The “troppo vero” Pope and his intense sister-in-law

Roman gossip gave rise to the idea that Pope Innocent X (1574-1655) was a man manipulated by his sister-in-law, the intense and ambitious Olimpia Maidalchini, who would have really held the reins during her Vatican period.

Except for those well-versed in ecclesiastical history, which there are, no one would currently remember this pontiff if it were not for the fact that a great painter, the Spanish Diego Velázquez, came across his life, who left a famous portrait of him, today in the Doria gallery. Pamphili, and that when he showed it to Innocent he made a witty comment that, instead, all art lovers know: “Troppo vero!”.

The Holy Father considered that mischievous and merciless look that had remained on the canvas “too true”.

This second stay of Velázquez in Rome from 1649-1651, commissioned by Felipe IV to acquire works of art that would enrich his collections (an exhibition on his trip can be seen at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, in Madrid’s Calle de Alcalá , until September 4), gave rise to other paintings by the Sevillian.

One of them, known as The Pope, a half-length portrait of Olimpia, dressed in black and with a background of the same color, which was believed to have disappeared, was sold at Sotheby’s in London in 2019 for 2.8 million euros. to a buyer who remained anonymous. The news of that sale stimulated the imagination of the Jaén writer Emilio Lara and led him to write the novel Venus en el espejo, published by Edhasa.

I have been following Lara’s literary production since El relojero de la Puerta del Sol (2017); Although the title referred to Madrid, it is above all a magnificent portrait of the Spanish liberal exile in London in the 1960s. I had the pleasure of being part of the jury that awarded him the Edhasa prize for his medieval-themed novel Times of Hope. And I try not to miss her literary analysis articles in the digital Zenda.

After the maestro Carlos García Gual, Lara is the one who has dedicated the most attention to the evolution of the genre of historical narrative among us, and his reflection, the most up-to-date in this regard. One among many, in his article “Historical Fiction and Emotions” (January 2021), he followed the trail that goes from Marguerite Youcenar and Robert Graves to Julian Barnes and Umberto Eco, passing through Vallejo-Nágera, Eslava Galán and Terenci Moix to end at Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Eric Vuillard and Hillary Mantel.

With them, “historical fiction continues to demonstrate its formidable capacity to remove emotions embedded in the past and transport them to the present”, since “our own memory is a repository of experiences, memories and feelings that emerge when reading something with which we empathize”.

In his role as a teacher, Lara asked his high school students to interview an older relative to tell them about his life. “The careful reading of those biographies led to many novels,” he says, because in the experiences of Jaén in the 1960s, “there were such childhood and youth dramas that it was overwhelming to read them.”

In the recent testimonial book that the Mexican novelist Juan Villoro dedicates to his father, he comments on the German-language concept of Anhebung, self-improvement beyond what is expected. Emilio Lara is a novelist from the Anhebung who drove the protagonists of Times of Hope, and also the adolescent Jimmy in his novel set in the London blitz Sentinel of Dreams.

Self-improvement beyond the imaginable is Olimpia’s motivation. Born in Viterbo, she soon managed to escape from the convent where her father had confined her. The owner of a considerable fortune after her brief first marriage to an older and wealthy man, she entered Roman high society by marrying Pamphilio Pamphili. But she soon becomes better friends with another member of the family, who lives with them in the Piazza Navona palace.

And while Donna Olimpia schemes to get her brother-in-law Giambattista, intellectually but not socially gifted, to ascend the rungs of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, to reach the chair of Saint Peter, and later to place her own twenty-something son as a cardinal, she promotes refuges in different enclaves for prostitutes who want to leave the trade and for widows and young people at risk.

There is a black legend of the female popess as an unscrupulous woman moved only by greed; Emilio Lara chooses to balance her most debatable moments with her admirable ones and make her attractive, let’s say extremely empowered.

There is a kind of joyful and luminous snailing in these pages set in 17th century Rome, when it had overcome the trauma of the looting orchestrated by the Spanish troops and was attending the aesthetic competition between Bernini and Borromini; with its stinking streets, adulterated bread, palaces with fountains and orange trees. A city invaded by pilgrims and populated by “pot repairmen, wool shearers, peddlers and buñoleros”. And where in the writer’s plausible imagination Velázquez finds the joie de vivre (quite guilty) that leads him to paint one of his masterpieces, The Venus in the Mirror.

There is vivacity and dynamism in this delicious novel that crosses political history -the clash of Spanish and French influences on the European table-, artistic history and that of the Catholic Church, with a background of impeccable humanism that is a trademark of the house. .

Was Olimpia, in addition to being a mentor, the lover of the Pope? Emilio Lara leaves this question in the air. And finally, perhaps it was not such a relevant piece of information.