Rome: St. Peter's

 Edward Hutton did not like St. Peter's. He was disappointed and disconcerted by its largeness. "Nothing is so feeble as largeness if it be not ordered and contrived with beauty." I can agree with much of what he says, but every time I am in Rome, I try to attend Mass in St. Peter's and it is always something special. Maybe it is just the feeling you get in the midst of a small congregation of worshippers gathered from all over the world while crowds of tourists walk through the vast interior. 

   

 

 

The Popes, themselves, who, vandals as they have ever been, were never guilty of an act more barbarous than the destruction of the most famous church in Christendom, one thousand one hundred and fifty years old at the time Nicholas V pulled it down in order to build—well the beautiful and sumptuous failure we see, which, though it has been too much decried, is in fact without a sense of reverence. It is a little blatant in its pride and a stranger to humility. It seems to praise God in the language one might use to a king for the sake of impressing the populace, but not sincerely…. (181)

 

S. Peter’s seems vulgar in a compromise between beauty and ostentation…. The whole place is blasphemous in the confusion of its intention. It is not Greek, nor Latin, but Barbarian, and what beauty it has, and it has much, is by reason of that confusion a barbarian beauty, fundamentally insane and romantic. The richness of the material is lost in the largeness of the church, the precious in a multitude of riches. One’s attention wanders, nothing there can hold it. the place is less a church than a city in whose streets one may wander all day long searching in vain for God…. (185)

 

Michelangelo was already seventy years old when he became capo-maestro. Refusing all payment, he worked, he said, ‘for the love of God, the Blessed Virgin, and S. Peter.’ Bound though he was by the plans and achievements of his predecessors, he was able to discard the design of Sangallo, which besides filling the church with darkness would have involved the destruction of the Sistine chapel. He took up again the plan of Bramante, a Greek Cross under a dome. “I will throw the Pantheon there up into the sky,’ he is reported to have said. Every effort was made by the disciples of Sangallo and Giulio Romano to displace him, but the Pope not only confirmed him in his office, but also gave him even greater power than before. When he died in 1564 he had finished the drum and made the plans for the dome which Giacomo della Porta finished in 1590.It remains the only perfectly beautiful part of the church…. (182-3)

In 1640 della Porta died, and Paul V appointed Carlo Maderna architect. At the order of the Pope he abandoned both Bramante’s and Michelangelo’s designs, adopting Rossellino’s, namely a Latin Cross; for it had become necessary to impress the North with that long nave at the head of which the altar might gleam and the faithful be edified. … (182)

 

Maderna finished the façade in 161. Fifty-three years later Bernini completed the Piazza with its beautiful colonnades and fountains… (1830

 

The strong and spiritual art of Florence, of the Tuscan realists, passes at last into absolute beauty only perhaps, here at any rate, in the early work of Michelangelo, of which S. Peter’s holds the most precious example. The Madonna della Pieta, in the first chapel of the south aisle, remains the most beautiful as it is the most perfect of the many works which came from that strong and ruthless hand, so marvelously tender for once. It was carved for the Cardinal di San Dionigi, called the Cardinal Rovano, not long after the Bacchus of the Bargello in Florence. Madonna is seated on the stone where the Cross was raised, her dead Son in her lap. ‘He is of so great and so rare a beauty,’ says Condivi, ‘that no one beholds Him but is moved to pity. It is a figure truly worthy of the humanity which belonged to the Son of God and to such a Mother; nevertheless, some there be who complain that the Mother is too young compared to the Son. One day as I was talking to Michelangelo of this objection: “Do you know,” he said, “that chaste women retain their fresh looks much longer than those who are not chaste? How much more, therefore, a virgin in whom not even the least unchaste desire ever arose?" ... Michelangelo was about twenty-four or twenty-five years old when he had finished that work. It brought him fame and a great reputation, and there, alone in all his work, on the hem of Mary’s robe, he has carved her name. (189-190)

 

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Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

Roman Churches: St. John Lateran

 

 

Hutton was disappointed with some of the more famous basilicas in Rome believing what original beauty and function they had once possessed had been spoiled by renovations and embellishments.

