Edward Hutton had high praise for Todi's church of Santa Maria della Consolazione, begun in 1508 at the height of the Renaissance. I must confess that on our brief visit, my wife and I admired its exterior beauty but the interior left us cold even when we heard Mass. Perhaps, as he says, it is more a temple than a church.
Santa Maria della Consolazione is one of the most lovely, if not the loveliest, of high Renaissance churches in Italy—that is to say, in the world; energy and identity within formal limits. No mysterious vistas here, no forests of columns lost in twilight, nothing but perfect order, space, proportion. Here the spirit and the mind take flight.
In Santa Maria della Consolazione we have at last a really fine realization of the high Renaissance ideal in architecture. It is not a perfect realization, but it is the best we possess. In looking on this church we may discern what St. Peter’s in Rome might have been but for the Reformation. The idea of Bramante, it will be remembered, was to build S. Peter’s as a Greek cross under a dome. It was an effect of space he aimed at, light and space confined, and so not confined within a perfectly proportioned building. Well, the Reformation came and spoiled all that. Rome remembered the pilgrims from the north, and how important it was to impress them, and so decided to build the long nave which obscures and obstructs the dome; and the dream of Bramante vanished. Coming into Santa Maria della Consolazione we realize, for the first time perhaps what we have lost.
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| Image by David Orme |
It is not a church, it is a magical space in the heavens between the sun and moon, and the light is level and beautiful. It is strange this effect of space—absolute space, flight almost, in what is really so small a building. And it is right that this ideal should have been achieved, if anywhere then in Umbria, where the beauty of the whole country is really that sense of serenity, of light and spacious air. It is the secret that Umbria has strived to confide to the world through her painters: through Perugino best of all, and at last through the lucid and tranquil genius of Raphael. These men composed with space as a musician composes with sound, and indeed the effect is very like. You seem suddenly to have stepped out of our world into a pure and clear sunlight, not terrifying by its infinity, but enfolding you with security and a kind of perfection. You gaze upwards. That dome borne on the wings of clouds on clouds of angels, soars in its beauty and its perfection like a splendid and irresistible thought in the mind of man. There is no uncertainty, no dimness, no tricks of shadow, no self-accusation, no deceit, no fear, no shame at all, but the clear light of the sky that is the most lovely and precious thing in the world. And it is thus that the men of the Renaissance chose to meet their God. You think there is no mysticism in that, no mystery? But you do not know the mystical power—strange and more wonderful than the spirit of the forests of the north, of the cathedrals of the Gaul and the Goth—to be found in the unappeasable sunlight of a still, hot day. That silence is more profound than the whispering depths of the most ancient forest, or the echoing intricate splendours, the dim unseen vaultings of the great Gothic churches of the north. If in the already worshipped sun there be mystery, or in the unpierced heaven there be angels, though we may not see; if in silence surrounded by light and the immense loneliness of space, God dwells so that that I may find Him always near, then Latin genius, which has taught us all the arts as a mother teaches her children, and to which we owe everything that is precious in the world, has not made this unthinkable failure in architecture of which we accuse her so easily, but has comprehended there too more than she has ever been able to lead us so much as to apprehend; and we in our gloomy, miserable lands preferring now even darkness before light in our trumpery cities, must acknowledge at last with what grace we may the indestructible untiring genius of Latin blood, that it has become the fashion to scoff at and to despise.
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Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 151-153.
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