The indefatigable Baracconi once talked with the son of the last
bull-fighter. So far as one may judge, it appears that during the
Middle Age, and much later, it was the practice of butchers to bait
animals in their own yards, before slaughtering them, in the belief that
the cruel treatment made the meat more tender, and they admitted the
people to see the sport. From this to a regular arena was but a step,
and no more suitable place than the tomb of the Caesars could be found
for the purpose. A regular manager took possession of it, provided the
victims, both bulls and Roman buffaloes, and hired the fighters. It does
not appear that the beasts were killed during the entertainment, and one
of the principal attractions was the riding of the maddened bull three
times round the circus; savage dogs were also introduced, but in all
other respects the affair was much like a Spanish bull-fight, and quite
as popular; when the chosen bulls were led in from the Campagna, the
Roman princes used to ride far out to meet them with long files of
mounted servants in gala liveries, coming back at night in torchlight
procession. And again, after the fight was over, the circus was
illuminated, and there was a small display of Bengal lights, while the
fashionable world of Rome met and gossiped away the evening in the
arena, happily thoughtless and forgetful of all the spot had been and
had meant in history.
The new Rome sinks out of sight below the level of the old, as one
climbs the heights of the Janiculum on the west of the city, or the
gardens of the Pincio on the east. The old monuments and the old
churches still rise above the dreary wastes of modern streets, and from
the spot whence Messalina looked down upon the cypresses of the first
Emperor's mausoleum, the traveller of today descries the cheap metallic
roof which makes a circus of the ancient tomb.
For it was in the gardens of Lucullus that Mark Antony's
great-grandchild felt the tribune's sword in her throat, and in the neat
drives and walks of the Pincio, where pretty women in smart carriages
laugh over today's gossip and tomorrow's fashion, and the immaculate
dandy idles away an hour and a cigarette, the memory of Messalina calls
up a tragedy of shades. Less than thirty years after Augustus had
breathed out his old age in peace, Rome was ruled again by terror and
blood, and the triumph of a woman's sins was the beginning of the end of
the Julian race. The great historian who writes of her guesses that
posterity may call the truth a fable, and tells the tale so tersely and
soberly from first to last, that the strength of his words suggests a
whole mystery of evil. Without Tiberius, there could have been no
Messalina, nor, without her, could Nero have been possible; and the
worst of the three is the woman--the archpriestess of all conceivable
crime. Tacitus gives Tiberius one redeeming touch. Often the old Emperor
came almost to Rome, even to the gardens by the Tiber, and then turned
back to the rocks of Capri and the solitude of the sea, in mortal shame
of his monstrous deeds, as if not daring to show himself in the city.
With Nero, the measure was full, and the world rose and destroyed him.
Messalina knew no shame, and the Romans submitted to her, and but for a
court intrigue and a frightened favourite she might have lived out her
life unhurt. In the eyes of the historian and of the people of her time
her greatest misdeed was that while her husband Claudius, the Emperor,
was alive she publicly celebrated her marriage with the handsome Silius,
using all outward legal forms. Our modern laws of divorce have so far
accustomed our minds to such deeds that, although we miss the legal
formalities which would necessarily precede such an act in our time, we
secretly wonder at the effect it produced upon the men of that day, and
are inclined to smile at the epithets of 'impious' and 'sacrilegious'
which it called down upon Messalina, whose many other frightful crimes
had elicited much more moderate condemnation. Claudius, himself no
novice or beginner in horrors, hesitated long after he knew the truth,
and it was the favourite Narcissus who took upon himself to order the
Empress' death. Euodus, his freedman, and a tribune of the guard were
sent to make an end of her. Swiftly they went up to the gardens--the
gardens of the Pincian--and there they found her, beautiful, dark,
dishevelled, stretched upon the marble floor, her mother Lepida
crouching beside her, her mother, who in the bloom of her daughter's
evil life had turned from her, but in her extreme need was overcome
with pity. There knelt Domitia Lepida, urging the terror-mad woman not
to wait the executioner, since life was over and nothing remained but to
lend death the dignity of suicide. But the dishonoured self was empty of
courage, and long-drawn weeping choked her useless lamentations. Then
suddenly the doors were flung open with a crash, and the stern tribune
stood silent in the hall, while the freedman Euodus screamed out curses,
after the way of triumphant slaves. From her mother's hand the lost
Empress took the knife at last and trembling laid it to her breast and
throat, with weakly frantic fingers that could not hurt herself; the
silent tribune killed her with one straight thrust, and when they
brought the news to Claudius sitting at supper, and told him that
Messalina had perished, his face did not change, and he said nothing as
he held out his cup to be filled.