I came at last into the vestibule of S. Giovanni in Laterano before the five doors of the nave, and passing the statue of Constantine, entered the basilica. And indeed the test was too hard. My first impression, yes, in spite of a certain largeness, space, and majesty in the church, was of something lacking in simplicity. The infinite and artless detail, often vulgar enough, seemed to spoil the place—how shall I say it?—of a certain seriousness and nobility. One cannot deny the spaciousness of these five naves broken by a wide transept, beyond which rises the great tribune splendid with mosaics, nor the beauty and richness of the soffitto roof, all of purple and gold; but its dignity and repose are spoiled by the pretentious baroque statues, the ridiculous reliefs on the enormous pillars and pilasters which have hidden the ancient columns from our sight… (145)

 

So, little by little my visit resolved itself into a search for certain treasures that, as I knew, still remained there from one or other of the older basilicas…But all other treasures are as nothing beside the mosaic of the Tribune, which, restored though it be, remains in great part a fourth century work, repaired by Fra Jacobus Torriti in the thirteenth century.

 

There, under a bust of our Lord, surrounded by a glory of angels singing among the clouds, above which God the Father shines like a sign in heaven, stands a great Cross, founded upon a rock, while above hovers the snow white Dove of the Holy Spirit, and below, about the rock at the foot of the Cross, two harts and four sheep bow their heads, while within, as it seems, an angel stands before the tomb of Jesus. On either side the Cross waits a group of saints; to the left the Blessed Virgin stands in the attitude of worship, her hands raised, while the tiny figure of Pope Nicholas IV kneels, humbly clinging to her skirts. Behind him, as his guardian, S. Francis lifts his hands in prayer, while s. Peter and S. Paul come after, bearing scrolls. To the right of the Cross are S. John Baptist, S. John Evangelist, and S. Andrew, and behind S. John Baptist stands the tiny figure of S. Antonio. And at the feet of the saints flows a great river, on which cupids sail in little boats among the swans, while on the banks the peacocks strut among the flowers.

 

Much of this work, the beautiful head of Christ, for instance, might seem to be of the fourth century, so fine it is and so close to the antique, in contrast with the figures of Nicholas IV, S. Francis, and S. Antonio, which are obviously of the thirteenth century and Fra Jacobus’s own. (146)

 

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Edward Hutton: Rome, 1922.

Rome: Pantheon

 In his book on Rome Edward Hutton devoted a chapter to the Pantheon.

The continuity of the life, of the political life of the City that is so well expressed by the Capitol is found too, in its religious aspect certainly, in the Pantheon, which since the time of its foundation, has always been sacred to the gods, to the saints, those Dive—Divinities, as both pagans and Christians have agreed to call them. If we need then, a witness to the continuity of the religious life of the City, of the slow and after all so gentle passing of Paganism into Christianity, in the hearts of men, at any rate, with many a strange and beautiful conservation of old things, old customs, old ways of thinking, we shall find it best, perhaps, in the Pantheon, which, sacred once as we may suppose, to the protecting divinities of Caesar, now holds the dust of the last conquerors from Piedmont. … (76)

The Pantheon…remains the most perfect ancient building in Rome, the only one, indeed, whose walls and arches have been completely preserved….built with all the solidity, boldness and splendor of the Roman genius, and remains one of the wonders of the world….The tremendous walls of the rotunda, a perfect circle, are divided into two stories by ring courses, while above them springs the most wonderful thing in Rome, that cupola of concrete, covered over with tiles of gilded bronze, which was once the greatest dome in the world….(77)

And today the Pantheon is like a sudden revelation, as though in an unexpected moment we had come into a legion of Caesar’s army, or in the quiet sunlight, amid the ruins of the Forum, had heard the persistent voice of Cato in the senate House: Delenda est Carthago... Phocas, the tyrant, in the exile of the gods, presented it to Pope Boniface IV, who on May 13, 609, consecrated it to S. Mary of the Martyrs… (79)

So the Pantheon became S. Maria ad Martyres, and to ensure its sanctity the Pope caused to be buried there twenty-eight wagon loads of the bones of the martyrs brought hither from the catacombs….

Yet it was the Pope himself who did his best to destroy it, for Urban VIII, stole the brazen tubes on which the roof of the vestibule rested, to convert them into the twisted columns of the baldacchino of S. Peter…And if of old it excited the wonder and awe of the City, and in the Middle Age guarded the dust of the Martyrs, certainly then, more precious than silver or gold, in the Renaissance it became the very model of the greatest buildings of that time. The Baptistry of Florence was certainly meant to be as like it as it might be; it inspired the dome of S. Maria del Fiori, and Michelangelo swore to build it, as it were aloft, over S. Peter’s, an oath which he contrived to keep; while it was there that Raphael preferred to lie, with his betrothed beside him and his disciples at his feet, pursuing the dream of beauty, which, as was said, had ravished him from our world. (80)

Raphael's Tomb

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Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

Roman Catacombs

 After the brutality of the Colosseum, and the languor of the Roman baths, Edward Hutton found something very different in the Catacombs.

