Re: Rome Reborn: The Pantheon Portable Edition
Irmgard Verzi
The manuscripts and printed books that came to rest in the Vatican Library tell many stories. They help to explain the development of Renaissance thought and art, scholarship and science, in Rome and elsewhere. They shed light on the history of the universal Roman church and on the city in which it flourished, on the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation--even on the history of Western efforts to understand and convert the peoples of the non-Western world. They describe the new education, art, and music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; they show how the curia reached beyond the bounds of Europe, to the Islamic world and even to China; and they reveal some of the conflicts that flared up when the accomplishment of church policy and the pursuit of new knowledge could not both be carried out.
Rome now is one of the grandest cities in the world. Millions of pilgrims and tourists come every year to admire, and be awed by, its treasures of architecture, art, and history. But is was not always this way. By the fourteenth century, the great ancient city had dwindled to a miserable village. Perhaps 20,000 people clung to the ruins despite the ravages of disease and robber barons. Popes and cardinals had fled to Avignon in southern France. Rome was dwarfed in wealth and power by the great commercial cities and territorial states farther north, from Florence to Venice. In the Renaissance, however, the popes returned to the See of Saint Peter. Popes and cardinals straightened streets, raised bridges across the Tiber, provided hospitals, fountains, and new churches for the public and splendid palaces and gardens for themselves. They drew on all the riches of Renaissance art and architecture to adorn the urban fabric, which they saw as a tangible proof of the power and glory of the church. And they attracted pilgrims from all of Christian Europe, whose alms and living expenses made the city rich once more. The papal curia--the central administration of the church- -became one of the most efficient governments in Europe. Michelangelo and Raphael, Castiglione and Cellini, Giuliano da Sangallo and Domenico Fontana lived and worked in Rome. Architecture, painting, music, and literature flourished. Papal efforts to make Rome the center of a normal Renaissance state, one which could wield military as well as spiritual power, eventually failed, but Rome remained a center of creativity in art and thought until deep into the seventeenth century.
The popes had always had a library, but in the middle of the fifteenth century they began to collect books in a new way. Nicholas V decided to create a public library for "the court of Rome"--the whole world of clerics and laymen, cardinals and scholars who inhabited the papal palace and its environs. He and Sixtus IV provided the library with a suite of rooms. These were splendidly frescoed, lighted by large windows, and furnished with elaborate wooden benches to which most books were chained. And, unlike some modern patrons, the popes of the Renaissance cared about the books as well as about the buildings that housed them. They bought, borrowed, and even stole the beautiful handwritten books of the time. The papal library soon became as spectacular a work of art, in its own way, as the Sistine Chapel or Saint Peter's. It grew rapidly; by 1455 it had 1200 books, 400 of them Greek; by 1481, a handwritten catalogue by the librarian, Platina, showed 3500 entries--by far the largest collection of books in the Western world. And it never stopped growing, thanks to bequests, purchases, and even, sometimes, military conquests.
From the start, the library had a special character. It included Bibles and works of theology and canon law, but it specialized in secular works: above all, the Greek and Latin classics, in the purest texts that the popes and their agents could find, for the popes and their servants saw these as the most powerful source of knowledge and counsel that the world possessed. The Vatican Library, in fact, became a center of the revival of classical culture known as the Renaissance. Its librarians were often distinguished scholars. Historians and philosophers, clerics and magicians visited the collections and borrowed books from them. By 1581, when the French writer Michel de Montaigne visited Rome, the treasures of the Vatican had become a mandatory stop on any well-informed traveller's Roman itinerary. To his delight, Montaigne was shown ancient Roman and ancient Chinese manuscripts, the love letters of Henry VIII, and the classics of history and philosophy (many of which can be seen in this exhibition). Then, as now, the Vatican Library was one of the greatest in the Western world.
These three views of Rome let us follow the city's revival. In the first, from the fourteenth century, the city appears devastated. Large uninhabited areas stretch across the center, and only a few neighborhoods--above all, the Borgo, around the Vatican, and Trastevere--are thickly settled. By the sixteenth century, the population has begun to recover; it went from around 20,000 at its lowest point, to over 100,000 by the time that the armies of the emperor Charles V sacked the city in 1527. New palaces in the city and country estates spreading up the surrounding hills reflect the growth of prosperity and the efforts of cardinals, ambassadors, and others to make the city splendid once again.
