founder of Saint John in Laterano, who erected about 324 this first, this mother of Christian basilics (Sacrosanta Lateranensis ecclesia, omnium urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et caput, as it is called), was reared on the supposed place of his doubtful baptism by Pope Silvester. It has been renovated several times, but still preserves the circular form it had in the ninth century. The eight great paintings of the Life of St. John the Baptist, by Andrea Sacchi, though boasted, are, like the other paintings of this sumptuous edifice, in bad taste and without remarkable qualities. most Christian King on an estrade placed in the choir. The bronze gate in the centre, of superior workmanship, belonged to the Emilian basilic of the Forum; it is the only model of the ancient gates called quadrifores. The principal nave, covered by one of the most splendid ceilings ever beheld, though of the elaborate architecture of Borromini, is not deficient in grandeur. The twelve colossal statues of the Apostles, fifteen feet six inches in height, was a noble undertaking in sculpture, but it was badly executed. The figures, according to the usage of that period, are The Scala Santa, à beautiful portico, draped but not dressed, and the personof Fontana's architecture, built under ages could not take a step without losing Sixtus V., preserves, according to a pious their habiliments. The folds of St. Phitradition, the twenty-eight steps of Pi- | lip's robe look like splinters of rock, and late's house, which were ascended and the artist Mazzuola, Bernini's pupil, has descended by Jesus Christ during his surpassed his master in disorder of drapassion. These steps were so worn by pery. The composition of the St. James the faithful, who ascend them on their the Less, Angelo Rossi's best work, is the knees, that it was found necessary to co- best of these bad performances. The ver them with thick planks, which have Prophets painted, despite the elogiums been worn away and renewed several heretofore lavished on Conca's Jonas times. and Andrea Procaccini's Daniel, are neither less heavy nor less formal than the Apostles. At the top of the Scala Santa is a chapel, which is rarely open and accessible to few but the pope, cardinals, and The rich, agreeable, and smiling Corclergy; it contains the venerated an- sini chapel, the most beautiful in Rome, tique image of Christ, seven palms in is Galilei's masterpiece, and is distinheight (about six feet and a half). Be-guished for the good style of its ornabind this chapel is the famous Sancta sanctorum, à walled-up chamber, an obscure sanctuary, the subject of innumerable popular tales, which must have been more than once opened in secret, and the priestly mystery of which seems little worthy of Christianity in the pre-soleum of Augustus. sent day. The theatrical front of Saint John in Laterano, erected by the Florentine architect Galilei, for Clement XII., is one of the most imposing masses of architecture of its kind. In the vestibule is an antique marble statue of Constantine, found in his Therma on the Quirinal Mount. Under the lateral portico is a great, but indifferent, bronze statue of Henry IV., by Cordier; it has little me. rit except in the casting, and was erected to him by the chapter, as a benefactor to the basilic, and his descendants preserved the singular title of first canons. Every year, on the 13th of December, Henry IV.'s birthday, a chapel was held at Saint John in Laterano: the ambassador of France there represented the ments and judicious disposition. The celebrated porphyry urn of the magnificent tomb of Clement XII. was under the portico of the Pantheon, which procured it the false surname of the urn of Agrippa, who was interred in the mau The bronze tomb of the great Martin V. (Colonna), who died in 1430 by Simone of Florence, Donatello's brother. is remarkable. With this illustrious pope, who replaced Cossa,' begins in some manner the individual history of Rome, a city ever conquered and pillaged, never possessed, and which has never been subject a moment, except to France. The Gothic tabernacle of the high altar, a monument curious for the history of art in the fourteenth century, is due to the munificence of the celebrated French pope Urban V. (Grimoard), whose arms it bears, as well as those of the king of France, Charles V., who as 1 See ante, book x. ch. ix. sisted him; among many other relics it contains the heads of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, found by Urban, at the beginning of the year 1368, among the ruins of the old basilic which had been destroyed by fire. This pope, whose lively faith was equal to his learning and charity, after passing all one night with the cardinals in Saint John in Laterano, opened the doors in the morning to the impatient crowd, and showed them the precious beads, a miraculous discovery, which procured each of these Romans, who were transported with joy and, as Baluze says, thought themselves once more masters of the world, a hundred years and a hundred quarantains of indulgences, and it was regarded throughout Europe as one of the most brilliant events of Urban's glorious pontificate. the abbé Cancellieri is celebrated among the learned. I was fortunate enough to know this true model of Roman urbanity, who