We reach Tifata, the very centre of the marching and counter-marching
of Hannibal, the spot from which we may best call up a picture of
beleaguered Capua, of Fulvius waiting for his prey, of the stout
fighting on either side of the enclosing lines, of Hannibal, as his
last hope, turning aside to threaten Rome, in the chance that the
danger of Rome might lead to the relief of Capua. The name Tifata, in
some tongue, most likely in the old Oscan, describes the evergreen oaks
which doubtless formed the sacred grove of Diana. The goddess had no
lake here, as she had at Aricia, nor do we hear of any such grim legend
on Tifata as grew round--
Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain.
Yet beside the rites of Canaan, the rites of the gods who had sent
forth him whose name proclaimed him as the Grace of Baal, the darkest
forms into which any kind of Italian or Hellenic worship strayed
might well seem mild. In tracking the career of Hannibal, we are ever
disappointed at the utter lack of means to call up a picture of the
man himself apart from his public acts. He had human weaknesses, for
he found a mistress at Salapia. He had his sallies of merriment, for
he could raise a laugh at the grave Gisgo. But the course of his inner
life is hidden from us. Still we can at least see that he was, in his
own belief, charged with a mission from the gods of his own city. And
it needs an effort to bear in mind that the gods of Hannibal were Baal
and Moloch. The goddess to whom he would have reared a temple would
have been, not a Diana, but an Ashtoreth. Yet, among the many, and
mostly false, charges of cruelty brought against the great Phœnician
by Roman writers, we do not hear, as we do in the case of some other
Carthaginian commanders, of captives being made to pass through the
fire to the gods of Carthage. Hannibal, the friend of Capua, would at
Capua honour Diana of Tifata; but it was not Diana that had sent him.
With what thanks did he honour his own gods, when Capua, second city
of all Italy, welcomed the victor of Trebia, Trasimenus, and Cannæ? Is
it too bold a flight to fancy the mount of Tifata the scene of the same
form of Baal-worship as the mount of Carmel?
But the gods of Italy lived on, undisturbed by the momentary presence
of Semitic rivals. Diana was not the only power worshipped on Tifata;
Jupiter also had his holy place. And it may be that the venerable
church which now forms the chief attraction of the hill-side represents
the holy place of Jupiter rather than the holy place of Diana. It is
curious to see how a kind of appropriateness was often sought after in
the nomenclature of Pagan temples when turned into Christian churches.
Thus, at Athens, the Parthenôn remained the Parthenôn, while the temple
of the warrior Thêseus or Hêraklês became the church of the warrior
George. We should look for a _Santa Maria_ or a _Santa Lucia_ at
the least, on the site of the sanctuary of Diana. Had we here a _San
Pietro_, we should have very little doubt in setting down the prince
of the Apostles as having supplanted the father of gods and men. But
at _Sant' Angelo in Formis_ we feel somewhat less certain; St. Michael
suggests the Norman, and the Norman has been there. It may well be that
the name is no older than his day.
But St. Michael on the slope of Tifata did carry us back in thought to
a church of St. Peter seen some months before under a widely different
state of outward things. We then made a somewhat difficult journey to a
great and solitary Tuscan basilica in time of snow. The outward aspect
of nature had certainly changed a good deal between the bleak day in
January when it was found a hard task to follow the way from Pisa to
the basilica of the prince of the Apostles _in Grado_ and the sunny day
in May when the same travellers found their way without difficulties of
any kind to the basilica of the prince of the archangels _in Formis_.
