Civilisation (1969–1970): Season 1, Episode 7 - Grandeur and Obedience - full transcript
(# MONTEVERDI: Toccata from L'Orfeo )
The ancient church of St Mary Major,
Santa Maria Maggiore,
stands in the centre of modern Rome.
The hellish Roman traffic
swirls all round it.
But if you go inside,
you'll find the original columns
of the 5th-century church
built in rivalry with the neighbouring
Temple of Juno, the mother goddess.
Since old St Peter's was pulled down,
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.
Above the columns,
the mosaics of Old Testament stories
are almost the earliest illustrations
of the Bible that exist.
Brilliant fresh colours,
like early Matisse.
One sees what was lost
when almost the whole
of early Christian art was destroyed.
(GREGORIAN CHANT)
From the roof of Santa Maria Maggiore,
I can see long, straight streets
stretching for miles up and down
and each ending in front
of a famous church.
Down there is St John Lateran.
And in the opposite direction
is Santa Trinità dei Monti.
And in each of the piazzas
are Egyptian obelisks,
symbols of that god-directed state
which Rome had superseded.
Papal Rome - the Rome of Sixtus V.
It's the most grandiose piece
of town planning ever attempted
and it anticipated by 50 years
all the great town plans
of France and Germany.
And the amazing thing is that
it was done only a generation
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
that the papacy's only course
was to face the facts.
Accept its dependence on the gold
of America, doled out through Spain.
Well, as you can see, this didn't happen.
Rome and the Church of Rome
regained many of the territories
it had lost
and became once more
a great spiritual force.
But was it a civilising force?
In England, we tend to answer no.
We've 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 outpouring of human genius
in the service of God
which is made triumphantly visible to us
every step we take in Baroque Rome.
(# GIOVANELLI: Nunc Dimittis)
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, 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've had a look
at the Rome of the Popes.
The first thing that strikes one
is that those who say
that the Renaissance had exhausted
the Italian genius are wrong.
After 1527, there was a moment
of discouragement,
a failure of confidence, and no wonder.
Historians 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 had witnessed it.
Michelangelo's Last Judgment,
which was commissioned by Clement VII
as a kind of atonement for the Sack,
fills the whole end wall
of the Sistine Chapel behind me.
It's a disturbing, a crushing work.
Most of the figures
are embodiments of fear or despair.
Look at the damned being ferried
across the Styx.
If you compare them
with The Creation of Adam on the ceiling,
you can see that something very drastic
has happened to the foremost
imagination of Christendom.
Michelangelo had been reluctant
to undertake The Last judgment.
Under Clement's successor,
Paul III Faroese,
he was persuaded to continue it,
although with rather a different purpose.
It ceased to be an act of atonement
or an attempt to externalise a bad dream
and became the first and greatest
assertion of the Church's power,
and the fate that would befall
heretics and schismatics.
The Last Judgment
belongs to a period of severity
when the Catholic Church
was approaching its problems
in rather the same puritanical spirit
as the Protestants.
It's curious that this period should
have been inaugurated by Paul III,
because he was in many ways
the last of the humanist popes.
He was cradled in corruption.
He was made a cardinal because
his sister, known as La Bella,
had been the mistress
of Alexander Borgia.
At first sight, he looks a crafty old fox.
But if you look at Titian's
portrait of him in Naples -
one of the greatest portraits
ever painted -
it's a wise, old head,
and the longer you look,
the more impressive it becomes.
And he took the two decisions that were
successfully to counter the Reformation.
He sanctioned the Jesuit Order
and he instituted the Council of Trent.
For almost 20 years,
several hundred bishops and cardinals
from all over the Catholic world
met in the Cathedral of Trent
to discuss the future of the Church.
There was a good deal of high politics
as well as theology.
But in the end, the Council did draw up
a plan for the Catholic revival
which held good right up
to the middle of the 19th century.
Michelangelo could refuse him nothing.
