The monuments of Christian Rome from Constantine to the renaissance

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Contents

PAOE

Pkologue 1

PAET I

Prologue

The complexity of Eome is at once an allurement and a source of despair. As a growing modern capital it turns its back upon its past, and as a historic museum it bristles with periods and styles so varied they cannot be set forth with the lucidity that makes the art of Athens comparatively easy to grasp.

The present epitome of one group of these phases reflects the artistic life of Rome as a Christian city and the general features of its history and culture from the day when the Emperor Constantine stopped the era of persecution and raised the Cliristian Labarum as his standard, until that when the mediaeval Papacy, after a glorious history, was forced to abdicate its world-power and to leave Eome for Avignon, reducing the city to the lowest ebb of desolation.

When Rome rises again under the Popes of the Renaissance, it will not be by its own efforts or with its peculiar traits unchanged. The new Rome will be a composite picture reflecting the handiwork of Tuscans, of Lombards and of Umbrians : a Rome at war with itself, tearing frantically at its own historic vitals and every day making a mock and travesty of its past. Rome of the Romans is no more.

This old Rome from Constantine to the Renaissance is itself a varied pageant. For nearly two centuries after his death it remained a decapitalized, unambitious Rome, pauperized by imperial bounty, drunk with corruption, hypnotized by vile plays, indifferent to apostles, occupied with a round of baths, games and gossip, clogged with a surfeit of villas, fine raiment and delicate eating, careless of the crumbling away of the ancient world about it under the blows of the barbarians.

In this Eome primitive Christianity was trying to grasp the hearts of the people and the reins of power ; reaching out successfully when led by such men as Popes Sylvester, Damasus and Leo the Great. And yet, while fighting indifference and depravity, the Church was itself becoming contaminated with luxury and worldliness. Pagan writers were able to jeer at ecclesiastical dandies and ladies' men; at papal wealth and worldly influence. This was the side of Christian Eome that formed the despair of S. Jerome and sent so many of its saints in flight to the mountains and monasteries of Palestine and the deserts of Egypt, so many of its earnest, ambitious men to Constantinople, so many of its literary lights to Southern Gaul.

But then, before the last echoes of paganism had ceased to reverberate, or asceticism had commenced to supersede the delights of the flesh, the hand of the Lord was stretched out, and there came a blank. For forty days Eome was silent in the wake of the Goths : Senate, Church, corporations, populace, were scattered to all quarters, — Constantinople, Sicily, Gaul, Dalmatia, Egypt, Palestine, — never to be reunited.

When, during the latter half of the sixth century and after the horrors of a great plague had followed the long war, the walls of Eome began once more to shelter a small but motley population, it bore little resemblance in numbers or character to that of the past. There was no aristocracy ; there were no organized corporations of the people. The newcomers were mostly of humble birth. They called themselves no longer by the old high-sounding triple Eoman names, — no Junius Bassus or Plavius Maximus, — but simple John and Paul. All were poor, but none were pauperized. They worked for their bread instead of receiving it from imperial or papal bounty. They knew of no public baths nor loitering places, no circus nor theatre. They were a Christian people dealing with stern and sad realities, for whom paganism and its delights were as an unreal dream, and the great deserted ghost-like city a weight and a nightmare.

To this people the monks of the East soon came as familiar spirits, and found themselves as much at home on the seven deserted hills as in the deserts of Egypt and Syria. Asceticism was now as much in the eye of the people as self-indulgence had been in that of the Rome of Constantine and Honorius.

This new Byzantine and monastic Rome, some two centuries in the making, was a stern school to retemper the spirit. It bred a people ready to leap forward to the opportunities of the Carlovingian era, a Papacy and a clergy ready to make of Eome once again a city with a mission.

