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“persuade[s] her readers to experience the unknown, to go beyond first impressions . . . extremely witty and well-written . . . for those who savor art”
 Mithras born of a rock and out from the cave becoming sol invictus and turning the wheel darkness, now a fading memory. —Rudyard Kipling, Yule Bearing a name that means both “contract” and “friendship,” Mithra is an ancient Persian god whom the Romans worshiped from the first to the fourth centuries a.d. Some of the cult’s traditions and mores we have retained, such as shaking hands when meeting friends or agreeing to a contract, pledging monogamy in marriage, wearing crowns, and celebrating December 25 as the birth date of an all-powerful god. Rome concentrates in one city the greatest number of mithraeums, or Houses of Mithra (just as museums are houses of the Muses). They served as houses of worship, rather than just altars where worshipers left offerings. Instead of being satisfied with mere altars, Mithra followers gathered regularly in underground rooms for ceremonies, sacred meals, initiation rites, and everyday communal prayers and recitals of the liturgy.
During his Roman era, Mithra spawned an international religion among the lowliest to the highest factions of male society. A plot of Mithra’s temples crosses the globe like a ribbon, stretching from modern-day Israel northwest to Scotland, tapering at its ends and bulging at Rome. Most excavated mithraeums concentrate in Rome, east to Romania, north to the Rhine, and around Vienna and the Danube; in short, all of Continental Europe. Until the West adopted Christ and the Persians switched to Mohammed, many in both areas revered Mithra.
When Mithra arrived in Rome, he had changed guises from his Persian original. The small, hot melting pot of Stoic intellects living at the base of the Taurus Mountains transfigured Mithra by interpreting new astronomical data about how the stars are not immutable. Mithra came to symbolize either Perseus or Orion, and his Roman-centered cult looked to worship him according to the sun’s and stars’ movements. Mithra’s ascent in Rome exactly paralleled that of Christ, and their followers fought each other to control a central religious power. The Christians won. Mithraism plummeted quickly after Constantine the Great (280–337 a.d.) converted to Christianity in October 312. Thus, in the beginning of the fourth century one could be martyred for practicing Christianity and by the century’s end one could be martyred for not. |
When the marchese Carlo Massimo decided to commission paintings of three Italian epic poems, he did not mean to start an epic story himself, one that undulates around serendipity, tragedy, religious fanaticism, and drama. In 1817, Massimo asked two German artists to paint the interior of his garden house in frescoes, a technique they and their “brothers” had come to Rome to study. By reviving the dead art, and walking the streets with long hair and flowing capes, and speaking feverishly of both art and religion, the painters had earned themselves the nickname I Nazareni, which eventually became more complimentary than the Romans had intended.
The movement began when Friedrich Johann Overbeck (1789–1869) and Franz Pforr (1788–1812) met at the Vienna Academy, where both young men chafed under the strict rules of aesthetics. With other rebels they started the Brotherhood of St. Luke, dedicated to representing the ideal in nature and in the creation and contemplation of art as a religious experience; not a fashionable gesture. In 1810 the two original founders moved to Rome, traveling with two other painters. Though the brotherhood’s ranks grew, Overbeck and Pforr were coincidentally also the only Nazarenes to die in la Santa, as they called the city; the others eventually returned to Germany and its more lucrative commissions.
The Viennese foursome quickly welcomed into their fold other sympathetic
artists, including Philipp Veit (1793–1877) and an important proponent
of the new aesthetic, Peter Cornelius (1783–1867). Sharing food, models,
women (for the less ascetic brothers), living quarters, and their first commission,
the painters solidified their religious and artistic underpinnings. When
Pforr died in 1812, the simple and natural idealist proved to have been the
glue of the Order, as they often called themselves. The artistic commune disbanded.
Though only the Nazarenes’ second commission, the Casino Massimo’s
frescoes represent the apogee of the brotherhood’s aesthetic expression.
