Buenos Aires
Sydney
Santiago
Soul
Hebrews 11:1
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
"when the wind soughed through the thick foliage"~~~Henry Miller
"A soul as full of warmth as void of pride"~~~Pope
"But no one with an ounce of historical feeling or philosophic detachment can be blind to the great ideals, to the passionate belief in sanctity, to the expenditure of human genius in the service of God, which are made triumphantly visible to us with every step we take in Baroque Rome."~~~Kenneth Clark: Ch.7 Grandeur and Obedience
Castel Sant'Angelo:
The Mausoleum of Hadrian, also known as Castel Sant'Angelo ; English: Castle of the Holy Angel), is a towering rotunda (cylindrical building) in Parco Adriano, Rome, Italy. It was initially commissioned by the Roman Emperor Hadrian as a mausoleum for himself and his family. The popes later used the building as a fortress and castle, and it is now a museum. The structure was once the tallest building in Rome.
7 Grandeur and Obedience
"I am back in Rome, standing on the steps of the ancient church of Santa Maria Maggiore. The hellish Roman traffic swirls all round it, but inside are the original columns of the fifth-century basilica, and above them the mosaics of Old Testament stories that are almost the earliest illustrations of the Bible that exist. Since old St Peter's was pulled down and the Lateran disguised in stucco, there is nowhere else in Rome where one gets such a powerful impression of the Christian Church before the barbarian conquests. This is the grandeur that the Roman Church had once achieved and was to achieve again. If one climbs to the roof of Santa Maria Maggiore one can see long straight streets, stretching for miles up and down, and each ending in a piazza containing a famous church — the Lateran, the Trinita dei Monti, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme - and in the piazzas are Egyptian obelisks, symbols of the first civilisation and god-directed state which Rome had superseded. This is Papal Rome as it was to remain until the present century, the most grandiose piece of town planning ever attempted. The amazing thing is that it was done only fifty years after Rome had been (as it seemed) completely humiliated - almost wiped off the map. The city had been sacked and burnt, the people of Northern Europe were heretics, the Turks were threatening Vienna. It could have seemed to a far-sighted intellectual (like the French intellectuals in 1940) that the Papacy's only course was to face the facts, and accept its dependence on the gold of America, doled out through Spain.
Well, this didn't happen. Rome and the Church of Rome regained many of the territories it had lost, and, what is more important to us, became once more a great spiritual force. But was it a civilising force? In England we tend to answer no. We have been conditioned by generations of liberal, Protestant historians who tell us that no society based on obedience, repression and superstition can be really civilised. But no one with an ounce of historical feeling or philosophic detachment can be blind to the great ideals, to the passionate belief in sanctity, to the expenditure of human genius in the service of God, which are made triumphantly visible to us with every step we take in Baroque Rome. Whatever it is, it isn't barbarian or provincial. Add to this that the Catholic revival was a popular movement, that it gave ordinary people a means of satisfying, through ritual, images and symbols, their deepest impulses, so that their minds were at peace ; and I think one must agree to put off defining the word civilisation till we have looked at the Rome of the Popes.
The first thing that strikes one is that those who say the Renaissance had exhausted the Italian genius are very wide of the mark. After 1527 there was a failure of confidence; and no wonder. Historians may say that the Sack of Rome was more a symbol than a historically significant event : well, symbols sometimes feed the imagination more than facts - anyway the Sack was real enough to anyone who witnessed it. If you compare the lower part of Michelangelo's Last Judgement, which was commissioned by Clement VII as a kind of atonement for the Sack, with a group in Raphael's Disputa or with the Creation of Adam, you can see that something very drastic has happened to the imagination of Christendom."~~~Kenneth Clark: Civilisation: Ch 7 Grandeur and Obedience.
Chess: "Buenos Aires" "Sydney" "Santiago" "Soul"
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