Mission of Rome. — In the days of the Early and Middle Empire from Augustus to the Antonines its mission had been imperium with libertas and the pax romana : the universal pervasion of law and order. To this material and political mission, after a long vacation, the new Eome was about to substitute another imperium, equally universal, but less material, an imperium of ideas in which the relation of politics to religion was reversed. For the Roman Empire, the imperial worship that overspread all particular religions had been the necessary handmaid of political unity, as giving the ideal raison-d'Mre of imperialism. With the Roman Church the moves on the political chess-board were subordinated to the supposed exigencies of a religious world-policy which aimed as stringently as the old order had at unity and centralization, at healthy local development under the impulse of the Roman idea. Bishops and abbots took the place of imperial prefects and legates, and under them the local clergy and monks formed the army of occupation. Vaguely groped after as a general system and variously conceived, it was systematized in its religious and moral hegemony during the fifth century by Leo the Great, and afterward by S. Gregory ; it was given a basis of material power through the conception of the political States of the Church under the Carlovingian Popes Hadrian and Leo III ; and it was finally brilliantly perfected in all its aspects in the eleventh century by Gregory VII, the great Hildebrand, at a time when the medieeval mind was both most clearly logical and most deeply religious, at the beginning of the age of scholasticism and the Crusades. Under this Roman banner of reform and Christian democracy, great ideas and

PROLOGUE impulses swept over Europe, altruism got the better of selfishness, the great monastic orders redeemed the land and the people, and the arts of civilization took giant strides along national lines during this golden age of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Roman People. — What, then, of the people of Eome and the art of Eome ? What was their part in this long transformai

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Ponte Nomentauo, across Anio, near Rome. Ancient bridge, with medlseval fortifications.

tion ? What was their relation to the Papacy ? That is one fascination of the sphinx-like city. We think of mediaeval Kome, if we do not really know it, as identical with the Papacy, as saying its dutiful amen to Church policy. How unexpected it is to know the people as they really were, turbulent and hot-headed, the first in Europe to establish a proud and powerful feudal nobility in the Carlovingian era, culminating in their Alberics and their Crescentii; the first to organize a great civilian army of militia in the eighth century, when they were also the first to build a mediaeval war fleet and defeat the Saracen invaders.

Eiddling their city with towers and fortresses, mostly reared on antique ruins ; scattering huge castles over every hilltop and crag in the province ; driving out Pope after Pope in jealous defence of their civic rights, and yet so proud of the Papacy as to be unwilling to live without it. Ready to accept imperial aid against the Papacy, and yet rising, regardless of odds and unpreparedness, against any German Emperor who came, with trained armies, to be crowned Roman Emperors of the West, if they happened to offend the fierce and boundless Roman pride. Small wonder that, like any organism without a single aim, this secular Rome never attained to fulness of structure.

This is the heart of Rome : illogical, inconsecutive and passion-tossed, an image of the frowning, rugged, jagged, ruined city, with its harsh contrasts, so different in its lack of unity from the purely mediaeval, well-ordered, single-eyed cities of Middle and Northern Italy. The spectre of the ancient world still loomed before the imagination, gigantic and irritating, spurring men on to things they did not themselves understand, as if all afflicted by what alienists call tlie mania of grandeur, from the days of the political reformer, Alberic, to those of the dreamer. Cola di Rienzo.

Such men as these Romans became incomparable agents when they could subordinate their wills to a system, to an organism like the Papacy. Such a people did not lack imagination. There were always those among them who could turn their peculiar gifts in the direction of art; who could understand how to wield art as an instrument of religion, as one of the greatest means for obtaining the universal dominion in the field of ideas, that always appealed to a Roman ; a dominion which Rome alone could gain in those early mediaeval days when all Western culture was to be made anew and largely on a Teutonic groundwork.

In fact the Roman clergy and people were in their very race and organization since the Gothic wars, ideally prepared for such a mission, for they were compounded of the antique race, of Byzantine settlers of Greek and Oriental origin, and of northerners of many tribes ; yet all, after long seething and attrition, fused into a characteristic and fascinating unit by the two powers of Roman tradition and of the living Papacy. So that it was by no means the Popes alone who were patrons of art in Rome : to the upper clergy and the nobility the majority, in fact, of the monuments was due, and, as we shall see, some of the most flourishing artistic decades were those when the Popes were exiles.

