An Inventory of Losses

by Judith Schalansky

  When the rollers release the large sheets, the sun shines mercilessly on the etchings, the shading is velvety and black as oblivion, the architectural sight lines almost endless, the visual angles fantastical and the crumbling buildings colossal even from a bird’s-eye view. The monuments stand up boldly against an inflamed sky, below them an army of tiny figures, gawky Harlequins with flailing arms. This city must have been built by giants, Roman Cyclopes at the zenith of their creative powers.

  Piranesi’s etchings are soon all the rage as anatomical records of ancient life, even though most of the plates tell only of death. They show interior views of burial chambers, ground plans of mausoleums, sarcophagi enthroned on marble plinths, or a cross section through the cobblestones of a gateway leading to a crematorium. Piranesi becomes the high priest of a death cult that grips the entire continent and every week spurs new disciples to make a pilgrimage to the master’s house on the far side of Monte Cavallo, where he has retreated in search of peace; his old workshop on the magnificent Corso was plagued by hordes of visitors. When the beardless folk ask to be admitted, he calls out “Piranesi is not at home” until they give up without having caught a glimpse of their idol.

  Only once, on one particularly hot and humid afternoon in early summer, the knocking simply does not cease. When Piranesi throws open the door with the usual cursing, on the threshold stands an elegantly dressed young man with shoulder-length, curly hair carefully combed and held together in a ribbon at the nape of his neck, smooth facial features and small round eyes that sparkle, and from his well-formed mouth, accompanied by an old-fashioned sweeping bow, come the words, spoken with a fine French accent, that he has been murmuring to himself for days, trying to strike the right tone: “Sir, if I may. My name is Hubert Robert. I love the ruins as you do. Take me with you anywhere you please.”

  Two years later, on the morning of a misty autumn day in the year 1760, Hubert Robert walks out of the Porta Angelica, follows the winding course of a small, partially dried-up stream into a valley at the shady far end of which, he was told, there stands a crumbling mansion. Beneath the cloud-covered sky the colors appear washed out. He breathes in the damp air, wants to shake off his tiredness, a leaden weariness which has been bothering him for some time, and which is fundamentally alien to his being.

  He is young, twenty-seven years of age, a scholar of the Académie de France, the son of a Parisian valet in the service of a diplomat at the court of Versailles. He arrived in Rome, via Basel, St. Gotthard and Milan, six years ago as a member of the entourage of the diplomat’s son, in order, as one gifted man among many, to draw all the monuments and buildings that, rather than concealing the signs of the times, display them almost proudly. Only this spring he traveled to Naples and visited the new excavations on the Gulf, saw Pozzuoli and Paestum, and in Tivoli drew the gnarled olive trees reaching with their parched branches towards a copper-colored sky in the derelict interior of a Temple of the Sibyl. He had not wanted to spend another summer in the feverish heat of Rome, which a year earlier had almost cost him his life. Since his return, he is somehow changed. Beset by a strange weariness that has suddenly spoiled his enjoyment of all the ancient remains, he is seized by an urge to visit some ruins from his own era, namely those of the villa of the Sacchettis, which, after another bend in the path, now appears behind the branches of the cypresses at the end of a sandy avenue.

  He leaves the bridle path behind, makes his way towards the grounds, sits down on the hard, brown grass and looks. Then he starts drawing the tumbledown premises, quickly and accurately, just as, during the long evenings of his first Roman winter, he drew the muscles of a wiry Italian in the high-ceilinged painting room of the academy on the Corso. He guides his graphite pencil purposefully over the paper, rarely looks up, capturing the scene with only an occasional glance: the way the straggly garden extends up over the slope in three tiers, the way the crumbling building, a pavilion with a protruding facade and two curved wings, sits enthroned on an embankment as if on a pedestal, at its center the tall semicircular apse, a water feature on each of the three terraces: a fountain, a fishpond and a shady nymphaeum with Doric pilasters behind a colonnade. But the flights of steps are bare except for the crumbling stonework. The roof structure is disintegrating, the balustrades are falling down, the coffered half dome of the apse is cracked, the fountain without water, and the seashell-shaped basin guarded by a pair of Tritons is bone-dry right down to its stone floor. Even the lintel above the entrance has slipped lower as if after an earthquake.

