THEIR LOSS AND RECOVERY.
From the middle of the ninth century till nearly the end of the
sixteenth, the Roman Catacombs had no history, and were practically
unknown. At various times indeed during the fifteenth century, a few
friars and strangers from Scotland, from Sicily, and the North of
Italy, had somehow found their way into a corner of the Catacomb of
St. Callixtus; and a few men of learning also, about the same time,
visited both this and some other cemeteries. All these visitors have
left their names inscribed upon the walls; but neither the friars nor
the archæologists seem to have recognised the value of what they saw,
nor taken pains to communicate their discovery to others. The whole
subject lay in complete darkness, when, in the year 1578, an accidental
circumstance brought it to light.
On the last day of May in that year, some labourers who were digging
_pozzolana_ in a vineyard on the Via Salara happened to break into
a gallery of graves ornamented with Christian paintings, Greek and
Latin inscriptions, and two or three sculptured sarcophagi. Such a
discovery in an age of great intellectual activity naturally excited
much curiosity, so that persons of all classes flocked to see it. “Rome
was amazed,” writes a cotemporary author, “at finding that she had other
cities unknown to her concealed beneath her own suburbs, beginning now
to understand what she had before only heard or read of;” “and in that
day,” says De Rossi, “was born the name and the knowledge of _Roma
Sotterranea_.” Would that there had been born also at the same time, in
the highest quarters of the Church, a sufficient appreciation of the
importance of the discovery to have caused them to take it under their
own immediate superintendence, and to pursue with care and diligence the
researches to which it invited them. Had the ecclesiastical authorities
of Rome adopted from the first some such means for the guardianship of
the Catacombs and their contents as Pope Pius IX. in 1851, by intrusting
them to a Commission of Sacred Archæology, or even as Clement IX. in
1688, by forbidding all excavations and removal of relics from them
by private individuals, they would have been to us almost a Christian
Pompeii—a true “city of the dead,” yet exhibiting such abundant and
authentic records of the first ages of the Roman Church as would have
enabled us to form a very lifelike picture of our forefathers in the
faith.
But alas! the work of destruction began almost as soon as it was
discovered that there was anything to destroy; and the labours of the
few who appreciated what had been found, and would fain have handed down
to posterity an accurate account of it, could hardly keep pace with the
destroyer. From the first there were a chosen few who laboured hard in
this new field of Christian archæology—in particular, a Spanish Dominican
friar and two young Flemish laymen; but the fruits of their labours were
never given to the public; and when Bosio took the work in hand, only
fifteen years after the date of the original discovery, the paintings in
the crypts on the Via Salara had already been destroyed.
Bosio seems to have paid his first visit to the Catacombs, in company
with the learned antiquarian Pompeo Ugonio and some others, on the
10th of December 1593. They penetrated into a catacomb about a mile
distant from St. Sebastian’s, and having found their way to a lower
level by means of an opening in the floor of one of the chapels, they
incautiously proceeded so far, that when they wished to return they
could not recognise the path by which they had come. To add to their
perplexity and alarm, their lights failed them, for they had remained
underground much longer than they had intended, and “I began to fear,”
he says, “that I should defile by my vile corpse the sepulchres of the
martyrs.” However, this accident did not damp his courage nor divert him
from his purpose; he only took precautions against its recurrence, and
then devoted himself for the remaining thirty-six years of his life to
the thorough prosecution of the work he had begun. He gave himself up
with untiring energy to researches in the bowels of the earth on the one
hand, and among old books and manuscripts on the other. His industry in
both was amazing. As to his literary labours, there are still extant some
thousands of folio pages in his own handwriting, showing with what care
he had read the Fathers, Greek, Latin, and Oriental; the collections
of canons and councils, ecclesiastical histories, lives of the saints,
and an immense number of theological treatises, including those of the
schoolmen; in fact, every work within his reach in which he thought there
was a chance of finding anything in illustration of his subject. He had
also transcribed numerous Acts of the Martyrs, especially of those who
had suffered in Rome, together with any other ancient records which
promised to throw light upon the topography of the Christian cemeteries.
And when he had learnt in this way something as to the probable position
of a catacomb, then began the anxious, fatiguing, and even dangerous
work of his subterranean researches. He would examine with the utmost
diligence all the neighbouring fields and vineyards, in order to
discover, if possible, some entrance by which he could penetrate; and
often, after returning again and again to the same spot, his labour still
remained unrewarded. At another time he would hear of some opening having
been accidentally made into a catacomb, by the digging of a new cellar
or a well; and on hastening to the spot, he would find perhaps that the
whole place was so buried in ruins that ingress was impossible. Even when
an entrance was once effected, he still had to force a passage, often by
the labour of his own hands, through the accumulated rubbish of ages;
for we must not suppose that the pioneers in the work of exploring the
Catacombs after their rediscovery found the galleries clear and empty as
they are seen by ordinary visitors at the present day; on the contrary,
some were filled to the very roof with soil that had been washed down
in the course of so many ages through the open _luminaria_; others had
been the scene of wilful injury done by Goth or Lombard, or by neighbours
nearer home seeking forbidden treasures, or only anxious to make use of
caves and cellars which they found ready-made to their hands. In some
places the roofs of the galleries and chambers had given way under the
shock of earthquakes, or from the continual disturbance of the surface
of the ground for the purposes of building or agriculture. In a word,
the work of exploration was attended with very real danger, so that no
Christian archæologist can ever speak of Antonio Bosio—the Columbus, as
he is often and deservedly called, of this new world of subterranean
Rome—without admiration and enthusiasm.
