Florence Italy – Cradle of the Renaissance and the Rebirth of Humanism – Part I - Rome

Two and a half years ago, immediately after the election of Trump, I was walking my dog and commiserating with a neighbor about the state of things when she said flatly, “You know, we’re not Greece, we’re Rome.”  So I should have been prepared to discover our American roots when we traveled this week to visit my stepdaughter who is doing her final semester abroad in Florence.  But, as we crossed the Atlantic for only the second time in my life (my grandmother brought my cousin and me to Europe when she and I were twelve), I was thinking more about exchange rates and not having time to grade midterms during spring vacation than being prepared to be immersed in the history of the Roman Empire – and the Church – and the art that the latter spawned – art that opened the door, or at least marked that the door was opening, to a new broad humanism that has culminated in a vast human awakening that is ongoing and that has contributed to our being able to be aware that this progression is intimately related to inhuman levels of oppression.

Let me start in the middle of the story.  We arrived Saturday morning after a largely sleepless and significantly shortened Friday night flight.  After two days getting oriented to Florence and the Medici, who had a stranglehold on political power and the Papacy and oversaw the transition from the middle ages to the Renaissance, we traveled to Rome on Tuesday.  Flying along at 250 km/hour on tracks that were as smooth as butter, we were hurtled back into the hurly burly days of Rome, starting with the Coliseum. 

Walking through a metal detector with a crowd of people to get into the Coliseum felt not unlike entering our local baseball or football stadium on game day.  Once inside, this edifice, which I had seen on the first trip, came to life this time in a different way.  Depictions of it in its glory days helped me realize that it was closer in appearance and size to our current arenas (the name arena derives from the Latin word for sand – which was used to cover the floor of the area that the gladiators fought on - according to the younger stepdaughter - in order to soak up the blood).  The guidebook claims that the best guess about the Coliseum’s capacity was about 60,000 spectators and that it was largely covered in an awning.  Contrary to its’ current appearance, in antiquity it was symmetrical, so it looked very much from the outside like the round space ship looking stadia that were so fashionable in the US in the 1970s.  That said, it was slightly oval in shape and the fighting space was perhaps a bit smaller – so it may have felt more intimate – like a basketball arena with many more fans than fit into any of those spaces.  Oh, and one other difference, there was a prison outside in which the captive gladiators trained.

We walked up from the Coliseum to the Palatine Hill, the place where the Emperors had their palace (which, along with palazzo, palatial, etc. is derived from the word Palatine - as we speculated - might be the name of the emperor in the Star Wars series).  To do this we had to take a left turn before going to the forum.  When I was here before, we just went straight to the forum which, then as now, was disappointing – more about that in a moment.  We turned left because I wanted to see the Circus Maximus, which I had not seen before.  This huge race track seated 200,000 fans in the day – double what the largest football stadia hold – close to the numbers that see the Kentucky Derby or the Indianapolis 500.  If you saw Ben Hur as a kid, this is where that took place.  What I was unprepared for was the acreage (literally) of land we needed to cross that had been the footprint of the Augustinian palace.  Huge.  And now largely vacant earth with some brick walls poking their heads up.  In the middle of the building was a large space for exercising horses, as well as many enclosed atria with gardens.

A sign caught my eye.  It stated that the Augustinian palace was purposely small (the acres I was treading across) to avoid the appearance of ostentation compared to the palaces of others at the time.  But after the fire, Nero tore down tons of fire damaged tenements below the Palatine to expand the size of the palace to suit his vision of the empire (he also erected a 210 foot statue of himself).  Sated by the mere size of the Augustinian palace, we proceeded to the Forum.  There’s not much left standing here, and what is standing is not of much interest because the things that mattered here – the stuff that took place within the Senate – like Caesar stating “Et tu, Brute” – had been replaced when the rulers transitioned from a representative form of government – with Senators – to one with a supreme and unquestioned leader – the emperor.  (Comparisons with our own recent history of Senators (and Congressmen) failing to check our leader were hard for me to avoid making).

From the Forum, we walked up the hill, taking in one of my favorite spots from last trip, the Pantheon.  We learned that this is the only ancient building in Rome that has remained intact from inception in part because it was converted to a church and the Popes funneled money into maintaining it through the middle ages.  I also appreciated that they did this for another reason – since it is a church, there was no admission charged to go inside and marvel at the architecture.  Hadrian built the church and, according to the signage, not only was it an engineering marvel in its day, but that with our current tools, it would still be a difficult building to erect.  I have always appreciated that the dome, if turned upside down, would just fit into the bottom space, making the room both circular but also oddly spherical.  This, then, becomes a place to worship all the gods, each of whom has their niche in a democratic space – though presumably Saturn had the place of honor opposite the entry where the altar now sits, with various statues of saints and portraits of the Christ story occupying the niches.