  Robert draws all of this, allowing himself to add the familiar figures of the household staff to the abandoned scene: on the sheet of paper a girl balances a jug on her head, a woman holds an infant to her breast, another leads a child up the steps, a dog follows an invisible scent, a cow and a sheep stand by the fountain, and a donkey lowers his head to the basin, which is filled to the brim with water.

  Hubert Robert casts an eye over his drawing, rolls up the sheet of paper, crosses the overgrown track that was once the drive, ascends the cracked steps, past the mortar remnants scattered at the foot of the wall. The entrance is littered with rubble. He climbs inside through a window aperture, a cool room of not particularly large dimensions, which must once have been the drawing room. A musty odor hangs in the air. Broken roof tiles and rotten beams lie in a heap on the ground; barely an arch of the vault is intact. And in the middle of the coffered ceiling is a gaping hole like a giant wound with the whitish-gray bank of clouds shining through. Only around the edges, under the crumbling plaster, is it still possible to make out the remains, rimmed black with mold, of a ceiling painting, faded scenes populated with shadowy figures, the only distinguishable one depicting an impaled head with wide-staring eyes—a grisly vision that reminds Robert of a line from Virgil’s Aeneid: “Unum pro multis dabitur caput.” One head will be sacrificed for many.

  He stares at the gruesome head until a thought strikes him: the present is merely the past of the future. A shudder comes over him, he clambers over the rubble and steps back, strangely elated, into the open, but then a foul smell hits him, bringing back memories of the previous summer, of the intolerable stench which, in August, after the heavy rains, when the Tiber was swollen and as so often had burst its banks, had settled like a bell jar over the entire city and dissipated only briefly during the twilight hours when he, like everyone else, took the opportunity to go for a stroll to recuperate from the heat of the day. Later he was told by the doctor, a thoughtful and experienced man who trusted above all in the salutary effect of bloodletting, that during those eerily fresh evening hours he must have been infected with the swamp fever, which few survive. Nobody—neither his landlady nor his friends—had still believed Robert would recover, so far advanced was his physical deterioration and accompanying mental breakdown. After the tenth bloodletting in the space of eight days, he too, coming round after fainting from lack of blood, was himself so resigned to his own irrevocable end that, even as the symptoms were already receding, he was still expecting to die and is surprised to this day to have survived the illness.

  He turns around once more, surveys the house, which now seems to him transformed. Greenery sprouts from the walls, moss covers the marble gods, stonecrop springs from the cracks, ivy clings to the stone with its sturdy roots, Virginia creeper adorns the parapet, its many-branching tendrils twining themselves around the fragile cartouche which identifies the builder and still bears the royal coat of arms of the Sacchetti family, three black stripes on a white background.

  When Giulio Sacchetti was appointed a cardinal over one hundred years ago, he had commissioned this villa with its high apse, proud and imposing like that of the Belvedere—a summer house in Valle Inferno, a sandy depression between Monte Mario and the Vatican, a dusty wooded hollow near the papal state, full of tall pines and slender cypresses. He is a rich man, Rome’s wealthiest cardinal—with a glittering future in prospect. From the bedrooms of his summer res
idence he can see the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. Twice he hopes to be elected Pontifex Maxi­mus, and at the conclave in 1655 he is not far short. But others become pope.

  One year later he stands at the window of his country house for the last time and gazes again at the object of his failed dreams, in his bony hand a perfumed sachet containing herbs, bitter orange and lemon peel, which he keeps pressing to his nose. The plague is raging in the city—yet again, but with more devastating effect than in a long time. The streets are populated with figures enveloped in clouds of smoke, wearing beaked masks in an attempt to ward off the disease with aromatic vapors of myrrh, camphor, and wild calla—and carrying a stick to keep the sick at bay, those poor devils who are carried off so quickly that he, Giulio Sacchetti, papal adviser on disease control, can come up with nothing better than having the wretched dead buried outside the city walls—as swiftly as possible and without any manner of religious ritual—before decomposition can set in and the corpses emit their reputedly highly infectious effluvia. This secluded valley is particularly prone to miasmas, those damp mists that fester in the shallow margins and spongy banks of bodies of still water, hang low above the earth—and exude a stench so repulsive that it is inevitably perceived as toxic and sinister. Giulio Sacchetti knows what is written in every treatise on the plague: a piece of land, once contaminated, is lost forever. From now on he receives his guests in his city palazzo again. Only a few decades after its construction, Villa Sacchetti is abandoned.