And there certainly can be no likeness of position, even if both were
seen in January or both in May, between the basilica standing low in
the flats by the mouth of Arno and the basilica which nestles against
the mountains which form a wall to the rich plain of Vulturnus. But
in seeing any one of these great churches, left, not ruined, like
our Cistercian abbeys, but still living on a kind of life in places
forsaken or nearly so, something always brings up the memory of some
other of its fellows. Aquileia is perhaps the greatest case of all; but
Aquileia, with its special position in the history of the world, stands
by itself. If Aquileia itself is dead, it has lived on a wonderful
after-life in the shape of its Venetian colony. We go to see Aquileia,
because it is Aquileia; but even a well-informed traveller may know
nothing of _San Pietro in Grado_ and _Sant' Angelo in Formis_, till
either his guide-book or some earlier visitor points them out to him
as places which he ought not to pass by. Aquileia again has other
things to show besides the great basilica and its surroundings. St.
Apollinaris _in Classe_ is as nearly forsaken as a church that is still
kept up can be; but the basilica of Classis does not stand by itself;
it forms part of the wonders of Ravenna, as St. Paul without-the-Walls
forms part of the wonders of Rome. St. Peter _in Grado_ might be looked
on as standing in the same relation to Pisa; but it hardly enters
into our general conception of Pisa, as the church of Classis--papal
havoc hinders us from adding the church of Cæsarea--certainly enters
into our general conception of Ravenna. S. Angelo _in Formis_ at all
events does not enter into our general conception of old Capua, because
there is not enough of old Capua left to form any general conception
of it at all. The church and the small surrounding village do form
a kind of distant _arx_ to the greater collection of houses which
surrounds the amphitheatre; but among the nearer objects which catch
the eye from the height, the most prominent is not old Capua with its
amphitheatre, but new Capua, Casilinum that once was, with its towers
and cupolas, mediæval and modern. We look on many things from the
terrace in front of the portico of the archangel, but that which among
artificial objects chiefly draws the eye towards it, is not the elder
Capua of Hannibal and Marcellus, but the Capua which succeeded Aversa
as the seat of the elder but the less famous of the Norman powers in
Southern Italy. As we mark the advance of national union, no less than
as we mark the advance of mere dynastic aggression, we have sometimes
to think, for a moment perhaps to mourn, that "kingdoms have shrunk
to provinces," though in this form of advance and incorporation, we
have no longer to add that "chains clank over sceptred cities." Capua,
on both its sites, once the head of an Etruscan, once of a Norman
dominion, passed, in one age, under the universal rule of Rome. In
another age it again sank from its separate headship to become a member
of that greater Norman dominion in Apulia and Sicily which, after
more shiftings, unions, divisions, transfers to distant rulers, than
any other part of Europe, has in our days been merged in the realm of
united Italy, with Rome as its head, but not its mistress.
We reach then the height which, whether that of Jupiter or Diana of
old, is now the height of the warrior archangel. The whole history of
the church belongs to the independent days of the second Capua; in its
present shape it belongs to the days of independent Norman rule in the
second Capua. But the days of independent Norman rule were days when
the arts of the earlier rulers of the land still lived on. We see signs
of the art of Byzantium, so long mistress of Southern Italy, and of
the art of the Saracen, in Italy only a visitor or an invader, while in
Sicily an abiding master. The portico in front of the church is Roman
in its general idea; but, instead of the colonnade and entablature
of the Laurentian basilica, we see an arcade whose pointed arches at
once call up memories of Sicily. They have indeed little of Sicilian
grace. Nowhere at Palermo or Monreale do we see such massive columns
bearing such massive stilts. Columns indeed we should hardly say, as
some of them are plainly mere fragments. But here, just as in Sicily,
just as in Aquitaine, the pointed arch is no sign of coming Gothic;
the style is still wholly Romanesque, and somewhat rude Romanesque
too. And in this region of Italy we can hardly doubt as to attributing
the almost accidental shape of the arches to the influence of Saracen
models, perhaps to the workmanship of Saracen craftsmen. Hard by, but
not joining the building, by an arrangement unlike Sicily, unlike
Apulia, but the common rule of Northern Italy, rises a bell-tower,
or rather the beginning of a bell-tower, which raises our wonder as
to what it would have been if it had ever grown to its full height.