He not only finished
The Last Judgment,
but in 1546 he accepted from the Pope
the post of architect of St Peter's.
Thus Michelangelo, by his longevity
no less than by his genius,
became the visual link between the
Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation.
One of the reasons why
medieval and Renaissance architecture
is so much better than our own
is that the architects were artists,
individual artists of genius.
The master masons of the Gothic cathedrals
started as carvers working on the portals.
In the Renaissance, Brunellesco was
originally a sculptor, Bramante a painter.
And of the great architects whom we
shall see later on in the programme,
Pietro da Cortona was a painter
and Bernini was a sculptor.
And this has given to their work
a power of plastic invention,
a sense of proportion and articulation
based on the study of the human figure,
which knowledge
of the tensile strength of steel
and other prerequisites of modern
building doesn't always produce.
Well, of all non-professional architects,
Michelangelo was the most adventurous,
the least constrained either by classicism
or functional requirements.
Not that he was unpractical.
He did drawings for the
fortification of Florence
which, from standards
of military necessities,
are most ingenious and are also like
the most superb works of abstract art.
For that matter, all his ground plans
are thrilling abstract designs.
But he felt himself free to play
with the elements of architecture
in such a way as to express his feelings,
and, as so often happens
with a great artist,
they were prophetic feelings.
You can see what I mean
in the building that stands behind me -
the Palazzo dei Conservatori
here on the Capitol of Rome.
Grandeur and obedience.
Well, it's grand all right.
And if man is to take any pride
in his history,
the Roman Capitol should be grand.
But the extraordinary thing
is how Michelangelo
has expressed in his architecture
the principle of subordination.
In an early Renaissance building,
the parts maintained their identity
with a harmonious independence.
In the Michelangelo facade, everything
is subordinate to powerful rhythms
that run right through the building.
He gave his immense authority
to the device of a single pilaster
running up through two storeys.
We know in Renaissance architecture,
and in Roman buildings for that matter,
you had one column per storey,
one on top of the other.
In this building, the small columns
are pressed into the foot
of the giant pilaster.
They don't assert themselves,
they simply add to its power.
And these commanding verticals are met
by even more assertive horizontals.
And the inevitable collision
of these two directions
gives the building
an extraordinary feeling of energy.
It seems as dramatically tense
as the human situation.
Perhaps only Michelangelo
had the energy of spirit to pull together
the vast inchoate mass of St Peter's.
Four admirable architects
had worked on it before him.
The central piers were already built
and part of the surrounding walls,
but le was able to give it
the unifying stamp of his own character.
(# MONTEVERDI: Toccata from L'Orfeo)
It's the most sculptural
of all his designs,
perhaps the grandest piece
of architecture ever built.
A vast, simple unit
that carries the eye round
as if it were the carving of a torso.
People don't always appreciate
the awe-inspiring grandeur
of the walls and cornices of St Peter's,
but everybody knows the dome.
For centuries, lovers of art
have gone into ecstasies
about its noble energetic arc, expressive
of Michelangelo's spiritual aspirations.
It is perhaps the most
commanding dome in the world,
easily dominating the other Roman cupolas
one sees as one looks across the city.
However, all the evidence suggests
that it does not represent
Michelangelo's final intention.
As you can see in this print,
he wanted it to be much more spherical,
less pointed.
It was, in fact, designed
by an architect called Della Porta
after Michelangelo's death.
Well, we can go on admiring it
and think rather more of Della Porta.
The last stone of the dome of St Peter's
was put in place in 1590,
a few months before the death of Sixtus V.
The long period of austerity
and consolidation was almost over.
The Catholic Church was victorious.
How had that victory been achieved?
In England, most of us
were brought up to believe
that it depended on the Index,
the Jesuits and the Inquisition.
Well, I don't believe that a great
outburst of creative energy,
such as took place in Rome
between 1620 and 1640,
can be the result of negative factors.