  First the tiled roof sags, then the rotten beams warp under the colossal weight of the vault. Soon water trickles through the cracked tiles, seeps into the timbers and walls, and the disintegration begins. The house’s outlines, which a young master builder once traced on the drawing board with a ruler, are gradually losing their shape, crumbling and unraveling. The stone, once cut and layered to make walls, becomes weak and vulnerable, defenseless in the face of weeds and weather, to the point that there is no distinguishing what is tuff, what is slate, what is marble, and what is rock. Only the thick, sturdy outer walls of the pavilion will stand firm for a while longer against the water that, in the summer months, cascades down the hillside after every downpour as if the end of the world were nigh.

  Meanwhile in Paris, Europe’s other capital, the stench of bodily excretions reigns longer than the House of Bourbon—a vile odor of urine and feces. At night, especially, it engulfs whole districts, when the sewer emptiers climb back out of the cesspits and, to spare themselves the trip to the waste dump, tip the excrement into the gutter, a viscous sauce that, as dawn breaks, runs down the streets towards the Seine, on the banks of which the water carriers later fill their jugs, oblivious.

  Early infirmity will deliver them. There is a bed ready for each one of them in the Hôtel-Dieu, the ancient hospital in the labyrinthine old town, a bed they must share with four others. There the insane and the elderly lie alongside orphans, women who have just given birth and postoperative patients one floor up from the corpses, the sick among the dying. The walls are damp, the corridors poorly ventilated, and even on summer days, a perpetual twilight filters through the window openings. The children smell sour, the women sickly sweet, the men of cold sweat, and hanging over everything is the fetid odor of decay which—as surely as the incessant fumbling with the bedclothes—heralds the approach of death, as on the night of December 30 of the year 1772, when a fire accidentally started during candle-dipping jumps across to the timberwork and spreads to the entire warren-like compound. For two weeks of winter the hospital is in flames. As the inferno takes hold, destroying an ever-expanding tract of the old heart of the city, spectators revel in the spectacle that is bathing the cityscape in a red glow.

  What is left is a hollowed-out shell against a black sky, which Hubert Robert captures in several drawings and paintings. He has been back in Paris for eight years, and has earned himself the nickname “Robert des Ruines.” Ruins are in demand. Anyone who cannot wait for time to do its work has them built or painted. The collapse of a building attracts almost as many onlookers as an execution. So Robert paints monks preaching in ancient temples and washerwomen on the quaysides of underground rivers, the demolition of houses on the Pont Notre-Dame and Pont au Change; he paints the horse carts taking the rubble from the ruins and men loading whatever is left behind onto barges, the day laborers hunting for reusable materials on the battlefields of urban regeneration and piling them up for sale, to keep the eternal cycle in motion. And so ruins turn into building sites, the one indistinguishable from the other in Robert’s paintings. On his canvas even the ditch for the foundations of the school of surgery resembles an archaeological excavation. He paints the blaze at the opera house as an erupting volcano, the sea of flames, the pillar of fire and the clouds of smoke against a June night sky, the sooty pall of the morning after, as well as the leveling of the Château of Meudon, the demolition of the Church of the Feuillants and the storming of the Bastille, the black bulwark before it was razed to the ground—a compelling, eloquent image: the falling lumps of stone pile up in the moat like ancient spolia, clouds of smoke billowing all around them. The new, says this picture, demands the ruthless destruction of the old. From now on, monuments disappear every day; every week a cavalcade of statues is dispatched to the furnace. Paris is the new city of ruins. Palaces are stormed, fortresses torn down, churches laid waste, and skeletons of kings and queens, abbots and cardinals, princes of the noblest blood dragged from their graves, their lead and copper coffins melted down to make shotgun pellets in purpose-built foundries and the bones consigned to hastily dug pits and sprinkled with the kind of unslaked lime that suppresses the stench of corpses and hastens their decomposition. Robert paints his panorama of purposeful and purposeless destruction with the stoical equanimity of a chronicler. Anyone at the time who asks him which side he is on receives the answer: “On the side of art.”