He was preparing to communicate to the world the fruits of all his
toil, when he was cut off by death at the early age of fifty-four. His
work, however, was published by others some five or six years later, in
1635. It was presently translated into German and Latin; an abridgment
of it also was published in Holland, and at once the Catacombs resumed
their ancient place as one of the wonderful sights of Rome which all
intelligent travellers should visit. More visitors, however, were
attracted by religious than by scientific motives, for Bosio’s book
had been the means of recalling some to the Catholic faith; and it was
obvious that a voice, issuing as it were from the graves of some of the
very earliest professors of Christianity, had a right to claim a hearing
amid the din of religious strife which was then raging. Moreover, the
devotion of the faithful had been excited by the hope of finding the
bodies of saints and martyrs still lying in their graves; and concessions
were therefore made to certain religious communities, and even to pious
individuals, to search for them. In this way excavations were going on
in a number of places at once, quite independently of one another, and
no trustworthy record was kept of any. At last, in 1688, all private
concessions were finally revoked, and henceforward the matter was
reserved entirely to official hands. Even so, however, the scientific
history of the Catacombs scarcely fared better than before. The
literature which appeared on the subject, with hardly an exception, was
controversial or apologetic rather than archæological. Nobody followed
the historical and topographical system of Bosio; so that from his death
down to the year 1740 we have no chronicles of each new discovery as it
was made, but only a number of independent treatises, on single epitaphs
perhaps, or on some special class of ancient monuments, out of which a
diligent reader may laboriously extract for himself some very imperfect
account of the results of the excavations that were in progress. Then
there followed another hundred years, during the greater part of which
the Catacombs remained almost in the same obscurity in which they had
been buried for so many ages before Bosio was born.
At the beginning of the present century, tokens of a reviving interest in
them may be traced in the proceedings of the Roman Archæological Society.
But it was not until the year 1840 that this interest spread to any wide
circle. The main impulse to it was then given by Father Marchi, S.J.,
who had been appointed _custode_ of the Catacombs, and devoted himself
to their study. In 1841 he began to publish a work on the monuments of
early Christian art. Only the first volume, however—on architecture—was
ever published, and then it was abandoned, partly in consequence of
the political troubles of the times, by which his own Order was so
seriously affected, but chiefly because, through the new discoveries
that were made, he became conscious of its grave imperfections. He saw
that he had begun to publish prematurely. He had, however, imparted his
own enthusiasm to one of his scholars, who was at first the frequent
companion of his subterranean exploring expeditions, whom he soon
recognised as a valuable fellow-labourer, and whom he finally urged in
the most pressing manner to undertake the work which he found too great
for his own failing strength. This scholar was Giovanni Battista de
Rossi, a Roman gentleman of good family, who has now for more than thirty
years devoted his means, time, and talents to the prosecution of the task
intrusted to him.
It has been well said that “archæology, as tempered and directed by
the philosophic spirit, and quickened with the life and energy of the
nineteenth century, is a very different pursuit from the archæology of
our forefathers, and has as little relation to their antiquarianism as
modern chemistry and modern astronomy have to their former prototypes,
alchemy and astrology;” and nowhere can the justice of this remark
be more keenly appreciated than in comparing De Rossi’s works on the
Catacombs with all that have gone before them. It is true that he has
had some advantages which his predecessors had not; he has had access
to newly recovered, or more carefully edited, documents, amongst
which are even ancient guides to those sanctuaries, or at least exact
descriptions of them, before they had been abandoned and their sacred
treasures removed. He has also had the assistance, as intelligent as
it has been indefatigable, of a brother whose mechanical genius has
invented an instrument whereby the process of surveying and mapping
any subterranean excavations has been rendered infinitely more easy, as
well as more accurate, than it was before. But, after all, the chief
secret of De Rossi’s wonderful success is to be sought for rather in
his own patient industry, his scrupulous caution, and the excellence
of his scientific method, than in any extraordinary superiority of his
literary or physical apparatus. He has studied every monument in its own
place. He has examined with his own eyes every detail of the subterranean
topography where it has been possible to penetrate, and then recorded his
observations with a minuteness of analysis which it is sometimes almost
wearying to follow in print, and which nothing but the most enthusiastic
love of truth and the most indomitable perseverance could have enabled
him to execute in fact. Thus his conclusions are drawn from the monuments
themselves; or rather, they are little more than a _résumé_ of the
observations he has had to record upon those monuments. He has had before
him, and, as far as possible, he sets before his readers, the precise
situation and the measurements of all the crypts and galleries on all
the different levels, and even of the thousands upon thousands of the
individual tombs throughout this Christian necropolis; he marks the place
and characteristics of every inscription, painting, and other monument
he comes across in them; then, side by side with this immense mass of
_data_, so important and so entirely trustworthy, he places every shred
of old historical documents that he knows of, and which he thinks capable
of throwing any light upon them; and finally proceeds to interpret them
according to the very best rules of archæological criticism. The result
has been a reconstruction of the history of the Catacombs, and in part
also of their geography, in such perfect accord with all the facts
and phenomena of the case, that there is probably no group of ancient
monuments which can now be classified more exactly and with greater
certainty than those in the Roman Catacombs.