Two stages only are finished, the lower of hewn stone, the upper of
brick; but their bulk is so great that the tower, if it had ever been
finished, would surely have ranked among the highest of its class,
utterly overpowering even the great basilica at its side, except so
far as it would have been itself overpowered by the natural heights
above it. As in some other cases, the thought suggests itself, were not
those who left off building the tower wiser than those who began it?
The tall bell-towers of Italy look well as they rise from the Lombard
plain, as they crown the hill of Fiesole, as they skirt the shores of
the lake of Como. But we are not sure that a gigantic tower, which, if
it was to have any kind of proportion, ought to have been carried up
to a height as great as that of Venice, was in its right place when
set a little way up a mountain-side, as if simply to show how small
man's biggest works look in the midst of the works of nature. But the
technical eye is thankful for the fragment that has been built, though
mainly on a very technical ground. Professor Willis is gone, but his
happy phrase of _mid-wall_ shafts has not died with him. The custom
of the elder Romanesque towers, the abiding fashion of Germany and
Northern Italy, was to set the little columns which divided the coupled
windows in the very middle of the wall; the latter Norman fashion,
whether in Normandy, in England, or in Apulia, was to set them nearly
flush with the outer wall. In this tower, Italian by geography, Norman
by allegiance, two sides conform to the Italian and two to the Norman
fashion. Nothing can show more clearly that even such small matters
of detail as the use of a mid-wall shaft were made matters of serious
thought, and that it was sometimes thought well to come to a compromise
between two rival forms of taste.
The outside of this church, except so far as it forms an object in
the general landscape, is perhaps chiefly attractive to the technical
observer; the inside will surely appeal to every visitor, though the
visitor who is technically informed in matters of painting may possibly
look upon it with more of curiosity than of positive admiration. But
the eye of the more general inquirer will give something like positive
admiration to a basilica of eight arches, resting on ancient columns
of various marbles, with its original design far less damaged than is
common in Italian churches, and with every inch of available space
covered with elaborate paintings of the date of the building. Like
St. Peter by Pisa, the archangel by Capua trusted to painting for his
enrichment and not to mosaics; and though the Campanian pictures are by
far the better preserved of the two, though nearly all the subjects can
be made out with the greatest ease, yet Ravenna and Venice rise to the
mind to make us think that at least if endurance be the object, there
is a more excellent way.
The walls of this church form almost a pictorial Bible, with a few
legendary and local subjects thrown in. The Abbot Desiderius, holding,
after the usual symbolical fashion, the church in his hand, is to be
seen at the east end along with the archangels and evangelists. At
the west end is what connoisseurs tell us is one of the very earliest
pictures of the Last Judgment. On the two sides a crowd of scenes and
figures from the Old and New Testament cover the whole space. The style
of the painting is said to show Greek workmanship; we look toward the
west end and mark, hardly above the ground, a single small shaft with
a capital of strictly Byzantine character. The ruling Norman seems on
this spot to have pressed into his service the artistic powers of all
the inhabitants of the peninsula. Italian, Greek, Saracen, all give
their help to adorn the house of the archangel. The Norman himself
contributes nothing but the position of two small columns in the tower
windows. We cannot even attribute to him the position of the house of
the archangel, set Norman-fashion in a high place; for the first church
was built before the Norman came. It is not so further east, where a
distinctively Norman element is to be seen in the great churches of
Apulia. But the gathering together of the best skill of the time from
all quarters is a thoroughly Norman function, whether in Italy or in
England.
The basilica should be compassed, so far at least as to climb the
hill a little way to look at its east end. Its surrounding buildings
supply an arch or two to catch the eye on the way up or down. But the
essential features of Sant' Angelo are the grand display of painting
and the union of elements of so many kinds. It is the first of a great
series of churches at which our course will bid us to stop here and
there. But before we reach them we shall pass by one point where our
musings will again be mainly secular and largely pagan. A short journey
will lead us from Campania into Samnium, and the valiant men of the
Samnite land will claim a tribute on a spot which is Samnite beyond all
others.