II

Periods. — In a scientific analysis Rome's epos from Constantine to Avignon falls naturally into three books. The first tells of the composite pagan-Christian city of the latter days of the Empire, the life in death of ancient culture, the new wine in old bottles full of sediment, with the after-glow of Theodoric the Goth temporarily galvanizing the effete organism until the final fall of the curtain during those famous forty days of the Gothic war when Rome is said to have been completely deserted. There are two centuries and a half in this first book (311-546).

The second book deals with a new Rome hiding within the old, dimly steeped in its memories, but ignorant of the realities of its ancient life and luxuries : an ascetic city weaving fables about a corrupt and decadent society of the past and drawing its real life from Byzantium and its guidance from the Papacy. Its first chapter shows us an almost purely Byzantine Rome ; while in its second chapter the Western elements reassert themselves with the Carlovingian dynasty in the lead and the converted northern nations all bursting into vigorous life. But this life was not fused by a quickening spirit ; it went out like the bursting of a rocket, and the second chapter of the epic closes, after a final century of lifelessness, at an even more discouraging and lower level of achievement than the first. It had lasted twice as long, for nearly five centuries (546-c. 1060).

As the second stage had opened with a Gregory the Great, the third and final book of the epic was ushered in by the work of another Pope Gregory, the great Hildebrand, at first the motive power behind several Popes, then himself in the chair. We are now in the creative stage of the Middle Ages, the days of quick living, of self-sacrifice, of idealism, of concentrated purpose. The contest for supremacy between the Imperial and Papal ideas, the movement of the Crusades, the all-pervading work of the monastic orders, the intellectual and moral resurrection of the Church and of society, are among the factors that raise these centuries above the petty policies of the material period that is to follow. Eome was then more than ever a centre of Western life, the main lever and leaven of Europe. What she would have done had not her career been cut short in the midst of strenuous achievement by the flight to Avignon, is one of the unsolved dreams of history !

Art of Christian Rome. — While the supreme role of Eome and the Papacy has filled a large place in the scholarly thought that has given us pictures of these ten centuries, almost nothing has been written of her role in the sphere of art history. And yet, as the grip of the Papacy upon the Western world grew stronger, Eome was once more called upon to furnish art-types and models, and to give artistic education and direction, exactly as ancient Eome had done for so many of her provinces under the Early Empire.

Why is it that what is so self-evident for the Eoman Empire has not been recognized as true for the Middle Ages ? Perhaps because the Christian art of Eome was far from simple, being compounded with Hellenic and Oriental elements, so that its track is not so plain to the eye as that of its less complex pagan predecessor. Perhaps also because its artistic teaching was now so much more in the domain of the spirit than of matter, that its traces are the more subtle and the less demonstrable. But as the fundamental axiom of art criticism for the Christian period is the indissoluble union of art with theology and liturgy, and as it is a truism that all the nations of the North owed their conversion directly or indirectly to Eome, and got from her the form, decoration and furniture, the music and liturgy of their churches and monasteries, and even the relics of their saints ; it is the inevitable conclusion that, whatever differences may have arisen through local peculiarities and with certain reservations as to decorative motifs, Eome was the ultimate source of the art of all Europe in the early Middle Ages, even of that of the Frank, the Anglo- Saxon and Germanic nations.

As art had become the "bible of the poor," and its works were dedicated to " the people of God," the Church was now the one common and civilizing centre of the city. And of this art Rome held the double key, that of its technique and that of its ideas. Eome also had in the hollow of her hand, through the organization of the Papacy, the bishops and abbots of all European churches, the men who guided the hands of all the artists of the time.

To know the Christian art of Eome, then, means far more than it seems. It transcends the city and the land; it joins hands with the East and the North throughout the ages of vital Christianity. Yet even now, in this advanced age of art criticism, the knowledge of the history of this Soman art is in a condition that can only be described as infantile.

Problems in Architecture. — Among the causes of this lacuna the first is the unique unity of the Eoman style of church architecture and painting during a thousand years of history, a unity which has made critics despair of certainty in dating many of its buildings and their decoration. A second cause is the indiscriminate slaughter and disfigurement of the mediaeval records by the prelates and artists of the Renaissance and Barocco periods.

