Within the shadow and to the left of Palazzo Farnese the justifiably renowned Palazzo Spada stands on Via di Capo Ferro. Built in the middle of the 16th century, Cardinal Bernadino Spada (papal nuncio, legate, and curial official) purchased and remodeled it almost one hundred years later. One of Rome’s richest and most unique façades is covered extravagantly with Giulio Mazzoni’s Mannerist decorative finishes featuring sculptures of ancient Roman rulers in niches (Numa Pompilius, Julius Caesar, Augustus and 5 others) surrounded with fruit and flower designs. Grotesques in bas-relief peer out around harmoniously balanced windows.
Spada engaged one of City’s greatest and most idiosyncratic architects, Francesco Borromini, to renovate the palace in 1632.
This personal rival of Bernini crafted a masterpiece of optical illusion in the Perspective Gallery (‘prospettiva’), a colonnaded arcade of the palace garden beyond the main courtyard.
Spada embraced the project because of his fascination with geometry and architecture and, as well, his peculiar aesthetic and religious sensibilities. He regarded perspective illusions as moral metaphors for the deceptive capacity of the human perception tied to the five senses.
Although the sculpture of a Roman warrior at the end of his tunneled colonnade stands but two feet high, it appears thoroughly life-sized. Borromini achieved this effect by gradually elevating the mosaic walkway, lowering the vault, and progressively diminishing the distance between and height of the columns. A coup de force, it later, ironically, inspired Bernini’s highly creative design for the Scala Regia in the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican.
The palace holds, as well, a colossal sculpture of Pompey the Great, donated by Pope Julius II to Cardinal Spada. Some believe that senatorial assassins stabbed Julius Caesar to death at the base of this sculpture in 44 BC.
Another wing of the palace houses the Cardinal’s art collection in the Galleria Spada which contains 16th and 17th-century paintings by some of Europe’s finest painters: Guido Reni, Titian, Rubens, Durer, Carracci, and Gentileschi, and others. In 1927 the Italian State purchased Palazzo Spada and now a section of it serves as headquarters for the Italian Council of State, the legal-administrative consultative body that ensures the legality of public administration in Italy.
San Paolo alla Ragola church
Dedicated to St. Paul the Apostle, this 18th century Baroque church stands on the eponymous street (Via San Paolo alla Regola) just a few blocks away from Palazzo Spada. After his arrest in Jerusalem in 57 AD, Roman officials sent Paul for trial in the City where he arrived in 60 AD. Legend has it that while awaiting trial he lived and worked as a tanner of leather at this site. After his death Christians constructed an oratory in his honor over the residence and later a church next to it in the 4th century.
Baroque architects of its 17th century façade incorporated Corinthian pilasters into the two bowed stories. Above the window of the second story a carved bas relief of the apostle Paul carrying a sword symbolizes Paul’s martyrdom by decapitation. Above it is also displayed the coats of arms of the Third Order Franciscans, the religious community which acquired the church and its convent in 1619.
The unusual square nave of the church serves as the axis of the church’s Greek cross plan.
Four piers support a simple central dome. The builders never completed decoration in the interior of the church, evident in the somewhat plain scheme prominent throughout most of its surfaces.
At the far end, the sanctuary features a triumphal arch together with an apse set behind the main altar. The San Paolo Oratory on the right stands directly over the residence of the Apostle and houses a modern mosaic depicting Paul, enchained, guarded by a soldier, and instructing his disciples.