The Catacombs—the place by the tombs, in which to the curious philologist every symbol of Christianity seems to lie hid, the cup of the Holy Grail, the ship of the Church, was indeed the very cradle of Christianity, of Catholicism, where Love lay helpless, a little child… Born, as it were, in the desert, in the stony silence of Judea, Christianity, by an act of Love, had at once solved the great mystery; it was in itself a denial of Death, of the power of Death, and as though to prove its sincerity, its belief in the hope it alone had dared to offer mankind, it made its first home in the Catacombs, those cemeteries of the dead. They too are our company, it seemed to say, for Death is not death but a sleep; and so it refused to be separated from them, waiting patiently beside their resting place, really in communion with them, who had slept and wakened. The Christian alone in Rome found hope in his heart…. (97)

 

 

There in the darkness, lighted only by occasional lumenaria, they celebrated their mysteries, even in the time of the Apostles, the Mass, the Commendatio Animae, the Funeralia, refusing always to speak of the departing brother or sister as dying, but rather as of one summoned or called away, accertitus, as the beautiful Roman inscription has it, assercitus ab angelis—summoned by angels…. (98)

 

These cemeteries, later to bear the names of Saints, … stretched really for miles outside the Wall on the left bank of the Tiber. And beside them were the gardens—horti—those cemeteries in the open air… these gardens were, however, comparatively few and were too public to be used for worship. It was in the Catacombs, so many of which still remain unexplored, that the Christian Church spent its childhood… (98)

 

Equanimity, a bold and confident gladness, grave and yet by no means without its more joyful moments, would seem to have been the most striking characteristic of the Catacombs. Expressing itself in many a beautiful or graceful custom accommodated to the human heart…especially in a wonderful new music and poetry… (99)

 

The Mass indeed would seem to have been said always, even in the Apostolic age, though not as we have it today; … A ritual, altogether expressive and full of meaning—a meaning often obscure to us in its detail at any rate—grew little by little about it in those early times really for the sake of expressing some profound mystery that could only thus be made plain, which it was not lawful to speak. And for the Christians of the Minor Peace certainly, the ritual of the Mass, its action namely, was altogether indicative, not hiding but expressing the very ‘heart of the mystery,’ which for them, as for us was often rather obscured than made plain by the words, then in the Greek language, the people answering in their own vulgar tongue, that colloquial or base Latin into which, though without any more popular success, the whole of the Liturgy had gradually passed… (100)

 

It was then as a dramatic action, a tragic drama, as we might say, that the Mass from the earliest times presented itself to those who in the subterranean oratories of the Catacombs were gathered together not merely in a common act of worship to hear the words of life, to be made partakers with Christ of the Kingdom of Heaven, but chiefly to remind themselves of the great deliverance won for them by that mournful and heroic Figure who passed before them in the words of the drama, the actions of the priest, from birth to death, to resurrection, into His Heaven. (102)

 

And so one’s first impression on entering one of these catacombs today is altogether of serenity and peace; a kind of ecstatic happiness, temperate and still fresh with a hope that has never quite passed away. On the walls one reads words of quiet expectation, full of light, confidence, and repose; Pax, you read, Pax tibi, in Pace Christi or Vivas in Deo; and then sometimes as though to sum up all contentment, Vivas in Christo, in Bono. And the scenes painted there are serene and glad. In those days at any rate they do not seem to have been very preoccupied with the Crucifixion, the death of Christ; they thought only of the resurrection. A certain Latin sanity and quietness are expressed in the work we find there; and indeed there is no hatred or contempt at all of Pagan thought or religion, not even a complete repudiation of it, for it remains, yes, a real thing, seen with new eyes as we might say, seen really for the first time, and drawn gently into the service of Christ, so that Orpheus becomes as it were but a prophecy of Him there in S. Calisto, and the Good Shepherd bears the lamb on his shoulders precisely as Hermes had been wont to do, but with a new tenderness….(105)

 

It was indeed a new ‘state of soul,’ really a new morality that one came upon suddenly in these dark obscure ways…Side by side they lay down to sleep, the rich beside the poor, the bond by the free, all whom Christ had made equal, to await in perfect confidence the promised resurrection. (106)

Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

 

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The Roman Colosseum

In his chapter on the Colosseum, Edward Hutton described how that huge open air theater, originally an arena for contests between professional gladiators, degenerated into savage brutality and cruelty that eventually led to the transformation of the Roman world.