In other countries and other schools there always were, from century to century, such radical changes in style that it would require abnormal critical density to make in most cases an error of over half a century. For example, during this millennium of Roman uniformity Erance saw a succession of styles, — Merovingian, Carlovingian, Romanesque, Gothic, — not only each instinct with individuality, but each embracing distinct local and chronological variations. Under such conditions, to date a monument approximately without the aid of documents is easy. To give a concrete instance. In almost every province of Erance during this period we find the successive use of several kinds of covering : wooden roof, tunnel vault, groin vault or dome. And we can control these larger factors by the minor peculiatities of details ; such as the architectural mouldings so rich In the closing centuries of the Middle Ages ; such as the capitals ■where we find a great variety of design, some a more or less imperfect adaptation of the antique orders, some based on geometric forms, some on the imitation of nature — human, animal and vegetable.

Compare this richness with the uniformity of Eome, where no kind of vaulting ever found entrance (except sporadically), but where we are everlastingly confronted by the same wooden roofs ; where no system of capitals (except sporadically) ever contested the supremacy of the antique orders ; where theclassic Roman system of ornament continued in almost unbroken use, hardly interrupted by the Byzantine centuries ; where the old thin brick walls, with their plain roundheaded openings for doors and windows, were never replaced by heavy moulded stonework ; where no problems in statics troubled the builders' minds and led to new developments.

Such a school requires infinite patience for its decipherment. This patience is severely taxed by the present condition of the churches of Eome. As long as it was Christian Eome that restored its own, there was no incongruity between the new work and the old, but with the Renaissance, and still more with the Barocco period, the Roman Church showed as much destructive ruthlessness for its own past as it did for ancient pagan ruins. "What it did not entirely destroy it aimed radically to transform. Not a single church entirely escaped. It was merely a question of scale : from complete destruction, like that of S. Peter, to the less radical transformation of the furniture and decoration, as at S. Maria Maggiore.

We cannot enter any of the Roman churches as we can so many Romanesque and Gothic churches of Northern Europe and have the complete satisfaction of being taken back through the centuries, without a jar or a contradiction. Mutilated as they are, the monuments of classic Rome, in their sombre and ragged nudity, but without discordant additions of. other ages, have less to contend with in their appeal to our reconstructive imagination than have the Christian basilicas where Barocco prelates have delighted to hide the lines of classic columns inside hideous plaster piers ; to fling riotous and sprawling cupids and allegorical females of colossal size against every apse and chapel ; to spread over heavy coffered ceilings the most violent combinations of bright blues, reds and golds ; to rip out the wealth of chancel rails, choir screens, pulpits, paschal candelabra, altar canopies that obstructed to their mind the view of the flaunting ceremonial of the age, and yet delighting to fill up the vistas again with portentous altar tabernacles ; to cover with whitewash the old mosaics and frescos ; to tear down the ancient porticos and plaster against the front one of those meaningless bescroUed and bumptious facades that disfigure most of the streets of Rome. An eminent living prelate and writer has tartly said, " These men make us regret the Vandals."

Yet while allowing the lover of the mediaeval Rome that was to voice this lament, it remains true that Rome still contains the most wonderful existing series of Christian works of art in unbroken continuity, and that their history has never been written with any scientific accuracy, though they are most of them familiar inmates of the pages of art histories. Their unity to which I have referred has made it possible to confuse a basilica of the time of a Liberius (352-366) or a Sixtus III (432-440) with one built eight hundred years later by an Innocent II (1130-1143) or a Honorius III (1216-1227). A fresco or mosaic of the tenth or eleventh may reproduce quite faithfully one of the fifth or sixth century.

This confusion is enhanced by misleading documentary evidence. As most of the basilicas were early foundations and were often restored, redecorated and even reconstructed, there are many records of work done which, owing to the vagueness, inaccuracy and exaggeration of mediaeval phraseology, leave us in doubt as to the date of the building that now stands before us. The old chronicler's desire to magnify the work done by a contemporary would often lead him to call a mere restoration by the misleading name of reconstruction.