[Illustration: PIAZZA DEL POPOLO]
She died somewhere on the Pincian hill. Romance would choose the spot
exactly where the nunnery of the Sacred Heart stands, at the Trinita de'
Monti, looking down De Sanctis' imposing 'Spanish' steps; and the house
in which the noble girls of modern Rome are sent to school may have
risen upon the foundations of Messalina's last abode. Or it may be that
the place was further west, in the high grounds of the French Academy,
or on the site of the academy itself, at the gates of the public garden,
just where the old stone fountain bubbles and murmurs under the shade of
the thick ilex trees. Most of that land once belonged to Lucullus, the
conqueror of Mithridates, the Academic philosopher, the arch feaster,
and the man who first brought cherries to Italy.
[Illustration: TRINITA DE' MONTI]
The last descendant of Julia, the last sterile monster of the Julian
race, Nero, was buried at the foot of the same hill. Alive, he was
condemned by the Senate to be beaten to death in the Comitium; dead by
his own hand, he received imperial honours, and his ashes rested for a
thousand years where they had been laid by his two old nurses and a
woman who had loved him. And during ten centuries the people believed
that his terrible ghost haunted the hill, attended and served by
thousands of demon crows that rested in the branches of the trees about
his tomb, and flew forth to do evil at his bidding, till at last Pope
Paschal the Second cut down with his own hands the walnut trees which
crowned the summit, and commanded that the mausoleum should be
destroyed, and the ashes of Nero scattered to the winds, that he might
build a parish church on the spot and dedicate it to Saint Mary. It is
said, too, that the Romans took the marble urn in which the ashes had
been, and used it as a public measure for salt in the old market-place
of the Capitol. A number of the rich Romans of the Renascence afterwards
contributed money to the restoration of the church and built themselves
chapels within it, as tombs for their descendants, so that it is the
burial-place of many of those wealthy families that settled in Rome and
took possession of the Corso when the Barons still held the less central
parts of the city with their mediaeval fortresses. Sixtus the Fourth and
Julius the Second are buried in Saint Peter's, but their chapel was
here, and here lie others of the della Rovere race, and many of the
Chigi and Pallavicini and Theodoli; and here, in strange coincidence,
Alexander the Sixth, the worst of the Popes, erected a high altar on the
very spot where the worst of the Emperors had been buried. It is gone
now, but the strange fact is not forgotten.
Far across the beautiful square, at the entrance to the Corso, twin
churches seem to guard the way like sentinels, built, it is said, to
replace two chapels which once stood at the head of the bridge of Sant'
Angelo; demolished because, when Rome was sacked by the Constable of
Bourbon, they had been held as important points by the Spanish soldiers
in besieging the Castle, and it was not thought wise to leave such
useful outworks for any possible enemy in the future. Alexander the
Seventh, the Chigi Pope, died, and left the work unfinished; and a folk
story tells how a poor old woman who lived near by saved what she could
for many years, and, dying, left one hundred and fifty scudi to help the
completion of the buildings; and Cardinal Gastaldi, who had been refused
the privilege of placing his arms upon a church which he had desired to
build in Bologna, and was looking about for an opportunity of
perpetuating his name, finished the two churches, his attention having
been first called to them by the old woman's humble bequest.