But I do admit that
the civilisation of those years
did depend on certain assumptions
that are out of favour
in England and America today.
The first of these, of course,
was the belief in authority,
the absolute authority
of the Roman Church.
And this belief extended
to sections of society
which we now assume to be
naturally rebellious, like artists.
It comes as something of a shock
to find that, with a single exception,
the great artists of the time
were all sincere, conforming Christians.
Guercino spent much
of his mornings in prayer.
Bernini frequently went into retreats
and practised the spiritual
exercises of St Ignatius.
Even Rubens attended Mass
every morning before beginning work.
This conformism wasn't
based on fear of the Inquisition
but on the simple belief that the faith
which had inspired the great saints
of the preceding generation -
saints like St Filippo Neri -
was something by which
a man should regulate his life.
The mid-16th century was a period
of sanctity in the Roman Church
almost equal to the 12th.
St John of the Cross,
the great poet of mysticism.
St Ignatius Loyola, the visionary soldier
turned psychologist.
St Teresa of Avila,
the great headmistress
with her irresistible combination
of mystical experience and common sense.
And St Carlo Borromeo,
the austere administrator.
One doesn't need to be a practising
Catholic to feel immense respect
for a half-century that could produce
these great spirits.
However, I'm not trying to pretend
that this episode
in the history of civilisation
was of value chiefly because of its
influence on artists or philosophers.
On the contrary,
I think that intellectual life
developed more fully
in the freer atmosphere of the North.
The great achievement
of the Catholic Church
lay in harmonising, humanising, civilising
the deepest impulses of ordinary people.
Harmonising, humanising, civilising.
Take the cult of the Virgin.
In the early 12th century,
the Virgin had been
the supreme protectress of civilisation.
She had taught a race of tough
and ruthless barbarians
the virtues of tenderness and compassion.
The great cathedrals of the Middle Ages
were her dwelling places upon Earth.
And then in the Renaissance,
while remaining the Queen of Heaven,
she became also the human mother
in whom everyone could recognise
those qualities
of warmth and love and approachability.
Now, imagine the feelings
of a simple-hearted man or woman -
a Spanish peasant, an Italian artisan -
on hearing that the Northern heretics
were insulting the Virgin,
desecrating her sanctuaries,
pulling down or decapitating her images.
He must have felt something deeper
than indignation.
He must have felt that some part of his
whole emotional life was threatened.
And he would have been right.
The stabilising, comprehensive
religions of the world,
the religions which penetrate
to every part of a man's being -
in Egypt, India, China -
gave the female principle of creation
almost as much importance as the male
and wouldn't have taken seriously
a philosophy
that failed to include them both.
Of course, I'm bound to say that
these are all what HG Wells called
"communities of obedience".
The aggressive, nomadic societies -
what he called "communities of will" -
Israel, Islam, the Protestant North,
conceived their gods as male.
Now, it's a curious fact
that the male religions
have produced
very little religious imagery,
in most cases
have positively forbidden it.
The great religious art of the world
in every country
is deeply involved
with the female principle.
Of course, the ordinary Catholic
who prayed to the Virgin
wasn't conscious of any of this.
Nor was he or she interested in the
really baffling theological problems
presented by the doctrine
of the Immaculate Conception.
He knew simply that heretics
wanted to deprive him
of that sweet, compassionate,
approachable being
who would intercede for him,
as his mother might have interceded
with a hard master.
Take another human impulse
that can be harmonised
but shouldn't be suppressed -
the impulse to confess.
The historian can't help observing how
the need for confession has returned,
even - or especially -
in the land of the Pilgrim Fathers.
The difference is that instead
of confession being followed
by a simple, comforting rubric which has
behind it the weight of divine authority,
the modern confessor must grope his way
into the labyrinth of the psyche
with all its false turnings
and dissolving perspectives -
a noble aim,
but a terrifying responsibility.
No wonder that psychoanalysts have
the highest suicide rate of any vocation.