Walking further up the hill, we sprinted through the Vatican museum to immerse ourselves in the Sistine Chapel (the link is to the Vatican Museum's website - not only were we not allowed to take pictures, a snap shot could, in no way, do it justice).  When last I saw Michelangelo’s masterpiece, it was dark and had an almost sinister feel to it.  After the relatively recent cleaning, the colors are bright and the palette is more that of Easter eggs than Lent.  Pastels dominate – but there is still plenty of sinister feeling to the work as a whole.  We listened to three audio descriptions of the frescoes.  The first clarified that the frescoes done before Michelangelo that line the walls are intended to connect the story of Christ’s life with that of Moses – essentially clarifying that Jesus was the second great prophet of the Jews.  There are six panels on the left of the altar and six to the right – and each panel on the left, telling a story of Moses, has a corresponding story on the right – with a story of Jesus – including Jesus handing the keys of the kingdom to Peter – the first Pope – who then hands those keys down through the successive Popes to the current one.

It was here that my art history and history appreciation began to sprout.  Art was intended, it dawned on me, to tell a story – one that “worked” not just for the priest and noble class – the class that could read and write - who ordered the artists to create it for themselves, but also for the rest of humanity – the illiterate class that did the muscle work.  They needed a pictographic representation of the stories that were binding them to the religion.  Even here, where the commoner would not, until current times, be allowed, the pictures supported the stories that the priests were telling.  The common man, though, who worshiped and worked for and with the priestly and noble classes also built the palaces and the stadia and the churches – as well as the homes and aqueducts and roads – and fought for the rulers to build the nations that would sustain them all. 

The artists – like the priests – though drawn at first from the higher class – advanced based on their skills – they were a meritocracy – and the brightest lights – Michelangelo and Da Vinci – ended up at the top of the heap.  And there they did the work of the priestly class, who at this point were also the noble class in part because they had the economic resources to hire them - and this work was educational.  On one level they were telling religious stories in pictures - the language people spoke.  On another level, the were indoctrinating the masses into a narrative that interwove reverence with service to God, and therefore to church.  Christ, then, became a symbol of the church – and the order that men created to promulgate Christianity, but also to pass on the spiritual power.  The narrative woven into the walls became a significant component of the force by which this was accomplished.

The next two narratives (to pick up my own narrative before it gets completely dropped) were about Michelangelo’s ceiling, which was painted when Michelangelo was in his early thirties, and then a separate description of the Last Judgement, the fresco that dominates the wall behind the altar, that the artist painted when he was in his sixties.  Michelangelo’s masterpieces – and there is no other word for them – tell two very different stories – the ceiling tells old testament stories – and the last judgement tells a story that unites the old and new testaments.  The ceiling speaks to the stories it is supported by – but tells a very different version of what it means to be human than the stories below.

The stories on the wall, though painted in renaissance style, are stories of the middle ages – intended to tell people how to live as subjects of a world that is ruled by others.   The ceiling above is a true renaissance tale – one that speaks about how to live as a subject – as a person who is privy to a creation that is divine – the creation of the world that we live in – but also the creation of ourselves – and the importance of celebrating that life that we live.  Perhaps the central narrative of the ceiling is the creation story.  God, in what some believe to be a self-portrait by the artist, creates the heavens and the earth, then separates the light from the dark and, in the iconic moment, creates man – reaching out across the void to bring the divine to life in a human form.  Michelangelo also depicts the creation of woman from man, but then the fall – with original sin leading to the expulsion and to continued difficulties, including the covenant with Noah, but also Noah's failure to maintain himself as a godly and upright person. 

The commentators point out that Michelangelo has human observers (ignudi) throughout the ceiling noticing the failings of humanity and their varied reactions consistently portray (at least according the commentator I was listening to) disappointment with the human condition.  Meanwhile, the countenances of the featured prophets and Sybils are more measured – they appear to be able to take the long view.

While the ceiling also contains a pictorial representation of the family history of Christ, giving him the required pedigree to assume the mantel of the King of the Jews, and thus is connected with the intent of the paintings on the side walls – the tension here is not between rulers who need subjects who will follow them and the need to educate those subjects (and, from a psychodynamic perspective, convince themselves that they are the rightful rulers – and therefore suppressors – of others) – the tension is between the glorious beings that are being depicted – this truly is a celebration of the human form in all its variety of expression – and the failings of these potentially divine beings.

The last Judgement, then, suggests a sort of resolution to the tension – but it is not a stable one.  Instead it is a swirl of motion as Jesus – who now, finally, enters Michelangelo’s piece, is transformed – on judgement day – from the loving, caring, available person who was martyred and destroyed into the idealized human form that is capable of judging good from bad – who uses the counsel of the saints who surround him to cast, via the oar of Charon, the boat’s captain, sinners into a massive and undifferentiated pit in hell and to raise those who have lived good lives to live with him.  This intensively spinning piece revolves around the resplendent and glowing Jesus -  a representation of a man who is functioning in a fully human and divine way simultaneously.  