received me most kindly in 1826, some weeks before his death. I yet remember his pretty house al mascherone di Farnese, with a Latin inscription and a view of the Tiber, in which this amiable and affectionate old man gave his Sunday morning receptions. There, on a long sofa occupying all one side of the saloon, and a long seat parallel to it, sat in two close rows cardinals, prelates with short cloaks, chiefs of orders with their ample garments, foreigners attracted to Rome by the love of learning, professors, etc., all met to enjoy literary conversation. The discovery of a column, a temple, an inscription, a medal, or a manuscript, became there an important event to be discussed with gravity, sometimes with enthusiasm; it was the same to this learned society as our amendments, address, and majority are to us. The spirit of investigation, our political and philo The splendid altar of the Holy Sacrament, from Olivieri's designs, has four antique columns of gilt bronze supposed to proceed from the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, and to have been made by Augustus, of the bronze from the rostra of Egyptian vessels taken at Ac-sophic eclecticism, in Italy are occupied tium; another tradition says they were brought from Judea to Rome by Vespasian. An Ascension is by the Cav. d'Arpino, interred in this church as well as Andrea Sacchi, his contemporary and rival in facility and false taste. The altar of the Saviour, erected by Nicholas IV., still preserves its curious mosaics executed in 1291 by Jacopo da Turrita, a monk of the Minorite order, and his companion Jacopo di Camerino. The two fluted coluinns of antique yellow supporting the organ are esteemed the finest of that precious marble. One of the first monuments of art in the basilic is the painting attributed to Giotto, which represents Boniface VIII. between two cardinals, publishing the famous jubilee of 1300. Among the new tombs of Saint John in Laterano, may be observed that of the abbé Cancellieri, near the monument which he consecrated to his protector, Cardinal Leone Antonelli, and who has obtained the honour, reserved to cardinals alone, of being buried in this basilic. The extensive, easy, indefatigable and almost encyclopedian erudition of 'This marble, which the ancients drew from Macedonia, must not be confounded with the Coriathlan yellow. with the ruins and monuments of the past. Though ecclesiastics were the most numerous, there was not the least question of theological disputes: the Roman clergy have that kind of moderation and security which power imparts, and do not experience the same difficulties as an aspiring and suffering clergy. All these literati cultivated learning and study for the pleasures they afforded; for literature in Italy is not a source of emolument; a man must be rich to write; there is in reality no literary property, and, most frequently, authors think themselves particularly favoured when the bookseller will bear the expense of printing. Milan, Venice, and Florence are the only towns where manuscripts are occasionally paid for; their price is rarely 40 franks a sheet, which, for a volume of 500 pages, brings the author about 1200 franks. The noblest minds in Italy do not raise by their labours the splendid tributes of eminent writers in France and England: the translation of the Iliad procured Monti no more than 4,000 francs; Parini was rather high in his demands when he exacted 150 sequins (nearly 721. sterling) of a Venetian bookseller for a reprint of his pretty poems Il Mattino and Il Mezzogiorno, to which he had added la Sera; the first edition of Manzoni's fine tragedy of Adelchi did not clear its expenses, and his popular Promessi Sposi have returned him but very little. To all these miseries add the obligation, much more rigorous in Italy than in France, of presenting one's book to all sorts of friends, even those who detest you, a compulsory homage ridiculed by the abbé Galiani, when he published his Reflections on the Neapolitan dialect without the author's name, and said that he knew no better means of preserving both his books and his friends. The curious Gothic cloister of Saint John in Laterano, of the thirteenth century, presents some singular monuments of the middle ages. The gate of Saint John, the ancient Porta Asinaria, was rebuilt under Gregory XIII. by Jacopo della Porta. It was on this side that Totila penetrated into Rome, through the treason of the Isaurian soldiers. I which animated the greatest ladies of the fifteenth century. 