The subject is too high to be lightly touched, and too wide to be touched more than lightly here; but in this view of it may perhaps be found some explanation of the miserable poverty of Italian art in the eighteenth century, foreshadowed by the decadence of the seventeenth, which again is traceable to the dissipation of force and the disappearance of individuality that followed the Renascence, as inevitably as old age follows youth. Besides all necessary gifts of genius, the development of art seems to require that a race should not only have leisure for remembering, but should also have something to remember which may be worthy of being recalled and perhaps of being imitated. Progress may be the road to wealth and health, and to such happiness as may be derived from both; but the advance of civilization is the path of thought, and its landmarks are not inventions nor discoveries, but those very great creations of the mind which ennoble the heart in all ages; and as the idea of progress is inseparable from that of growing riches, so is the true conception of civilization indivisible from thoughts of beauty and nobility. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Italy had almost altogether lost sight of these; art was execrable, fashion was hideous, morality meant hypocrisy; the surest way to power lay in the most despicable sort of intrigue, and inward and spiritual faith was as rare as outward and visible devoutness was general.
That was the society which frequented the Villa Medici on fine afternoons, and it is hard to see wherein its charm lay, if, indeed, it had any. Instead of originality, its conversation teemed with artificial conventionalisms; instead of nature, it exhibited itself in the disguise of fashions more inconvenient, uncomfortable and ridiculous than those of any previous or later times; it delighted in the impossibly nonsensical ‘pastoral’ verses which we find too silly to read; and in place of wit, it clothed gross and cruel sayings in a thin remnant of worn-out classicism. It had not the frankly wicked recklessness of the French aristocracy between Lewis the Fourteenth and the Revolution, nor the changing contrasts of brutality, genius, affectation and Puritanical austerity which marked England’s ascent, from the death of Edward the Sixth to the victories of Nelson and Wellington; still less had it any of those real motives for existence which carried Germany through her long struggle for life. It had little which we are accustomed to respect in men and women, and yet it had something which we lack today, and which we unconsciously envy — it had a colour of its own. Wandering under the ancient ilexes of those sad and beautiful gardens, meeting here and there a few silent and soberly clad strangers, one cannot but long for the brilliancy of two centuries ago, when the walks were gay with brilliant dresses, and gilded chairs, and servants in liveries of scarlet and green and gold, and noble ladies, tottering a few steps on their ridiculous high heels, and men bewigged and becurled, their useless little hats under their arms, and their embroidered coat tails flapping against their padded, silk-stockinged calves; and red-legged, unpriestly Cardinals who were not priests even in name, but only the lay life-peers of the Church; and grave Bishops with their secretaries; and laughing abbés, whose clerical dress was the accustomed uniform of government office, which they still wore when they were married, and were fathers of families. There is little besides colour to recommend the picture, but at least there is that.
The Pincian hill has always been the favourite home of artists of all kinds, and many lived at one time or another in the little villas that once stood there, and in the houses in the Via Sistina and southward, and up towards the Porta Pinciana. Guido Reni, the Caracci, Salvator Rosa, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, have all left the place the association of their presence, and the Zuccheri brothers built themselves the house which still bears their name, just below the one at the corner of the Trinità de’ Monti, known to all foreigners as the ‘Tempietto’ or little temple. But the Villa Medici stands as it did long ago, its walls uninjured, its trees grander than ever, its walks unchanged. Soft-hearted Baracconi, in love with those times more than with the Middle Age, speaks half tenderly of the people who used to meet there, calling them collectively a gay and light-hearted society, gentle, idle, full of graceful thoughts and delicate perceptions, brilliant reflections and light charms; he regrets the gilded chairs, the huge built-up wigs, the small sword of the ‘cavalier servente,’ and the abbé’s silk mantle, the semi-platonic friendships, the jests borrowed from Goldoni, the ‘pastoral’ scandal, and exchange of compliments and madrigals and epigrams, and all the brilliant powdered train of that extinct world.
VILLA MEDICI
Whatever life may have been in those times, that world died in a pretty tableau, after the manner of Watteau’s paintings; it meant little and accomplished little, and though its bright colouring brings it for a moment to the foreground, it has really not much to do with the Rome we know nor with the Rome one thinks of in the past, always great, always sad, always tragic, as no other city in the world can ever be.
