Edward Hutton: 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.

Edward Hutton: Rome

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. 

Edward Hutton: Urbino

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Urbino was the last stop on Edward Hutton's tour of Romagna and the Marches. It was not the most beautiful city he had seen but it had a fabled past.

Of Urbino, who can speak as he should or conjure up in words, for the pleasure of him who has not seen it, that dark and gaunt city crouched upon its double hill, never venturing to tower up into the sky, but stooping there gazing over the tangled valleys to S. Marino, to S. Leo, to Pesaro, to the great peaks of the Apennines and to the sea? Bleak and rain-sodden, battered by the wind, burnt by the sun, Urbino seems the last place in Italy to have nourished a court renowned for its grace and courtesy. … 

For, astonishing though it may seem, civilization, the ritual of life—life itself being, as some of those great candid minds of the Renaissance were not slow to observe, a kind of religious service-- was very punctually and strictly observed at Urbino in the sixteenth century.  Here on the hills, in this rain-swept, sun-baked place, the Renaissance in all its liberty, beauty and splendor, was played out in its curious medley of contrasts, almost like a play. The most learned and refined of all the courts of Italy, the court of Urbino gathered to itself all the wit and genius of this imperishable Latin people, filled itself with the finest scholars and the noblest gentlemen of Italy, while its Duke and Duchess lived a life that reads almost like a fairy tale, till Cesare Borgia blasted the place like a lightning flash and nothing was ever really quite the same again…. (276-7)

The Duke and Duchess named by Hutton are Federigo da Montefeltro (1422-1482) and his wife, Battista Sforza both pictured in this famous painting by Piero della Francesca that now hangs in the Uffizi. Federigo was succeeded by his son, Guidobaldo (1472-1508) who though driven out by Cesare Borgia returned to continue the courtly tradition. * (See Note)

Suddenly, almost as suddenly as Cesare Borgia had leapt upon Urbino, Alexander VI died. In a moment Cesare’s magical empire departed from him, and he himself was a fugitive. Guidobaldo returned to Urbino, and… passed the rest of his life among his treasures in the retirement of his court. It was then that the Golden Age began for Italy which in its expression and production has never since been equaled. Every sort of scholar came to Urbino; great poets, painters, sculptors, architects, engineers, doctors, priests, quacks of every kind, fools and nobles, dancing-masters and beautiful women, musicians and preachers flocked to the court of one of the most humane princes Italy had ever seen. It was then that Castiglione wrote his Cortegiano and his life of Guidobaldo; it was then that Santi entertained Piero della Francesca, that Melozzo da Forli came to court, and Luca Signorelli painted his work in San Spirito. … (284)

But who could hope to sum up the riches of this stormy, wind-battered, rain-sodden, sun-baked acropolis? This, at least, should not be forgotten. I mean the church of S. Bernardino. This is a little convent of the Zoccolanti which stands at the end of a dusty road on a hill-top opposite Urbino, from which there is a notable view of the city, but not of the palace. S. Bernardino stands under the cypress-ringed Campo Santo of the Urbanati. It has itself always been a graveyard, and here, in the little cruciform church under its blind, round lantern, a truly Bramantesque dream of a church all in rosy brick, the Dukes Federigo and Guidobaldo lie….

Church of San Bernardino**

It was there I took farewell of Urbino, before I set out down the long road for Pesaro, the railway, and home. All that way was pleasantly filled, as I came into the valleys, with great bullock wagons piled up with vast barrels or boxes with the family sitting on top, for it was the time of vintage. The happiness of all that!

At evening, my head full of songs, I came into Pesaro by the Rimini gate, thronged today with bullock-waggons loaded with grapes….and when a few days later I set out for home, it was in the new bubbling wine my health was pledged, and in the new pressed grapes I, too, drank to all my friends. (295)

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Romagna and the Marches, NY, 1925.

*Note: When he was still young, Federigo, who was destined to attain to so much splendor, was sent as a kind of hostage to Venice. It was while in that city that he came under the influence of Vittorino de' Ramboldoni da Feltre, the learned professor of Mantua. This great man was a Greek scholar of no mean attainment, and his ideal of education soon took possession of the greatest princes in Italy. He taught Greek, Latin, Grammar, Philosophy, Mathematics, Logic, music, and Dancing at the Casa Goija, the "House of Joy," where he had settled in 1425 at the invitation of Gianfrancesco II of Mantua.... such scholars as could not afford to pay him he taught for the "love of God." His pupils included the noblest names in Italy; all the children of the Gonzaga house were educated at Casa Goija, and no doubt met the Duke Federigo in the lecture rooms and the meadows. Later, Duke Federigo placed the great scholars portrait in his palace at Urbino with this inscription: "In honor of his saintly master Vittorino da Feltre, who by word and example instructed him in all human excellence, Federigo has set this here."

**Image courtesy of David Orme.