SACRED PROFANITY
My wife and I traveled to Italy in April, 2011, five years after a previous visit. We’d been studying Italian literature, and our ultimate destination was Palermo, because we’d read Giuseppe Tomaso di Lampedusa’s masterpiece Il gattopardo (which doesn’t literally mean “The Leopard,” but refers to a heraldic cat more like a lion which was the emblem on the protagonist’s crest). We wanted to see the city where Lampedusa’s Don Fabrizio, modeled on one of the author’s ancestors, had lived during the time of the Italian Risorgimento, the ultimately compromised revolution led by Garibaldi in the mid-19th century.
But we spent several days in Rome en route, and on our first afternoon, an American scholar named Lila led us and some other people on a tour of San Clemente, perhaps Rome’s best preserved medieval basilica. She explained in fascinating detail the iconography of the mosaic of Christ Crucified which dominates the apse of the 12th century upper church. Against the eternal golden light of heaven, Jesus hangs gauntly from a cross which springs up from coils of acanthus vines that roll outward to encircle the figures of John the Baptist and other saints.
Lila showed us that from the base of the cross the four rivers of Paradise flow out, providing sacred water for the faithful, represented by stags, and watering pastures where the Good Shepherd’s sheep are grazing. She admitted that she was puzzled by one element in the design, a snake-like creature, but without a head, which appears at the foot of the cross, and she asked for suggestions from her listeners, many of whom, judging by their questions and comments, knew something about medieval symbolism. But nobody ventured a guess.
Lila went on to propose (not state as fact, unlike most art historians) that the designer of the mosaic had chosen the acanthus motif for the Cross because in Rome the vine puts out a vertical shoot each year between Easter and Pentecost, a clear symbol of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. Her suggestion answered a question I’d always had about why the capitals of columns in medieval churches throughout Europe are decorated with acanthus leaves. And my admiration for her scholarship deepened as she led us down to San Clemente’s next level.
We reached the faded, but still mostly intact wall-paintings which had adorned a section of the wall of the 11th century church’s nave. The first fresco, done in a loose, representational style that is utterly different from the rigid Byzantine stylization of the later mosaics in the upper church, depicts the legend of San Clemente. He lived at the end of the 1st century CE and is thought to have been the Apostle Peter’s third successor as Bishop of Rome and Pope. Imprisoned by the Emperor Trajan, he kept on preaching, and eventually managed to escape, fleeing to Byzantium. But Trajan’s troops caught up with him, and he was thrown into the Black Sea tied to a heavy anchor. Some time after his death, the child of a Christian mother fell into the water near where Clemente had drowned. The child went down, and his mother prayed to Clemente. The sea drained miraculously and the child was found alive and well.
The fresco depicts the mother stepping into the dry sea-bed, gathering her child into her arms, and Lila’s delight in its naturalism, which suggests that something of the ancient Roman style as seen on wall-paintings in places like Pompeii was still flourishing a thousand years later, was infectious. Nothing in Rome is ever entirely obliterated, despite the efforts of new regimes. There are just too many levels of history under its streets and buildings for anyone but a fool to think that his moment is permanent.
The second 11th century fresco was even more fascinating. It tells the legend of Saint Alexius in pictorial form. According to one tradition he was born in Syria, the son of a wealthy Roman patrician who had converted to Christianity. Alexius abandoned his arranged marriage, leaving his young bride on their wedding night (below and to the right of the central image of the saint, he and the girl are shown cuddling in bed) to spend many years as a wandering mendicant-preacher. He finally came home, so changed his parents didn’t recognize him (by then, I hope, his jilted bride had found a less devout husband), but as pious Christians they took in the stranger. He converted a cramped area under a staircase into his hermit’s cell, and he came out of it only to continue preaching the Gospel, until he died there. Papers found with him disclosed his identity, and he was revered as a saint throughout the Eastern Empire.
But nothing is simple in the legends of the saints. Another Alexius tradition places him in Rome, where he became St. Peter’s immediate successor as Pope, at a time when Christianity was just establishing itself in the city and Christians had to keep a low profile. That Alexius celebrated secret masses for the faithful, and the wife of a prominent pagan named Sisinius was one of them. Suspicious, possibly jealous, Sisinius followed her to one of Alexius’s services, and was stricken blind on the spot for his blasphemy. The fresco also includes the Sisinius story, on the left. Alexius, showing true Christian charity, cured the blindness of Sisinius, but the wicked Roman thought even his own cure was witchcraft, and he sent some of his servants to kill Alexius. They were about to seize him when they were also blinded.
And the pictures turn into a bawdy, comic cartoon. Unable to see, they mistake a fallen marble column for Alexius, and struggle to carry it away. One of them is using a lever to pry it up. Lila pointed out that as in modern cartoon panels, the 11th frescoes contain talk-balloons, but the words appear over the heads of the listeners, not the speakers. And some of the sentences are in what may be the earliest written Italian yet discovered, rather than in Latin. Medieval Italian (cf. Dante) is markedly different from its modern version, but when Lila traced out the words, I recognized them immediately, because they were obscene, and Italian curse-words haven’t changed in a thousand years. The man with the lever is being told to “Stick it up his ass!” (referring to the column, which they thought was Alexius), while those hauling on a rope are ordered, “Pull, you sons of whores!”
So here is a cartoon depicting a comic miracle in the life of a saint, with the minor characters swearing like sailors. Perhaps the secret of the Church’s enduring power in what’s been called the Age of Faith was that it didn’t hold itself above crude jokes and bad language – unless you used them about the Church itself, whereupon you would find yourself tied to a stake with the flames rising around you, trying to convince the executioner that you were only kidding.