Ignorance, tradition, imagination, romance, — call it what you will, — has chosen the long-closed Pincian Gate for the last station of blind Belisarius. There, says the tale, the ancient conqueror, the banisher and maker of Popes, the favourite and the instrument of imperial Theodora, stood begging his bread at the gate of the city he had won and lost, leaning upon the arm of the fair girl child who would not leave him, and stretching forth his hand to those that passed by, with a feeble prayer for alms, pathetic as Œdipus in the utter ruin of his life and fortune. A truer story tells how Pope Silverius, humble and gentle, and hated by Theodora, went up to the Pincian villa to answer the accusation of conspiring with the Goths, when he himself had opened the gates of Rome to Belisarius; and how he was led into the great hall where the warrior’s wife, Theodora’s friend, the beautiful and evil Antonina, lay with half-closed eyes upon her splendid couch, while Belisarius sat beside her feet, toying with her jewels. There the husband and wife accused the Pope, and judged him without hearing, and condemned him without right; and they caused him to be stripped of his robes, and clad as a poor monk and driven out to far exile, that they might set up the Empress Theodora’s Pope in his place; and with him they drove out many Roman nobles.
And it is said that when Silverius was dead of a broken heart in the little island of Palmaria, Belisarius repented of his deeds and built the small Church of Santa Maria de’ Crociferi, behind the fountain of Trevi, in partial expiation of his fault, and there, to prove the truth of the story, the tablet that tells of his repentance has stood nearly fourteen hundred years and may be read today, on the east wall, towards the Via de’ Poli. The man who conquered Africa for Justinian, seized Sicily, took Rome, defended it successfully against the Goths, reduced Ravenna, took Rome from the Goths again, and finally rescued Constantinople, was disgraced more than once; but he was not blinded, nor did he die in exile or in prison, for at the end he breathed his last in the enjoyment of his freedom and his honours; and the story of his blindness is the fabrication of an ignorant Greek monk who lived six hundred years later and confounded Justinian’s great general with the romantic and unhappy John of Cappadocia, who lived at the same time, was a general at the same time, and incurred the displeasure of that same pious, proud, avaricious Theodora, actress, penitent and Empress, whose paramount beauty held the Emperor in thrall for life, and whose surpassing cruelty imprinted an indelible seal of horror upon his glorious reign — of her who, when she delivered a man to death, admonished the executioner with an oath, saying, ‘By Him who liveth for ever, if thou failest, I will cause thee to be flayed alive.’
Another figure rises at the window of the Tuscan Ambassador’s great villa, with the face of a man concerning whom legend has also found much to invent and little to say that is true, a man of whom modern science has rightly made a hero, but whom prejudice and ignorance have wrongly crowned as a martyr — Galileo Galilei. Tradition represents him as languishing, laden with chains, in the more or less mythical prisons of the Inquisition; history tells very plainly that his first confinement consisted in being the honoured guest of the Tuscan Ambassador in th
e latter’s splendid residence in Rome, and that his last imprisonment was a relegation to the beautiful castle of the Piccolomini near Siena, than which the heart of man could hardly desire a more lovely home. History affirms beyond doubt, moreover, that Galileo was the personal friend of that learned and not illiberal Barberini, Pope Urban the Eighth, under whose long reign the Copernican system was put on trial, who believed in that system as Galileo did, who read his books and talked with him; and who, when the stupid technicalities of the ecclesiastic courts declared the laws of the universe to be nonsense, gave his voice against the decision, though he could not officially annul it without scandal. ‘It was not my intention,’ said the Pope in the presence of witnesses, ‘to condemn Galileo. If the matter had depended upon me, the decree of the Index which condemned his doctrines should never have been pronounced.’