As for the Pincio itself, and the ascent to it from the Piazza del
Popolo, all that land was but a grass-grown hillside, crowned by a few
small and scattered villas and scantily furnished with trees, until the
beginning of the present century; and the public gardens of the earlier
time were those of the famous and beautiful Villa Medici, which Napoleon
the First bestowed upon the French Academy. It was there that the
fashionable Romans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries used to
meet, and walk, and be carried about in gilded sedan-chairs, and flirt,
and gossip, and exchange views on politics and opinions about the latest
scandal. That was indeed a very strange society, further from us in many
ways than the world of the Renascence, or even of the Crusades; for the
Middle Age was strong in the sincerity of its beliefs, as we are
powerful in the cynicism of our single-hearted faith in riches; but the
fabric of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was founded upon the
abuse of an already declining power; it was built up in the most
extraordinary and elaborate affectation, and it was guarded by a system
of dissimulation which outdid that of our own day by many degrees, and
possibly surpassed the hypocrisy of any preceding age.
No one, indeed, can successfully uphold the idea that the high
development of art in any shape is of necessity coincident with a strong
growth of religion or moral conviction. Perugino made no secret of being
an atheist; Lionardo da Vinci was a scientific sceptic; Raphael was an
amiable rake, no better and no worse than the majority of those gifted
pupils to whom he was at once a model of perfection and an example of
free living; and those who maintain that art is always the expression of
a people's religion have but an imperfect acquaintance with the age of
Praxiteles, Apelles and Zeuxis. Yet the idea itself has a foundation,
lying in something which is as hard to define as it is impossible to
ignore; for if art be not a growth out of faith, it is always the result
of a faith that has been, since although it is possible to conceive of
religion without art, it is out of the question to think of art as a
whole, without a religious origin; and as the majority of writers find
it easier to describe scenes and emotions, when a certain lapse of time
has given them what painters call atmospheric perspective, so the
Renascence began when memory already clothed the ferocious realism of
mediaeval Christianity in the softer tones of gentle chivalry and tender
romance. It is often said, half in jest, that, in order to have
intellectual culture, a man must at least have forgotten Latin, if he
cannot remember it, because the fact of having learned it leaves
something behind that cannot be acquired in any other way. Similarly, I
think that art of all sorts has reached its highest level in successive
ages when it has aimed at recalling, by an illusion, a once vivid
reality from a not too distant past. And so when it gives itself up to
the realism of the present, it impresses the senses rather than the
thoughts, and misses its object, which is to bring within our mental
reach what is beyond our physical grasp; and when, on the other hand, it
goes back too far, it fails in execution, because its models are not
only out of sight, but out of mind, and it cannot touch us because we
can no longer feel even a romantic interest in the real or imaginary
events which it attempts to describe.
The subject is too high to be lightly touched, and too wide to be
touched more than lightly here; but in this view of it may perhaps be
found some explanation of the miserable poverty of Italian art in the
eighteenth century, foreshadowed by the decadence of the seventeenth,
which again is traceable to the dissipation of force and the
disappearance of individuality that followed the Renascence, as
inevitably as old age follows youth. Besides all necessary gifts of
genius, the development of art seems to require that a race should not
only have leisure for remembering, but should also have something to
remember which may be worthy of being recalled and perhaps of being
imitated. Progress may be the road to wealth and health, and to such
happiness as may be derived from both; but the advance of civilization
is the path of thought, and its landmarks are not inventions nor
discoveries, but those very great creations of the mind which ennoble
the heart in all ages; and as the idea of progress is inseparable from
that of growing riches, so is the true conception of civilization
indivisible from thoughts of beauty and nobility. In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, Italy had almost altogether lost sight of these;
art was execrable, fashion was hideous, morality meant hypocrisy; the
surest way to power lay in the most despicable sort of intrigue, and
inward and spiritual faith was as rare as outward and visible devoutness
was general.