2 The Porta Maggiore, built by Claudius, is a majestic wreck of those aqueducts which, according to M. de Chateaubriand, brought water to the imperial people on triumphal arches. The basilic of Saint Laurence extra muros, like Saint Clement's, characteristic for its pulpits, real suggesta called ambos, and its disposition, 3 is said to be as old as Constantine. This church, in which Pope Honorius III. crowned a Frenchman, Pierre de Courtenay, count of Auxerre, emperor of Constantinople, is now chiefly frequented by the country people who come to Rome to sell their produce, and the service is performed before sunrise. Among the frescos of the portico, painted in the beginning of the thirteenth century, and of the GræcoItalian school, representing the Martyrdom of the saint, the Coronation of Courtenay, and other subjects from the history of Honorius, who built the portico, may be remarked the demons contending for the soul of Saint Michael and weighing his actions, as in the Iliad Jupiter put the fate of the Greeks and Trojans in a balance. A lizard and a frog sculptured on the volutes on two capitals of the twenty-two lonic columos of granite, were sculptured by Scaurus and Batrachus, artists of Sparta, working at Rome, who, not being allowed to inscribe their names, contrived to make themselves known by representing the two reptiles their homonyms. Near the door, is a Roman marriage in bassorelievo on a fine sarcophagus, the tomb of Cardinal Guglielmo Fieschi, nephew of Innocent IV. The twelve precious antique columns almost buried since Pope Honorius raised the pavement of the church, present richly ornamented Corinthian capitals. The modern paint The basilic of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, founded by Saint Helena on the ruins of the gardens of the infamous Heliogabalus and the remains of the Castrense amphitheatre, one of the Roman churches that are visited for obtaining indulgences, is served by the Bernardine monks of the congregation of Lombardy. Its name is derived from the largest of the too numerous pieces of the true cross, preserved among its relics. The Invention of the Cross, by Pinturicchio, on the ceiling of the gallery, has several good figures of warriors. The mosaics of the chapel of Saint Helena are by Baltassare Peruzzi. The convent library is now very limited. Under the French administration it was removed to the Vatican, and when restored to the convent in 1815, it was put in a provisional apartment where a great number of the manuscripts were stolen; several have been found at Petrucci's, a bookings are all inferior. seller of Rome, who had been previously prosecuted for purchasing articles of this kind. It has a fine copy of Cicero's de Senectute, transcribed by the princess Ippolita Sforza, daughter of Duke Francesco, and consort of the king of Naples Alfonso II., with a great number of thoughts collected by her, a monument of the enthusiasm and ardour for study See post, ch. xliii. a See ante, book v. ch xix. The church of Saint Bibiana, too often shut, contains the simplest, most graceful, and best work of Bernini in sculpture, and one of his first, the statue of the saint, one of the most pleasing productions of modern art when Bernini executed this, he had not taken such pains to corrupt his style the present front of this church is also by him. 3 See the next chapter. The front of Santa Maria Maggiore, rebuilt under Benedict XIV. by Ferdinando Fuga, one of the last celebrated architects of Italy in the eighteenth century, is of inferior architecture. The interior renovation of the basilic, ornamented with a superb ceiling of gilt panels, the finest church ceiling known, and a baldachin supported by four Corinthian columns of porphyry, is infinitely superior and passes for Fuga's best work. This decoration, as well as the whole aspect of the splendid edifice, has something gay, showy, worldly, and almost profane. The thirty-six lonic columns of white marble in the grand nave seein to have belonged to a temple of Juno. The baptistry, formed of a magnificent, richly-ornamented porphyry vase formerly in the museum of the Vatican, was given by Leo XII. The chapel del Presepio, by Fontana, admired for its form and symmetry, was ordered by Sixtus V. when only Cardinal Montalto; Gregory XIII., supposing from such an expenditure that he was very rich, suppressed his pension (piatto); and the enterprise would have remained unfinished, if the architect, no less devoted to the cardinal than anxious to execute his own designs, had not advanced the sum of 1,000 Roman crowns, the fruit of his savings. The noble disinterestedness of Fontana was the source of his fortune and procured him the friendship of Sixtus V.: shortly after the Shepherd of Montalto became pope; the chapel was finished, and sung by Tasso. In it is the tomb of the ambitious pontiff, the approver of regicide, the founder of the ecclesiastical government of the Roman states, a deranged machine which he Rime. Part. IIIa, la Canz. IV. Mira devotamente alma pentila. ⚫ The quarries of antique red were situated be himself would now doubtless reform in some parts, but retain its spirit of equality and plebeian constitution, its first, most ancient, and wisest principle. The mosaics of the choir, by Fra Jacopo da Turrita, though really of the thirteenth century and ordered by Nicholas IV., another shepherd and mountaineer of the Marches, who attained the papal throne before Sixtus V., do not appear of so barbarous an epoch. The mosaics over the arch and columns of the middle nave, representing different subjects from the Old Testament, date from the fifth century and were ordered by Sixtus III., the friend of Saint Augustine, a simple pastor of Rome, who, notwithstanding his evangelical poverty, anticipated the encouragements that were one day to be lavished on the arts by so many powerful pontiffs, his magnificent successors. The Borghese chapel, prodigiously rich, makes one regret that its accessories are not as pure as its character is grand. Bernini and his school executed the tombs of Clement