That Galileo’s life was saddened by the result of the absurd trial, and that he was nominally a prisoner for a long time, is not to be denied. But that he suffered the indignities and torments recorded in legend is no more true than that Belisarius begged his bread at the Porta Pinciana. He lived in comfort and in honour with the Ambassador in the Villa Medici, and many a time from those lofty windows, unchanged since before his day, he must have watched the earth turning with him from the sun at evening, and meditated upon the emptiness of the ancient phrase that makes the sun ‘set’ when the day is done — thinking of the world, perhaps, as turning upon its other side, with tired eyes, and ready for rest and darkness and refreshment, after long toil and heat.
One may stand under those old trees before the Villa Medici, beside the ancient fountain facing Saint Peter’s distant dome, and dream the great review of history, and call up a vast, changing picture at one’s feet between the heights and the yellow river. First, the broad corn-field of the Tarquin Kings, rich and ripe under the evening breeze of summer that runs along swiftly, bending the golden surface in soft moving waves from the Tiber’s edge to the foot of the wooded slope. Then, the hurried harvesting, the sheaves cast into the river, the dry, stiff stubble baking in the sun, and presently the men of Rome coming forth in procession from the dark Servian wall on the left to dedicate the field to the War God with prayer and chant and smoking sacrifice. By and by the stubble trodden down under horses’ hoofs, the dusty plain the exercising ground of young conquerors, the voting place, later, of a strong Republic, whither the centuries went out to choose their consuls, to decide upon peace or war, to declare the voice of the people in grave matters, while the great signal flag waved on the Janiculum, well in sight though far away, to fall suddenly at the approach of any foe and suspend the ‘comitia’ on the instant. And in the flat and dusty plain, buildings begin to rise; first, the Altar of Mars and the holy place of the infernal gods, Dis and Proserpine; later, the great ‘Sheepfold,’ the lists and hustings for the voting, and, encroaching a little upon the training ground, the temple of Venus Victorious and the huge theatre of Pompey, wherein the Orsini held their own so long; but in the times of Lucullus, when his gardens and his marvellous villa covered the Pincian hill, the plain was still a wide field, and still the field of Mars, without the walls, broken by few landmarks, and trodden to deep white dust by the scampering hoofs of half-drilled cavalry. Under the Emperors, then, first beautified in part, as Cæsar traces the great Septa for the voting, and Augustus erects the Altar of Peace and builds up his cypress-clad tomb, crowned by his own image, and Agrippa raises his triple temple, and Hadrian builds the Pantheon upon its ruins, while the obelisk that now stands on Monte Citorio before the House of Parliament points out the brass-figured hours on the broad marble floor of the first Emperor’s sun-clock and marks the high noon of Rome’s glory — and the Portico of Neptune and many other splendid works spring up. Isis and Serapis have a temple next, and Domitian’s race-course appears behind Agrippa’s Baths, straight and white. By and by the Antonines raise columns and triumphal arches, but always to southward, leaving the field of Mars a field still, for its old uses, and the tired recruits, sweating from exercise, gather under the high shade of Augustus’ tomb at midday for an hour’s rest.
Last of all, the great temple of the Sun, with its vast portico, and the Mithræum at the other end, and when the walls of Aurelian are built, and when ruin comes upon Rome from the north, the Campus Martius is still almost an open stretch of dusty earth on which soldiers have learned their trade through a thousand years of hard training.
Not till the poor days when the waterless, ruined city sends its people down from the heights to drink of the muddy stream does Campo Marzo become a town, and then, around the castle-tomb of the Colonna and the castle-theatre of the Orsini the wretched houses begin to rise here and there, thickening to a low, dark forest of miserable dwellings threaded through and through, up and down and crosswise, by narrow and crooked streets, out of which by degrees the lofty churches and palaces of the later age are to spring up. From a training ground it has become a fighting ground, a labyrinth of often barricaded ways and lanes, deeper and darker towards the water-gates cut in the wall that runs along the Tiber, from Porta del Popolo nearly to the island of Saint Bartholomew, and almost all that is left of Rome is crowded and huddled into the narrow pen overshadowed and dominated here and there by black fortresses and brown brick towers. The man who then might have looked down from the Pincian hill would have seen that sight; houses little better than those of the poorest mountain village in the Southern Italy of today, black with smoke, black with dirt, blacker with patches made by shadowy windows that had no glass. A silent town, too, surly and defensive; now and then the call of the water-carrier disturbs the stillness, more rarely, the cry of a wandering peddler; and sometimes a distant sound of hoofs, a far clash of iron and steel, and the echoing yell of furious fighting men— ‘Orsini!’ ‘Colonna!’ — the long-drawn syllables coming up distinct through the evening air to the garden where Messalina died, while the sun sets red behind the spire of old Saint Peter’s across the river, and gilds the huge girth of dark Sant’ Angelo to a rusty red, like battered iron bathed in blood.
