't wait to see it.
So, we've just entered into the church
and we're in this beautiful oval form
and that's actually ... As we walk in,
it opens more broadly to our left and our right.
Male: It's a horizontal oval.
Not what you would expect.
Well, first of all, a church you would erect
a quadrangular space of some kind,
a cross shaped space and this too is something
which could not have happened during the Renaissance era.
There would have been a circular plan.
This is an oval one and it's interesting to see
that we'll come to an oval again just down the street
with Borromini, is often compared as a kind of rival
to this and in some ways it is as Camillo.
David: It also seems ... Saint Peter's Square.
Male: Yes, which is elliptical actually.
It's two ellipses. In that sense of,
of well, it's like the difference between
classical ballet and modern ballet.
There's a sense of, sort of, expansion
while keeping to certain symmetries.
This is rigorously symmetrical.
The thing that most strikes us as we go in
is beyond and above the altar we have light.
It looks like theatrical light, but it's actually real light
filtered in through a window that we can't see.
Beth: Bernini does that often.
Male: He loves doing that. He does that ...
David: In the Saint Teresa.
Male: ... in the Saint Teresa and in Saint Peter's
and it filters down on this group of tumbling.
When they're moving up and down at the same time,
joyous, musical angels and cherubs set against
massive rays of light and they're made
of stucco and gold and bronze.
Beth: Let's go a bit closer.
Male: Yes.
Male: Well, as we approach the altar in
the curve of the oval, we have a richly
appointed altar and seats and all of that,
but we have a central painting of the
Martyrdom of Saint Andrew.
Sant' Andrea is Saint Andrew in Italian.
That is the dedicatee of the church
and he is very important in the Christian faith
not just for Catholics.
He is the brother of Saint Peter so there are
many churches dedicated to him in Rome.
And he is the figure nailed to a X shaped cross
which we call Saint Andrew's Cross
and that is what is framed within these cherubs
and angels and fictive, but very solid rays of light.
David: What's so interesting is that the painting itself
is framed in the same marble ...
Beth: As the columns and pilasters.
David: Yeah, so that it really is not a painting
as we would normally understand it
within an architectural space.
Male: It's fully integrated.
Again, it is that combination of solid and void
of rich material and sculpture in architecture
and painting, it is this complete work of art
again and theatricality.
And if we get too close, as it were,
we're standing right in front of the altar
and look up, we see the source of that light
that the congregation wouldn't normally see
and whether it's daylight or electric,
but there is space for daylight.
That is what bathes the area in light.
David: This beautiful second lantern.
Male: Exactly.
David: Yeah, yeah.
Male: And that, of course, is pure
theatrical expedience.
The color of the columns and the pilasters
and the gorgeous colors of the different
stone materials that we used to build this church
are earthly colors.
Some people have compared these columns
to, I would think of prosciutto, maybe.
Some people say hamburger meat.
We're not being flippant.
We're looking at browns and whites
and streaks of what would be the fat in the prosciutto,
but this relates to food in a perfectly serious way.
That is something of the earth.
All of that gives way when your eyes are taken up
into the vaulting of the whole church
to pure colors and they're Heavenly colors.
Down below it's earth and up above it's only
white and gold and those are the colors of paradise
and as we'll see, Saint Andrew, dying on the cross
in the painting yields to a statue actually
exploding out of the level down below
into the upper level and that is a white statue
and he's being carried up to Heaven.
Beth: And that gold in the lantern. That's just ...
Male: Yes, well that gold is enhanced, of course,
by having stained glass.
A simple expedient ancient landmark
and we simply use glass that is, in this case, yellow
so even on a cloudy day like today
it's gives this sense of a glow like the Holy Spirit above.
Beth: Heavenly.
Male: And that is what is shown in that lantern.
Beth: In the center.
Male: The very top of the building.
David: What I'm really taken by is the way
that the structural ribs of the dome are
structured as rays that emanate from the dove.
Male: It's a two way thing
and you've hit it on the head.
It both emanates from that dove and brings us
divine grace which comes from the Holy Spirit
an inspiration, but also it leads the eye upward.
Whichever way you look at it, it works to go
from this very decorated oval shape that we have
below to something that resolves into,
as I said, pure gold and white and light.
And that vaulting, that dome itself, which
is so oval is full of people in white.
Now, they're made of stucco.
These are statues of both men and boys.
The boys, of course, are little cherubs.
We can see them with the angels.
The men are fishermen and they have nets
and this is to remind us that Andrew was
a fisherman like his brother Saint Peter.
They're the first two apostles who were called
to the ministry by Jesus of Nazareth.
Beth: Some of the figures seem to be
moving from the lantern down.
Male: Yes, in the Renaissance, well let's say
150 years before this, Mantena's famous ...
Beth: Camera de Espose.
... Camera de Espose. The view up or down
according to which way you look at it,
included figures that look down on us.
Beth: Yeah.
Male: And we have the illusion that
Beth: Exactly.
... and this does that perfectly.
We have this dissolving of the earthly
and the spirituals by having figures
midway between one and the other
and none is more obvious than Andrew himself,
who stands in a white statue in the broken pediment.
And the pediment is broken so that he can be released
from earth up to Heaven where he is going.
David: And there's the fact that this contrast then
between the suffering of Andrew in the painting
and then the spiritual representation.
Male: The spiritual release and eternity.
And remember that everyone at that time
would have believed in death as something
that is almost comforting.
We refer to this in the Jesuit,
this God's time is the best time.
Beth: The release from the body.
... of course, the release.
The absence of what we now have as fear
and apprehension and even terror of death
because we don't think much about the afterlife.
Everyone was sure that they were going
to an eternal place.
Not of ultimate happiness, you had to work
your way through and that's what purgatory is for
and as long as you weren't going to hell,
but it was a certainty and it was something
that was seen as better than this life.
And death was, of course, ubiquitous
because of infant mortality, current outbreaks
of plague.
Beth: People lived with it in a way that we don't.
Male: People lived with it.
We absolutely don't. We don't even like to talk about it.
Beth: That's right.
Male: And this kind of painting and sculpture
and architecture is also reassuring
and comforting even.
It sounds paradoxical, but about death.
Well, it's not death. It's a new life.
Beth: That's right. I think often about that
when we see images of saints or the death
of Christ or the death of Mary,
being at a death bed was not unusual.
Male: No.
Beth: You know, they could relate to that.
because we're going to ...
I'm going to show you now, the ultimate deathbed
in Rome.
Beth: Let's go see.
Male: And that is a statue upstairs
behind the church. Let's go there.
(piano playing)