Almost all the beauty which had in the time of our grandfathers made of the Colosseum the most mysterious and the most astounding ruin in Rome, contriving out of its mere size something monstrous, spellbound, has departed from it, perhaps for ever, since it has come within the radius of action, so unfortunately wide, of the improver and the restorer of ruins. While the destruction of those trees that grew along the broken arches, waving ‘dark in the blue midnight’, and with the passing of the flowers, the Flavian Amphitheatre has become almost absurd in it rueful nakedness; a sort of inadequate monstrosity, a mighty heap of patched and ordered debris on the lower slopes of the Esquiline Hill. Stripped and ashamed, with all its wounds exposed, to say nothing of the horrible patchwork of the archaeologist, it is now just a vast and empty shell, that indeed scarcely impresses us, mere size being, after all but a poor claim upon our notice.… (66)

It was this monstrous colossus that overthrew paganism and the empire and served as the stage on which Christianity was at last to meet them both in combat and defeat them.

It might seem that no people save the Romans…have made of agony and death a spectacle to amuse the populace. They alone were ignorant of pity…. Beginning, perhaps, with a genuine indifference to suffering, a certain hardness that was part of their strength, little by little this insensibility to suffering…encroached on the soul, till cruelty, a kind of joy in speculating on the endurance of others, less indifferent certainly, put to the most dreadful of tests, came to be with them  a kind of delight, which secretly at first, but altogether openly at last, involved all their pleasures, their public entertainments in its marvelous horror….

It was there in the awful din and horror, under the cruel eyes of those who had failed to understand, that our soul was born, that soul which was to make such a spectacle as that forever impossible….

All the fate of the world was decided in the arena of the Flavian Amphitheatre. It was Rome who stood there at the tribunal of humanity and heard the verdict—guilty. In passing through the Forum, or among the ruins of the Palatine Hill, and remembering the disastrous story of her days since then, we may well ask—for are we not of her company—is her punishment harder than she can bear?

Yes; it was on the bloody floor of the Colosseum that Rome contrived her own slavery and our freedom. It was there that Christianity met the world and overthrew it, there the martyrs won for Christ His kingdom in the hearts of men—and certain poor folk, almost nameless, men, women, and children, weak too, weeping and afraid overthrew forever the despotism of Rome. (73-74).

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Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922, pp. 66-74 

Roman Forum

 In his book on Rome Edward Hutton devoted a whole chapter to a tour of the remains in the Roman Forum. Despite his love of ancient Rome, its philosophy, laws, and poetry, he saw in the art of these monuments the cruelty at the core of pagan Rome.

Arch of Titus

How different is this hard and realistic Roman art from the work of the Greeks in the frieze of the Parthenon! There, with a perfect feeling for animals, Pheidias has carved the bull led to sacrifice, the victim of the Gods, amid the chanting of the priests, the songs of the people; but the Roman artist seems to have understood nothing and to have seen after all only with his bodily eyes. It is before such work as this that we seem to realize almost for the first time the limitations of Rome, the immense gulf that—yes, we must admit it at last—separates us from her. Her artists lacked a certain delicacy and clairvoyance and were without spirituality or finesse. They seem, here at least, to have been mere copycats of Nature without insight or sensibility. We seem to understand at last, before such work as this, how even Aurelius* could sit through all the brutality of the amphitheatre, and drag, even he in his Triumph, along the Sacred Way that little German family, the father and mother in chains, their child crying in her arms, on the threshold of a home brought bodily over the mountains ‘to make a Roman holiday,’ for the enjoyment of the Roman people.Yes, that explains too, the failure of Rome, not in art only, but in life, in government. To the heart which would refuse to look on just that with indifference—that and the rest—the future belonged. Yet we may well ask ourselves, if only to avoid a kind of vulgar self-complacency, what latent cruelty we still entertain…which in certain circumstances might induce us to do the like… (41-2)