Perhaps most importantly, the artist in both the early but especially the late version of the work is not taking orders from the rulers – he is asserting himself as an interpreter of the Bible – but even more directly – as an interpreter of creation itself.  He is functioning as a theologian – one who is independent.  I think that, at just the moment when Luther is suggesting that humans don’t need priestly or papal intercession to commune with God, Michelangelo is articulating that in the most sacred space at the heart of the church – the very chapel where the popes are chosen.  And he is suggesting that it is not just Peter – but also he – Michelangelo – and, perhaps by extension – every other human – that is capable of a sort of divinity – or at the very least, reaching out to connect with the divine and to interpret it in a way that is uniquely his or her own.

I found it interesting that, when a critic published a list of all the ways that the Last Judgement was inconsistent with the theology of the day and was further upset about the extent of nudity depicted, Michelangelo, who was still not finished with the work, depicted the critic as being cast into hell and covered his naked body with a snake entwined about it.  When the critic complained to the Pope about this, the Pope is reported to have responded that, because the depiction was in the part of the fresco that depicts hell, the Pope had no jurisdiction over that area and the depiction would stand.

I found it interesting that the description of the Last Judgement made only passing reference to the possibility that the second self-portrait in the two works might be the one attached to a skin that is hanging from the hand of a figure immediately below the Christ figure.  The figure holding the skin is St. Bartholomew, who was flayed alive.  This may have to do with Michelangelo feeling martyred by having to spend four years in the prime of his life working on a fresco at the behest of the pope when he would have preferred to have been using his powers to sculpt – something that he felt he was better at.

We left the Sistine Chapel and went to St. Peter’s.  As we were entering, I overheard a group from the States saying, “What is it that we are seeing here?”  The professor in me kicked into gear and I explained that this was the church that was built above the place where Peter, the first Pope, was buried.  It also was the Pope’s church (I have since learned this isn’t quite accurate, but it is the church where the Pope is crowned and it is the lead Papal church or Basilica).  I explained that most of the Popes – an unbroken line from Peter – were buried there.  Soon after this, I heard a docent explain to his audience that the Basilica, which covers a number of acres and is the largest church in the world, can hold 60,000 people.  Saint Peter’s square, in front of the church, can hold 300,000 people.  In the square, there is an obelisk that was in the area where Peter was martyred by Nero.  When Peter was crucified, he chose to be crucified upside down so that this crucifixion would not be like that of Jesus.  I was struck by how similar the numbers who could fit into the spiritual spaces were to the numbers that could be held in the Coliseum and the Circus Maximus respectively.  When the guide book noted that Constantinople, in his role as first Christian Emperor, began a process of transitioning political power in Rome into spiritual power, there was a sense of continuity in space as well as the political sphere.

The irony, in my mind, in this transition, is that the political power and muscle that had oppressed Jesus and his fellow Jews would be harnessed to proselytize him as the Christ.  When watching a documentary recently about the theologian behind the Civil Rights movement being brought up short by a trip to India where the locals confronted him about being a man of color who was proselytizing for a religion that had oppressed people of color all over the globe, he responded by working to articulate the differences between the historical Jesus and the Christ figure who had been used as a vehicle for suppression.  Consistent with this, there is perhaps no greater depiction of Jesus the man than the shrunken and very human body being held by his mother after his crucifixion - Michelangelo's Pieta that is tucked inside the front door of the Basilica.  Mother and son are seemingly carved, as the reluctant wife so eloquently put it, from milk.  I think that the current Pope, a Jesuit, is working to help the church reconnect with the historical Jesus.  He has a lot of work to do and that work will not, in the words of the Romero prayer, be completed in his lifetime, but it is important work if we are to realize the vision of Jesus, Michelangelo (as I am naively interpreting it), and many other enlightened people – including, I think, Freud.  This is a vision that includes the dignity and worth of each individual's subjective experience of this grand creation- one that is even more spectacular than the marvels of a place like Rome can possibly represent.

As a mundane example of what I am talking about, I was struck, while walking through the Uffizi today, back in Florence, by the number of people who stopped to look out the windows– to take in the vistas – whether the jumble of nearby rooftops – the grand vision of the nearby Duomo – the views of the Arno River – or the vistas of the distant hills – and that each of these images competed with and frequently surpassed the masterful canvases and sculptures for visual interest.  Arguably some of the greatest creations of man approach the liveliness of experiencing life as it exists in front of our eyes – if we only have the ability to see it.    

More on Florence and the complications of mixing political and spiritual power here.    

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