That was the society which frequented the Villa Medici on fine
afternoons, and it is hard to see wherein its charm lay, if, indeed, it
had any. Instead of originality, its conversation teemed with artificial
conventionalisms; instead of nature, it exhibited itself in the disguise
of fashions more inconvenient, uncomfortable and ridiculous than those
of any previous or later times; it delighted in the impossibly
nonsensical 'pastoral' verses which we find too silly to read; and in
place of wit, it clothed gross and cruel sayings in a thin remnant of
worn-out classicism. It had not the frankly wicked recklessness of the
French aristocracy between Lewis the Fourteenth and the Revolution, nor
the changing contrasts of brutality, genius, affectation and Puritanical
austerity which marked England's ascent, from the death of Edward the
Sixth to the victories of Nelson and Wellington; still less had it any
of those real motives for existence which carried Germany through her
long struggle for life. It had little which we are accustomed to respect
in men and women, and yet it had something which we lack today, and
which we unconsciously envy--it had a colour of its own. Wandering under
the ancient ilexes of those sad and beautiful gardens, meeting here and
there a few silent and soberly clad strangers, one cannot but long for
the brilliancy of two centuries ago, when the walks were gay with
brilliant dresses, and gilded chairs, and servants in liveries of
scarlet and green and gold, and noble ladies, tottering a few steps on
their ridiculous high heels, and men bewigged and becurled, their
useless little hats under their arms, and their embroidered coat tails
flapping against their padded, silk-stockinged calves; and red-legged,
unpriestly Cardinals who were not priests even in name, but only the lay
life-peers of the Church; and grave Bishops with their secretaries; and
laughing abbes, whose clerical dress was the accustomed uniform of
government office, which they still wore when they were married, and
were fathers of families. There is little besides colour to recommend
the picture, but at least there is that.
The Pincian hill has always been the favourite home of artists of all
kinds, and many lived at one time or another in the little villas that
once stood there, and in the houses in the Via Sistina and southward,
and up towards the Porta Pinciana. Guido Reni, the Caracci, Salvator
Rosa, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, have all left the place the association
of their presence, and the Zuccheri brothers built themselves the house
which still bears their name, just below the one at the corner of the
Trinita de' Monti, known to all foreigners as the 'Tempietto' or little
temple. But the Villa Medici stands as it did long ago, its walls
uninjured, its trees grander than ever, its walks unchanged.
Soft-hearted Baracconi, in love with those times more than with the
Middle Age, speaks half tenderly of the people who used to meet there,
calling them collectively a gay and light-hearted society, gentle, idle,
full of graceful thoughts and delicate perceptions, brilliant
reflections and light charms; he regrets the gilded chairs, the huge
built-up wigs, the small sword of the 'cavalier servente,' and the
abbe's silk mantle, the semi-platonic friendships, the jests borrowed
from Goldoni, the 'pastoral' scandal, and exchange of compliments and
madrigals and epigrams, and all the brilliant powdered train of that
extinct world.
[Illustration: VILLA MEDICI]
Whatever life may have been in those times, that world died in a pretty
tableau, after the manner of Watteau's paintings; it meant little and
accomplished little, and though its bright colouring brings it for a
moment to the foreground, it has really not much to do with the Rome we
know nor with the Rome one thinks of in the past, always great, always
sad, always tragic, as no other city in the world can ever be.