This plan of Rome from the fourteenth-century Satyrica historia of Paolino of Venice, offers a comprehensive view of the city. It shows dense settlement in the Borgo and Trastevere near Saint Peter's, but isolated buildings elsewhere, especially in the southern part of the city. Though the view is schematic, it is far from arbitrary or inaccurate. One can easily find Saint Peter's, the Capitoline, the Pantheon (in the center), and many other landmarks and also see how deserted much of the ancient city was.
This fine printed plan gives a sense of the growth of the city in the Renaissance, as central districts of Rome filled out again as popes, cardinals, and pilgrims spent lavishly. Streets were straightened. Bridges were laid across the Tiber. Dignitaries built fine palaces in the city center and gardens and villas on the hills.
In the 1580s, Sixtus V, a cantankerous and determined pope, tried to clear the Roman streets of their thousands of prostitutes. Though he failed at that, he succeeded in reorganizing streets and plazas. The Piazza del Popolo, where long straight streets converge and an obelisk provides a focus for marching pilgrims, is only one of the centers that he created for the public ceremonies so important in Counter-Reformation Rome.
Gaspare di Sant'Angelo's manuscript of Cicero portrays the Roman orator and his audience in contemporary dress before a gilt background. The image itself is framed in interlacing white vines or branches, one of the most common ornamental devices of the Italian illuminated manuscript of the Renaissance. The text was written by Petrus of Middelburg.
Henry VIII, a monarch with a fine classical education, supposedly wrote--or at least signed--this defense of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church against Martin Luther. He did add, in his own hand, the couplet seen here, in which he presents the book to Pope Leo X. The manuscript was shown to famous visitors to the Vatican Library as early as the sixteenth century.
The Vatican Library also acquired Henry's loving letters, in both English and French, to Anne Boleyn. The letters, though undated, predate their marriage early in 1533 and presumably come from the period, toward the end of Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, when he made Anne Boleyn pregnant and tried unsuccessfully to induce the Vatican to grant him a divorce from Catherine. In 1536 Anne herself would be executed, on a dubious charge of adultery.
This spectacular two-volume Bible was produced for the papal mercenary and duke of Urbino, Federigo da Montefeltro, by the Florentine book dealer Vespasiano da Bisticci. The scribe was Ugo Comminelli of Mzires; but the illuminations, by David and Dominico Ghirlandaio and others, make this book one of the finest works of art of the fifteenth century. Shown here is a miniature of the Apocalypse.
Galileo helped to create a new science partly because of his extraordinary skills as an observer, which enabled him to create and use the first telescope. These drawings represent sunspots-- whose existence proved that the sun was not the perfect, unchanging body that traditional Aristotelian cosmology considered it to be. Galileo's work received strong support for a long time from Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII, though his Dialogues on Two World Systems and Copernican views would eventually be condemned by Rome.
Johannes Rossos wrote the Greek text and Bartolomeo San Vito the Latin of this codex of Homer's Iliad and a companion version of the Odyssey. The illustrations, by a north Italian artist, draw on the archaeological scholarship of Paduan antiquaries to represent the Greek and Trojan heroes in convincingly rendered ancient armor and costumes (though the ship and tents in the middle of the Latin page are clearly modern). Here we see the priest Chryses, rendered as an ancient pagan, spurned by Agamemnon and avenged by the god Apollo, who shoots down the Greeks. Sadly, time or funds ran out, and most later images in the series are either merely sketched in or entirely omitted. The illustrations shown summarize Book I of the Iliad.
The architects of baroque Rome created some of the most dramatic spaces of Western Europe. The piazza before Saint Peter's was one of the most contentious, as well as the most successful, of these. Scholars as well as architects argued over the shape it should take, whether or not it needed formal openings, and many other issues. But the result was perhaps Bernini's most famous creation. These drawings show some of his struggles with the many problems posed by the site.
7fc3f7cf58