Back come the Popes from Avignon, and streets grow wider and houses cleaner and men richer — all for the Bourbon’s Spaniards to sack, and burn, and destroy before the last city grows up, and the rounded domes raise their helmet-like heads out of the chaos, and the broad Piazza del Popolo is cleared, and old Saint Peter’s goes down in dust to make way for the Cathedral of all Christendom as it stands. Then far away, on Saint Peter’s evening, when it is dusk, the great dome, and the small domes, and the colonnades, and the broad façade are traced in silver lights that shine out quietly as the air darkens. The solemn bells toll the first hour of the June night; the city is hushed, and all at once the silver lines are turned to gold, as the red flame runs in magic change from the topmost cross down the dome, in rivers, to the roof, and the pillars and the columns of the square below — the grandest illumination of the grandest church the world has ever seen.
REGION V PONTE
THE REGION OF Ponte, ‘the Bridge,’ takes its name from the ancient Triumphal Bridge which led from the city to the Vatican Fields, and at low water some fragments of the original piers may be seen in the river at the bend just below Ponte Sant’ Angelo, between the Church of Saint John of the Florentines on the one bank, and the Hospital of Santo Spirito on the other. In the Middle Age, according to Baracconi and others, the broken arches still extended into the stream, and upon them was built a small fortress, the outpost of the Orsini on that side. The device, however, appears to represent a portion of the later Bridge of Sant’ Angelo, built upon the foundations of the Ælian Bridge of Hadrian, which connected his tomb with the Campus Martius. The Region consists of the northwest point of the city, bounded by the Tiber, from Monte Brianzo round the bend, and down stream to the new Lungara bridge, and on the land side by a very irregular line running across the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, close to the Chiesa Nuova, and then eastward and northward in a zigzag, so as to take in most of the fortr
esses of the Orsini family, Monte Giordano, Tor Millina, Tor Sanguigna, and the now demolished Torre di Nona. The Sixth and Seventh Regions adjacent to the Fifth and to each other would have to be included in order to take in all that part of Rome once held by the only family that rivalled, and sometimes surpassed, the Colonna in power.
As has been said before, the original difference between the two was that the Colonna were Ghibellines and for the Emperors, while the Orsini were Guelphs and generally adhered to the Popes. In the violent changes of the Middle Age, it happened indeed that the Colonna had at least one Pope of their own, and that more than one, such as Nicholas the Fourth, favoured their race to the point of exciting popular indignation. But, on the whole, they kept to their parties. When Lewis the Bavarian was to be crowned by force, Sciarra Colonna crowned him; when Henry the Seventh of Luxemburg had come to Rome for the same purpose, a few years earlier, the Orsini had been obliged to be satisfied with a sort of second-rate coronation at Saint John Lateran’s; and when the struggle between the two families was at its height, nearly two centuries later, and Sixtus the Fourth ‘assumed the part of mediator,’ as the chronicle expresses it, one of his first acts of mediation was to cut off the head of a Colonna, and his next was to lay regular siege to the strongholds of the family in the Roman hills; but before he had brought this singular process of mediation to an issue he suddenly died, the Colonna returned to their dwellings in Rome ‘with great clamour and triumph,’ got the better of the Orsini, and proceeded to elect a Pope after their own hearts, in the person of Cardinal Cibo, of Genoa, known as Innocent the Eighth. He it is who lies under the beautiful bronze monument in the inner left aisle of Saint Peter’s, which shows him holding in his hand a model of the spear-head that pierced Christ’s side, a relic believed to have been sent to the Pope as a gift by Sultan Bajazet the Second.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1377