"For us to go to Italy and to penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery, back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness." --D.H. Lawrence
PART I Paganism
I love to contemplate and learn about art, and I knew that going to Rome, Siena, and Florence would be rare opportunties to see some of the world's finest art...
Still, I must admit that I was far more excited about the week we would spend in Tuscany, studying the literary arts and the art of organic farming and sustainable living than I was about traipsing through what I knew would be hot, crowded and busy Rome and Florence at the height of the tourist season.
My ideas about Italy were a mixture of memories from High School Latin; the neuroses of Catholic boys; the Mafia rumors of my peers; and lots of stereotypes that I'd better not mention.
I was pleasantly surprised! My spirit as well as my intellect and my senses were fed by the arts of Italy. In fact, I was particularly intrigued at how many points of intersection there are between these paintings, sculptures, and buildings and UU philosophies. Here's a tiny glimpse of how one Unitarian, non-educated in art history, found meaning in the great arts:
"Grandeur was important to the Romans because of their strong sense of history and their unique and important place in it. They were anxious to leave a record of themselves... (a) search for immortality through mortar and stone..." Cole, 26
I thought I would be horrified by the Coliseum and the remnants of brutality it always represented for me. Instead, I was able to appreciate the massive antiquity for its architechtural genius, the use of arches and concrete to construct a massive amphitheatre that has not only survived nearly two thousand years, but has many similarities to today's arenas where humans still crave competition and conflict.
The words of the Venerable Bede came back to me with renewed impact: While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand. When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall. And when Rome falls, the world. One wonders, and marvels.
Likewise, arches which were built to commemorate victories had no practical purpose at all. Most were not even built over roads. Called triumphal arches, they have served their somewhat vainglorious purpose, for they still stand as advertisements of ancient prowess.
These were pagan structures, earth-bound and filled with stories, myth, and conflict. The arts were about to change dramatically.
PART II
Christianity
"The Vatican is a dagger in the heart of Italy." Thomas Paine
Here is where my bias became fully evident. I was resistant to the glorification of the Popes, the rape of the antiquities to create the vatican ("What the barbarians did not take, the Barbarinis did...") and the general trends I associate with Roman Catholicism. I'll admit that I entered the first few cathedrals and especially the Vatican with a juandiced eye!
During the Dark Ages and until the Renaissance, many ancient works were destroyed, and attention turned from earth and human affairs toward heaven. It was the start of the building of the great cathedrals.
If you ever get to visit Italy, skip Florence if you must but do not skip Siena. I reaquainted myself with the Italian origins of Unitarian thought after returning home, and learned that both Socinus and Ochino, some of those who brought the roots of anti-Trinitarianism to eastern Europe, along with Gribaldi, Pucci, and Biandrata ("ecclestiastical wire-puller in the interest of heterodoxy") whence it ultimately was the basis for Unitarian churches in Transylvania.
Siena is the home of this magnificent cathedral, which represents the shift back toward the celebration of nature (also found in the writings of St. Francis of Assisi) and individual humanity, as well as the "human side of divinity," all considered to be emerging "from a long sleep of anonymity" as the 13th century dawned.
PART III
Humanism
"It is certainly a miracle that a formless block of stone could ever have been reduced to a perfection that nature is scarcely able to create in the flesh." Vasari , of the Pieta.
By the full flowering of the Renaissance, associated perhaps most widely with Michelangelo, Humanism was again the dominant theme.
Yes, the works of art were commissioned by wealthy patrons and often by Popes, so the subject matter was controlled, yet within the confines of their assignments, the artists moved decisively toward humanization and naturalism.
The School of Athens (Raphael) could depict philosophers Plato and Aristotle (also Socrates, Pythagoras and Euclid) engaged in philosophical debate in front of one of the Roman baths as a fresco on the wall of the Pope's apartments; Boticelli could paint a nude and sensuous Venus for the Medici family; and Michelangelo could banish even the Pope from the Sistine chapel when he painted his celing for four years.
This new, "secular" spirit was epitomized by the essay on the dignity of man written by Mirandola at the end of the 15th c, in which "man is portrayed as the molder of himself, who, through his own efforts and self-improvement, could become divine -- a radical and revitalizing departure from midieval thought, in which God controlled everything, including human desinty." (Cole, 90)
But I was most moved by two of Michelangelo's masterpieces, The Pieta and the David. I could never have been prepared for the emotional impact these works would have on me. And it was not their religious significance, but their humanistic message that moved me to tears. Mary cradling her grown son became evry mother whose child's death precedes hers, and David... is the essence of nobility and near-perfection, yet still flawed, still with the spark of human fallibility.
Italy is filled with paradox, complex and as multi-faceted as a stained glass window, its layers of meaning as thick as the layers of archeological remnants that dot its cities, its contradictions as puzzling as the tension between faith and science, both of which it excels in.
But at its core there is a love of life, a carpe diem thread that celebrates the now, the good, the beautiful and the sweetness of existence.
