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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Kenneth Clark's Civilisation
Chapter 7
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I am back in Rome... This is Papal Rome ... the most grandiose piece of town planning ever attempted.
The amazing thing is that it was done only fifty years after Rome had been (as it seemed) completely humiliated -- almost wiped off the map. The city had been sacked and burnt, the people of Northern Europe were heretics, the Turks were threatening Vienna. It could have seemed to a far-sighted intellectual ... that the Papacy's only course was to face the facts, and accept its dependence on the gold of America, doled out through Spain.
Well, this didn't happen. Rome and the Church of Rome regained many of the territories it had lost, and, what is more important to us, became once more a great spiritual force.
But was it a civilising force?
In England we tend to answer no. We have been conditioned by generations of liberal, Protestant historians who tell us that no society based on obedience, repression and superstition can be really civilised.
But no one with an ounce of historical feeling or philosophic detachment can be blind to the great ideals, to the passionate belief in sanctity, to the expenditure of human genius in the service to God, which are made triumphantly visible to us with every step we take in Baroque Rome.
Whatever it is, it isn't barbarian or provincial... I think one must put off defining the word civilisation till we have looked at the Rome of the Popes.
The first thing that strikes one is that those who say the Renaissance had exhausted the Italian genius are very wide of the mark. After 1527 there was a failure of confidence; and no wonder. Historians may say that the Sack of Rome was more of a symbol than a historically significant event: well ... the Sack was real enough to anyone who witnessed it.
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If you compare the lower part of Michelangelo's Last Judgment, which was commissioned by Clement VII as a kind of atonement for the Sack, with a group in Raphael's Disputa or with the Creation of Adam, you can see that something very drastic has happened to the imagination of Christendom.
Michelangelo had been reluctant to undertake the Last Judgment; under ... Pope Paul III, Farnese, he was persuaded to continue it although with a rather different purpose. It ceased to be an act of atonement ... and became the first and greatest assertion of the Church's power, and the fate that would befall heretics and schismatics.
[Paul III] took the two decisions that were successfully to counter the Reformation: he sanctioned the Jesuit order and he instituted the Council of Trent...
In 1546 [Michelangelo] accepted from Pope Paul III the post of overseer for the construction of St. Peter's. Thus, by his longevity no less than by his genius, he became the spiritual link between the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation.
One reason why medieval and Renaissance architecture is so much better than our own is that the architects were artists. The master masons of the Gothic cathedrals started as carvers...
The last stone of the dome of St. Peter's was put in place in 1590... The long period of austerity and consolidation was almost over, and in that decade were born the three men who were to make visible the victory of the Catholic Church: Bernini, Borromini and Pietro da Cortona.
How had that victory been achieved?
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In England most of us were brought up to believe that it depended on the Inquisition, the Index and the Society of Jesus. I don't believe that a great outburst of creative energy such as took place in Rome between 1620 and 1660 can be the result of negative factors, but I admit that the civilisation of these years depended on certain assumptions that are out of favour in England and America today.
The first of these, of course, was belief in authority, the absolute authority of the Catholic Church. This belief extended to sections of society which we now assume to be naturally rebellious.
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It comes as something of a shock to find that, with a single exception, the great artists of the time were all sincere, conforming Christians...
This conformism was not based on fear of the Inquisition, but on the perfectly simple belief that the faith which had inspired the great saints of the preceding generation was something by which a man should regulate his life.
The mid-sixteenth century was a period of sanctity in the Roman Church almost equal to the twelfth. St. John of the Cross, the great poet of mysticism; St. Ignatius Loyola ... St. Theresa of Avila ... St. Carlo Borromeo... one does not need to be a practising Catholic to feel respect for a half-century that could produce these great spirits. Ignatius, Teresa, Filipo Neri and Francis Xavier were all canonized on the same day, 22 May 1622. It was like the baptism of a regenerated Rome.
However, I am not trying to pretend that this episode in the history of civilisation was of value chiefly because of its influence on artists or philosophers. On the contrary, I think that intellectual life developed more fully in the freer atmosphere of the north. The great achievements of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, humanizing, civilising the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people. Take the cult of the Virgin... She had taught a race of tough and ruthless barbarians the virtues of tenderness and compassion...
The leaders of the Catholic Restoration had made the inspired decision not to go half-way to meet Protestantism in any of its objections, but rather to glory in those very doctrines that the Protestants had most forcibly, and sometimes, it must admitted, most logically, repudiated...
The art of the Renaissance had appealed through intellectual means... The Baroque appealed through the emotions to the widest possible audience...
Bernini is perhaps the only artist in history who has been able to carry through a vast design over so long a period; and the results is a unity of impression that exists nowhere else on so large a scale... everything is calculated to overwhelm...
Of course, all art is to some extent an illusion... But there are degrees of illusion... Bernini went very far -- just how far one realizes when one remembers the historical St. Teresa, with her plain, dauntless, sensible face. The contrast with the swooning sensuous beauty of the Cornaro Chapel is almost shocking.
Art creates its own momentum and once set on this course there was nothing it could do except become more and more sensational...
As for my other misgivings, of course there was exploitation before the sixteenth century, but never on so vast a scale... the colossal palaces of the Papal families were simply expressions of private greed and vanity... their contribution to civilisation was limited to this kind of visual exuberance.
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The sense of grandeur is no doubt a human instinct, but, carried too far, it becomes inhuman. I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room...
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