Pavia: Church of S. Michele

 

 

 

 

In Pavia Edward Hutton reflected on the significance of the eleventh century church of S. Michele.

All along the Via Aemilia, between Venetia on the north and Tuscany and the Apennines on the south, between the Alps and the Adriatic, there may be found a whole series of buildings, certainly of the North, belonging to a style of architecture which we call Lombard, but which it would be an error to merge altogether  in the larger title of Romanesque. Perhaps the most remarkable of these buildings, among which we may name Borgo S. Donnino, the monastic church of Chiaravalle and S. Fedele at Como, is the church of S. Michele at Pavia, which is certainly one of the earliest, dating as it does from the last years of the eleventh century. … the whole is at once massive, savage, and restless, a true barbarian work—that is to say, the work of a barbarian who has been brought in contact with Latin work and has been unable to use or assimilate it. Something rude and uncouth we find in all this, of course, for that is the fundamental nature of it, but how full of energy and life it is, too, how restless, daring and unhappy. And indeed the whole building seems to express a sort of disappointment, most of all with itself, as though the builders had seen a vision which they could not recall, or had heard some sudden good news which they could not remember. It is well to remember that the church is dedicated to S. Michael, and that everywhere it speaks of deliverance—deliverance perhaps from the helpless misery and disorderliness of the forests, of the roadless lands hidden in the twilight of the North, that here on the sunny side of the great mountains had been left behind forever, but still remained as a kind of an uneasy and ever recurrent dream. The souls of men who built these churches were haunted by an unconscious recollection of barbarism, from which suddenly and by a kind of miracle their fathers and they themselves had been delivered….

This haunting dread, and an overwhelming sense of deliverance from it, are expressed not only in these carvings over the doors, but everywhere in S. Michele. The belts of carving along the walls, the medallions, and the figures on the jambs of the arches represent dragons, griffins, sphinxes, centaurs, snakes and eagles, a whole menagerie of doubtful creatures from whose power here in Italy one has escaped, that Christianity certainly once and for all disposed of. It is the same within the church, and indeed here in S. Michele Christianity appears in the eleventh century as it appeared to the men of the primitive Church, as a refuge from a whole world of danger, disorder and ennui, as a refuge, most of all, perhaps, from oneself; a philosophy, a faith, a revelation upon acquiring or receiving which depended the safety of the whole world and of one’s own soul. It is possible here in this strange and lonely church to understand that ultimately there is no such thing as Europe, that there is only Christendom, since it is upon what is in the mind and the soul the present and the future of man depends.

 

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Edward Hutton: The Cities of Lombardy, New York, 1912. Pp. 154-156.