There is one splendor in the forum which might seem to sum up, as it were, the whole significance of the place. I mean the Triumphal Arches…. Of the two which are left to us the Arch of Titus is the earlier. Set up in his honour by the Senate, to commemorate the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70…Consisting of a single arch supported by composite pillars, it is decorated with fine reliefs. In the tympana are set winged Victories bearing palms and crowns, while beneath the inscription is carved a sacrificial procession as a frieze. Within, under the arch, are two marble reliefs in which we see Titus crowned by Victory proceeding along the Sacred Way to the Capitol in a chariot driven by Roma. Opposite is another relief of a Triumphal procession with the captives and the spoils; the table with the showbread, and the seven-branched candlestick from the temple at Jerusalem; while in the vault the divine Emperor is borne to heaven by the bird of Jove. Carved some twenty years before the balustrades of the Rostra, these reliefs have much of their character and as little feeling or sense of beauty as they. The work of those who were always the victors, they celebrate a strength and persistence which have suffered neither a love of beauty nor a love of truth to cheat them of reality. It is as though we saw an indomitable tyranny, already a little weary of itself marching once more, how uselessly, over the humble and meek. Rome was already incapable of any sort of expression save that of government. For her, life no longer had illusions or promises; one not only died at the word of command, one lived by it also. (44-45)

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Edward Hutton: Rome. 1922, fourth edition. First edition, 1907.

* Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher Emperor.

Roman Vision

 Edward Hutton began his book on Rome with a retrospective account of a personal vision that came to him as he looked over the city from the Janiculum. 

It was on an April evening in my earliest manhood, as I stood on the vast bastion of the Janiculum in the sudden silence of the hour after the sunset—Rome was looking terrible as a crater under the conflagration of the sky—that I seemed to realise for the first time the true aspect of a place so augustly familiar, which, as Dante has perceived, nature herself has formed for universal dominion… and out of which has risen all Europe and our Faith, all that is really worth having in the world.

It was my last evening in Rome. On the morrow I was to return to the North. All day I had wandered aimlessly about looking for my lost illusions, till, weary at last, I had come towards evening to sit beside the parapet of the Janiculum, turning all things over in my heart as I watched the sun set over the City. How will I remember it?

It seems to me that I was but a child then, that I had believed in everything, and was altogether discouraged and dismayed, for Rome had been like a stranger to me. With an incredible loyalty I had dreamed of her in the North (shall I confess it?) as the city of Horatius, of the Gracchi, of Scipio Africanus, of Sulla and Marius, of Caesar, of that spiritual Caesar, too, who for so many ages has appointed there his dwelling, communing with the eternal in an eternal place. And I had found there a new city, spoiled by old things, full of all the meanness and ugliness of modern life, the rush and noise of electric trams, even in the oldest and narrowest ways, a place of change and destruction.

Take heart, I had continually told myself, even on the first morning beside the imprisoned Tiber bridged with iron, among the new slums about the Vatican, in the brickfield of the Forum: take heart, the Capitol remains. Therefore, not without thankfulness… I had made my way along the ruined Corso to the Piazza Venezia.

Well, I had rejoiced too soon. I was prepared for destruction…but for destruction heaped on destruction, for a rascal impudence that might put Phocas to shame, I confess it at once, I was not prepared…. For there, where long and long ago the Temple of Juno passed into the gentler dominion of the Madonna Mary, the modern barbarian had raised indeed a fitting monument to his king, who resembles great Caesar in this alone that in the heaven of the populace he has become divine. Was it a temple or a tomb, that ghastly erection of ghostly stone, that, standing on a ruined convent, seemed to bellow like Behemoth… It has remained, however, I told myself, for the kingdom of Italy to surpass both Caesar and Popes in vulgarity, rapacity, and insolence…

It was these things, I remember, that rose before me at the close of my last day in the City as I waited for the sunset by the parapet of the Janiculum. So that I said in my heart: Rome is not any more immortal; all that is gone for ever. It is finished. Let us pass by and be silent.

Nevertheless, it was in this moment of despair, of denial, that I began to understand.

An incredible majesty had descended upon the City and the hills…. the City loomed out of the night like some mysterious and lovely symbol, a visible gesture of the infinite, decisive and affirmative, never to be recalled or modified.

The material world, that close, impassable prison, seemed just then to be dissolving before my eyes, and it was as though in the silence, I had heard again these words, so full of assurance and all gladness: Sed confidite, Ego vici mundum: be of good cheer, I have overcome the world. And all my heart was changed suddenly, and in a moment I was comforted.

But that was long ago. Today as I look down on Rome in the long summer that is so quiet still within her walls—is it that I have grown wiser, or may be only older? —I find her immortality not alone in the continuity of Nature or in such a vision as that of which I have spoken, but in the City herself, in the life of the City I have come in some dim way to understand and to reconcile with my dreams…. I feel the eternity of Rome as I feel the brief sweetness of every passing moment there; she seems to me as eternal and persistent as life, as strangely various, as mysteriously secret.

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Edward Hutton: Rome. 1922, fourth edition, pp. 1-4. The first edition appeared in October 1907.