The artists changed, but the epic poems remained the same: La divina commedia by Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), Gerusalemme liberata by Torquato Tasso (1544–1595), and Orlando furioso (or The Siege of Paris) by Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533). Yet the very act of stuffing epic poetry into modest rooms has caused the Nazarenes’ Massimo frescoes to be dismissed as trivial. Art critics voiced reservations even as the painters worked.
Critics believed that each new era must demonstrate some innovation in artistic
technique, philosophy, goal, or medium. Instead, the young Germans purposefully
jumped off the forward march of painting by quitting the academy. They chose
to run backward past Titian, Correggio, and Andrea del Sarto to Raphael, the
medieval Germans, and Giotto. They personally raised Raphael from the dust
heap of surpassed painters, resuscitating him as one of the eternal masters
whom all artists benefit from studying.
The artists strove not to become greater than any other painters in the sophistication of their techniques and the realistic beauty of their images. Instead, they were interested in exciting religious, not worldly, passion and in serving the public good more than their own vanity as artists. Despite their atavistic techniques and purposes, their choice of setting broke the aesthetic mold. Even though they did not choose the commission and the topics, which Count Massimo had selected himself before looking for the painters, they did choose how to interpret the poetry. Instead of compromising the epic figure traditional to frescoes and drawing on a smaller scale to fit the garden house’s rooms, the artists sketched enormous cartoons, more fitting to a much larger wall of a palace or church. They created an entirely new aesthetic, a re-creation of the literary experience.
The Nazarenes returned to a time when patrons had huge walls to fresco and the illiterate common folk needed stories told in images, a time that burgeoning democracy drew to a permanent close within a century. Strangely enough, history has brought us full circle. While modern travelers can read, they are not what the nineteenth century called literate. High school students no longer memorize as part of their standard curriculum passages of The Divine Comedy, which John Ciardi (my favorite translator) calls “the greatest poem of the Middle Ages and the first masterpiece of world literature written in a modern European language.” Few Americans know of Ariosto, called “the Italian Homer,” or Tasso, the greatest Italian poet of the sixteenth century. (Neither poet even makes a listing in E. D. Hirsch, Jr.’s The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know.) The Nazarene frescoes today fulfill their original purpose: to educate with frescoed Cliff Notes.
When Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) hired Francesco Borromini (1599–1667)
as an apprentice to help in St. Peter’s, he invited a rival who pestered
him for the rest of his life. Though always the more powerful of the two
and an internationally admired sculptor, Bernini as an architect was Borromini’s
inferior. Sometimes relegated to accepting Bernini’s crumbs—as
when the sculptor recommended Borromini as the architect for the Sant’Ivo,
church to the University of Rome—Borromini depended on his own creativity
to force beauty into Rome’s smaller spaces. His imagination led him to
such innovation that many architects revere Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza as
one of their favorite Baroque spaces, inside and out. Borromini inherited a plan—build a circular church—from the time of Clement VIII. The Palazzo della Sapienza’s elegant and spacious court is of a university founded in 1303 that now contains the State’s archives. The commission of a university’s rather than a parish’s church liberated Borromini from many of the Baroque conceits, such as an extravagance of crosses and colored marble. The architect worked on Sant’Ivo from 1642 through 1660, when Alexander VII consecrated the church. Borromini showed both restraint, in honor of the church’s scholarly attendees, and fantasy in the church’s internal and external contours. Like an origami master who folds and unfolds stone instead of paper, Borromini starts with a simple shape, the equilateral triangle, which symbolizes sapienza, or wisdom. The church is often called Domus Sapientiae, House of Wisdom. He doubles the triangle, twists the ends, performs a sleight of hand, and unfolds six convex bays on each point to support the cupola. The interior spins in tight curves and circles. To keep the attention on his manipulation of space and not on the details, Borromini decorates the wavelike walls modestly with symbols of Pope Alexander’s Chigi family—gold eight-point stars and mountains—as well as cherubim and palms set against a white background. The understated interior is a startling relief after the usual Baroque madness for green, red, pink, and blue marble one finds in Rome. The gold-lined dome is the focal point for the entire marvel of undulating light. |