Ill

Problems in Painting and Sculpture. — All this applies merely, to one section of Roman art — to its architecture. If one turns to other branches, one meets with questions just as baffling and problems just as interesting, many of them raised by the recent discoveries which are, every day, emphasizing the importance of the Koraan school.

Critics are now asking whether the revival of painting in the thirteenth century did not really take place in Rome. They are asking whether Giotto was not a pupil of Eoman artists, especially of Pietro Cavallini, and not at all of Cimabue. The Vasari bubble of the Tuscan origin is being pricked ! But who was this mysterious Cavallini ? His works are now being identified and discovered, especially in Rome, Naples and Assisi, and he is being hailed as the greatest painter before Giotto and one of the foremost religious painters and decorators of all times, crowning Rome as the source of mediaeval and Renaissance painting.

And again, who can say with certainty how much Arnolfo, celebrated as the great Florentine architect and sculptor, who shares with Niccola Pisano the honor of resuscitating sculpture, owed to Rome and her artists as we study his many works in Rome in which he shows himself too completely a leader of the Roman school itself to be classed as an outsider ?

I have been convinced for twenty years that in the revival of art in the thirteenth century the Roman school took the foremost part in painting and a prominent share in sculpture. Recent discoveries are leading many foremost critics, such as Zimmerman, Thode, Venturi, Langton Douglas and Strzygowski, to conclusions that involve these results. But we are still struggling for our clews in the obscurity created by the cruel Barocco devastations ! The disjecta membra of the old basilica now scattered through the Vatican crypt are a symbol of the fate of most of the mediaeval sculpture. The absurd copies made before their destruction by unskilled Barocco humanists, such as the series at S. Paolo by Cavallini, and the mutilated fragments that are reappearing from beneath the Barocco whitewash, are a mere apology for the extensive series that rivalled the Assisi frescos in a dozen Roman churches.

If the closing days of the School are full of such puzzles, what is one to say of its earlier work in sculpture and painting ? Only during the past half-dozen years has it been possible to even dream of following the history of fresco-painting in Rome during the earlier Middle Ages ; but now, the discovery of numerous new works of the sixth to the ninth centuries and the more careful study of others of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth, have given an embarrassing quantity of material which no one has yet attempted to classify. How much in all this, if any, is by Byzantine artists, how much by Italian pupils, how much is purely Roman in style ? The burfting Byzantine question is virulently reopened !

Even the entire system of carved decoration that ruled in Rome and nearly everywhere in Italy from the seventh to the eleventh century is cause for bitter controversy, and opposing critics battle for its Byzantine, its Lombard or its Classic origin ! In this I side emphatically with Byzantium. Everywhere we uncover interesting mare's nests !

For all these reasons this handbook cannot, as such books usually do, give a summary of recognized facts, but must be itself often a pioneer and admit a large element of discussion and hypothesis, and, I may confess, also a modicum of partisanship. To create the right atmosphere I have found a larger element of history necessary than is at all customary, because my theory of historic art (not of contemporary art) is that it is as integral a part of civilization as politics, religion, sociology or literature. As I hope this book may serve in the classroom, I have also felt it necessary to include a considerable amount of detailed description of the more important works, so as to obviate reference to other books for these fundamental elements. Less serious students may pass this over. I only regret that I could not make these descriptions moie vivid by a greater number of illustrations : those I have given have been selected so as to omit no single important type in any of the arts.

Ever since joining, in 1879, at the age of nineteen, the Societd, dei Cultori di ArcJieologm Cristiana, of which De Rossi was the leading spirit, I have made Christian Rome and its art my special study. After living in Rome for seventeen years, I left in 1883, but have returned a number of times, gathering material and continuing to explore not only the mediaeval city but the small towns and monasteries in every part of the Roman province, many of them still gems of sequestered mediaeval life. I followed, along the highways throughout this territory, the footprints of Roman art and artists. Before long I expect to publish a history of mediaeval art in Rome on a large scale. Of course in this limited space only a part of this work can appear, but even in this handbook I shall include some small part of the material gathered outside of Rome, — I wish it could be more, — because it is a product of the same hands and brains that worked in the metropolis, and many a gap in Rome itself is filled by some work in a country town where Barocco devastation was less active.