Rome: St. Peter's Basilica

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. 

   

 

S. Peter’s

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

Edward Hutton: S. Giovanni in Laterano

 

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.

Edward Hutton: the 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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Edward Hutton: The 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.