VIII. and Paul V., the founder of the chapel. The paintings are inferior to those in the chapel of Sixtus V., the best in the basilic. Here, too, are the tombs of the popes Nicholas IV., Clement IX., the sepulchral stone of Platina and the mausoleum of a cardinal Consalvi of the thirteenth century, by Giovanni Cosinate, who bears the noble title of civis Romanus in the inscription. The brilliant chapel of the Madonna, which has four angels by the Cav. Arpino on its cupola, is especially remarkable for the graceful, living frescos of Guido. In the square behind the basilic, is the obelisk which was brought to Rome, placed before the mausoleum of Augustus with that on Monte Cavallo, and reared again under Sixtus V. by Fontana. At Rome only is it possible to find simplicity and extreme magnificence combined, in the same edifice, to such a degree. For instance, in the little and ancient church of Saint Praxede the ascent to the high-altar, supported by four porphyry columns, is by a double flight of steps of antique red, regarded as the most considerable block of that precious marble. In the chapel of the tween the Nile and the Red sea; this marble has become rare because they have never been worked since the ancients. martyrs Saint Zenon and Saint Valentinian, a large fragment of a column of oriental jasper, brought from Jerusalem in 1223 by Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, passes, as do some other fragments at Saint Anthony of Padua, for a part of that to which the Saviour was fastened when scourged. The fine mausoleum of a Breton cardinal of the family of Taillebourg, bishop of Sabina, who died in 1474, is an interesting monument in respect to art. The Ascension, on the ceiling, is in the first and better style of the Cav. d'Arpino. Some figures painted in fresco by Guercino are not without merit. In the sacristy is the celebrated and superb Flagellation, by Giulio Ro mano. The antique church of Saint Martin de' Monti, with its subterranean oratory, its catacombs, its old Madonna, and its modern embellishments, seems a poem with progress and action. Though injured by time, its collection of landscapes painted in fresco hy Guaspre Poussin is admirable and unique in churches; the figures are by Nicolas, Guaspre's illlustrious brother-in-law, a formidable namesake who has too much eclipsed him. The church of Saint Pudenziana, repaired in 1598, has in its gallery a mosaic of the eighth century, ordered by Pope Adrian I., in astonishing preservation, and reckoned by Poussin one of the best in the old style. In the middle of numerous figures and a varied landscape, the Saviour is represented with a book in his hand, on which is written: Dominus conservator ecclesiæ Pudentianæ. CHAPTER XX. Saint Peter in Vincoli.-Michael Angelo's Moses.Santa Maria of Loretto. Restorations.- Holy Apostles.-Mausoleum of Clement XIV. The acclivity leading to Saint Peter in Vincoli recalls one of the most horrible Chi è costui che in sì gran pietra scolto Siede gigante e le più illustri e conte Opre dell' arte avanza, e ha vive e pronte Le labbra si che le parole ascolto? Questi è Mosè, ben mel dimostra il folto Tal era allor che le sonanti e vaste | crimes of ancient Rome, as it is pretended to be the place of the street called Scelerata, because the ambitious and infamous Tullia had there driven her car over the corpse of the king her father. The church of Saint Peter in Vincoli was built by the empress Eudoxia, wife of Valentinian III., under the pontificate of Saint Leo the Great, to receive the chain which had bound the apostle in the prison of Jerusalem. This venerated chain is still shown to the people, and kissed by them on the festival of Saint Peter. The majestic church of Saint Peter in Vincoli, rebuilt by Adrian I., repaired under Julius II., was put in its present state in 1705 by Francesco Fontana, a descendant of Domenico; the nave has twenty columns remarkable for their Grecian character, which resembles divers fragments of the architecture of Adrian's villa. The tomb of Julius II., though unfinished and far short of the immense proportions it ought to have, is the most important created by modern art. It does not, however, contain his corpse, which lies neglected in the Vatican. It must be confessed that there existed an analogy such as is seldom seen between the genius of Michael Angelo and the character of Julius II., who had actively employed him. The bold menacing expression and proud attitude of the colossal Moses belong no less to the haughty pontiff than the Hebrew legislator. This famous Moses has inspired two superb sonnets and a multitude of other verses: the first sonnet is by an indifferent poet, Giambattista Zappi; the second, by Alfieri, is however inferior to the first. The adjustment of the figure, though treated broadly, is open to censure; the head has been thought too little, the beard enormous; the body seems to wear a flannel waistcoat, and the kind of pantaloons with gaiters which cover the thighs and long legs are scarcely in cha Acque el sospese a se d'intorno, e tale Quando il mar chiuse, e ne fe' tomba altrui. E voi, sue turbe, un rio vitello alzaste? Alzato aveste imago a questa eguale, Ch' era men fallo l' adorar costui. Oh! chi se' tu, che maestoso tanto Marmoreo siedi; ed hai scolpito in volio |