Ignorance, tradition, imagination, romance,--call it what you will,--has
chosen the long-closed Pincian Gate for the last station of blind
Belisarius. There, says the tale, the ancient conqueror, the banisher
and maker of Popes, the favourite and the instrument of imperial
Theodora, stood begging his bread at the gate of the city he had won and
lost, leaning upon the arm of the fair girl child who would not leave
him, and stretching forth his hand to those that passed by, with a
feeble prayer for alms, pathetic as Oedipus in the utter ruin of his
life and fortune. A truer story tells how Pope Silverius, humble and
gentle, and hated by Theodora, went up to the Pincian villa to answer
the accusation of conspiring with the Goths, when he himself had opened
the gates of Rome to Belisarius; and how he was led into the great hall
where the warrior's wife, Theodora's friend, the beautiful and evil
Antonina, lay with half-closed eyes upon her splendid couch, while
Belisarius sat beside her feet, toying with her jewels. There the
husband and wife accused the Pope, and judged him without hearing, and
condemned him without right; and they caused him to be stripped of his
robes, and clad as a poor monk and driven out to far exile, that they
might set up the Empress Theodora's Pope in his place; and with him they
drove out many Roman nobles.
And it is said that when Silverius was dead of a broken heart in the
little island of Palmaria, Belisarius repented of his deeds and built
the small Church of Santa Maria de' Crociferi, behind the fountain of
Trevi, in partial expiation of his fault, and there, to prove the truth
of the story, the tablet that tells of his repentance has stood nearly
fourteen hundred years and may be read today, on the east wall, towards
the Via de' Poli. The man who conquered Africa for Justinian, seized
Sicily, took Rome, defended it successfully against the Goths, reduced
Ravenna, took Rome from the Goths again, and finally rescued
Constantinople, was disgraced more than once; but he was not blinded,
nor did he die in exile or in prison, for at the end he breathed his
last in the enjoyment of his freedom and his honours; and the story of
his blindness is the fabrication of an ignorant Greek monk who lived six
hundred years later and confounded Justinian's great general with the
romantic and unhappy John of Cappadocia, who lived at the same time, was
a general at the same time, and incurred the displeasure of that same
pious, proud, avaricious Theodora, actress, penitent and Empress, whose
paramount beauty held the Emperor in thrall for life, and whose
surpassing cruelty imprinted an indelible seal of horror upon his
glorious reign--of her who, when she delivered a man to death,
admonished the executioner with an oath, saying, 'By Him who liveth for
ever, if thou failest, I will cause thee to be flayed alive.'
Another figure rises at the window of the Tuscan Ambassador's great
villa, with the face of a man concerning whom legend has also found much
to invent and little to say that is true, a man of whom modern science
has rightly made a hero, but whom prejudice and ignorance have wrongly
crowned as a martyr--Galileo Galilei. Tradition represents him as
languishing, laden with chains, in the more or less mythical prisons of
the Inquisition; history tells very plainly that his first confinement
consisted in being the honoured guest of the Tuscan Ambassador in the
latter's splendid residence in Rome, and that his last imprisonment was
a relegation to the beautiful castle of the Piccolomini near Siena, than
which the heart of man could hardly desire a more lovely home. History
affirms beyond doubt, moreover, that Galileo was the personal friend of
that learned and not illiberal Barberini, Pope Urban the Eighth, under
whose long reign the Copernican system was put on trial, who believed in
that system as Galileo did, who read his books and talked with him; and
who, when the stupid technicalities of the ecclesiastic courts declared
the laws of the universe to be nonsense, gave his voice against the
decision, though he could not officially annul it without scandal. 'It
was not my intention,' said the Pope in the presence of witnesses, 'to
condemn Galileo. If the matter had depended upon me, the decree of the
Index which condemned his doctrines should never have been pronounced.'
That Galileo's life was saddened by the result of the absurd trial, and
that he was nominally a prisoner for a long time, is not to be denied.
But that he suffered the indignities and torments recorded in legend is
no more true than that Belisarius begged his bread at the Porta
Pinciana. He lived in comfort and in honour with the Ambassador in the
Villa Medici, and many a time from those lofty windows, unchanged since
before his day, he must have watched the earth turning with him from the
sun at evening, and meditated upon the emptiness of the ancient phrase
that makes the sun 'set' when the day is done--thinking of the world,
perhaps, as turning upon its other side, with tired eyes, and ready for
rest and darkness and refreshment, after long toil and heat.
* * * * *