  In his picture, the desecration of the centuries-old tombs becomes an everyday exercise and it is impossible to tell whether something is being destroyed or preserved here. Before the canvas is even dry, he is arrested. Like so many other protégés of the aristocracy, he ends up in Saint-Lazare, the prison that was once a leper colony. There, too, he paints: the distribution of milk, the ball games in the prison yard, the suburbs of Clichy and La Chapelle glinting in the distance through the barred window, and the fields lying fallow around Montmartre, which rises up on the horizon—on earthenware and door timbers at first, until he is given permission to acquire canvases and paper. Every afternoon he practices gymnastics in the inner yard, not far from an enormous wooden cross, at the foot of which a marquise cloaked in black begs heaven for mercy—and the restoration of the old order, when “a lord was still a lord, and a servant still a servant.”

  One March evening in 1794 laughter issues from the third-floor corridor. Not unusually, there is a feast in progress, pike and trout are served, fruit and wine. A little monkey roams from cell to cell and Émile, the five-year-old son of a prisoner, takes a rabbit for a walk on a lead, to general amusement. Two female inmates play the harpsichord and harp, oblivious of everyone around them, then once the instruments have fallen silent, Robert starts telling the story of how, as a young man, he had scaled the Colosseum and almost fallen, and how he had plucked up the courage to call on Piranesi. How he was mentored by him and allowed to draw the subterranean burial sites with him. He makes no mention of the gruesome picture in Villa Sacchetti. As always he wears a knee-length purple robe, beneath which his bodily proportions can only be guessed at. He has two deep wrinkles etched into his high forehead, and a few pockmarks dotting his otherwise rosy, smooth face. His black, bushy eyebrows are now as gray as his sparse hair. In spite of his age and his corpulence, he nearly always wins the games of catch in the prison yard. And his small eyes are as cheerful as ever. When he laughs, his fleshy lower lip trembles, and two dimples appear on his chin. He raises his wine glass and proclaims contentedly that he is the least unhappy inmate i
n Saint-Lazare. He does not, though, speak of the reason for his unshakable gaiety: that absolute certainty that he, like everyone here, will die by the guillotine. “Stat sua cuique dies,” he says, quoting Virgil, as he so often does, and laughs his infectious laugh that would have you believe that misfortune had never befallen him. Yet his four children are all dead, borne away by illness. He is fully prepared. He has already done a painting of his own grave and built himself a miniature guillotine out of scraps of firewood to familiarize himself with the workings of the apparatus that before long, when his turn comes, will nice and neatly sever his head from his body. Every few days, the drumroll announcing the arrival of the dark horse carts that come to fetch the prisoners and take them before the court echoes through his cell.

  A few weeks later, on a cold, clear sunny morning in May 1794, he is standing among the prisoners gathered in the inner yard when his name is called out. He realizes that his final hour has come and is about to step forward when another man makes himself known, someone on whom fate has bestowed the same surname, who will now face the blade in his place. Hubert Robert is released. Only many years later does he eventually die of a stroke in his studio in rue Neuve de Luxembourg. He drops dead on the floor, his palette in his hand.

  One year after Robert’s death, in July 1809, two architects accompanied by a doctor take a drive into the deserted, muggy valley near Rome. Since the horses start to take fright before they have reached their destination, and even the whip cannot persuade them to pull the carriage all the way to the end of the almost impassable avenue, the men have no choice but to finish their journey on foot, until they are standing in front of Villa Sacchetti with Monte Mario behind it, the hill on which all Rome’s occupiers set up camp, including Napoleon’s staff officer in February 1797, when he issued the order to seize all works of art deemed worthy of being transported back to the French Republic, the self-proclaimed land of freedom, to Paris, school for all the world, whereupon the officers fanned out across the city and plundered the pope’s treasure chambers, cut up Raphael’s tapestries, sawed frescos and paintings to pieces, hacked the limbs off statues.