And perhaps, after all, the old procedure
had something to recommend it,
because, as a rule, it's the act
of confession that matters,
not the attempted cure.
The leaders of the Catholic restoration
had made the inspired decision
notto go halfway to meet Protestantism
in any of its objections,
but rather to glory
in those very doctrines
that the Protestants had most forcibly,
sometimes, it must be admitted,
most logically, repudiated.
Luther had repudiated
the authority of the Pope.
Very well, no pains must be spared
to make a gigantic assertion
that St Peter, the first Bishop of Rome,
had been divinely appointed
as Christ's vicar on Earth.
Ever since Erasmus, intelligent men in the
North had spoken scornfully of relics.
Very well, their importance
must be magnified,
so that the four piers of St Peter's
itself are gigantic reliquaries.
This one contained parts of the lance
that pierced Our Lord's side.
And in front of it stands Longinus,
looking up with a gesture
of dazzled enlightenment.
The veneration of relics was connected
with the cult of the saints,
and this had been equally condemned
by the reformers.
Very well, the saints should be made
more insistently real to the imagination,
and, in particular,
their sufferings and their ecstasies
should be vividly recorded.
In all these ways, the Church
gave imaginative expression
to deep-seated human impulses.
And it had another great strength,
which one may say was part
of Mediterranean civilisation,
or at any rate, a legacy
from the pagan Renaissance -
it was not afraid of the human body.
Titian's Assumption Of The Virgin,
a Baroque picture almost
100 years before its time,
was painted in the same period
as his great celebrations of paganism.
Early in the 16th century,
Titian had given his immense authority
to this union of dogma and sensuality.
And, when the first puritan influence
of the Council of Trent was over,
Titian's work was there to inspire both
Rubens, who made superb copies of it...
...and, I think, Bernini.
Protestantism, in its overzealous
condemnation of sins of the flesh,
had also cut itself off from the kind
of the comforting physical presence
that one finds in Bernini's Charity.
For all these reasons,
the art we call Baroque was a popular art.
The art of the Renaissance had appealed
through intellectual means -
geometry, perspective, knowledge of
antiquity - to a small group of humanists.
The Baroque appealed through the emotions
to the widest possible audience.
Sometimes it does so
by dramatic illustration.
This is The Calling of St Matthew
by Caravaggio,
who was, on the whole, the greatest,
certainly the most original,
painter of the period,
and like many other artists of the time,
he uses a means of communication
that reminds one of the films.
Caravaggio experimented -
as you see here -
with violent contrasts of light and shade
that were popular
in high-brow films of the '20s.
And later Baroque artists, like Bernini,
delighted in the emotive close-up,
the tears and open lips
and restless movement,
all those devices that were to be
rediscovered in the movies.
The extraordinary thing
is that the Baroque artist did it in
bronze and marble, and not on celluloid.
Of course, in a way,
it is a frivolous comparison,
because however much
one admires the films,
one must admit that they are
often vulgar, always ephemeral,
whereas the work of Bernini
is ideal and eternal.
He was a very great artist,
and although his work may seem
to lack the awe-inspiring seriousness
and concentration of Michelangelo,
it was, in its century,
even more pervasive and influential.
He not only gave Baroque Rome
its character
but he was the chief source
of an international style
that spread all over Europe,
as Gothic had done
and as the Renaissance style never did.
He was dazzlingly precocious.
At the age of 16, one of his carvings
was bought by the Borghese family,
and by the time he was 20,
he was already commissioned
to do a portrait
of the Borghese Pope, Paul V.
In the next three years, he became
more skilful in the carving of marble
than any sculptor has ever been,
before or since.
His David, in contrast with
the static David of Michelangelo,
catches the sudden twist of action.
And the vehement expression
of the head is almost overdone.
Actually, it is a self-portrait
of the young Bernini,
who made a face into a mirror,
a mirror said to have been
held for him by his patron,
the Cardinal Scipione Borghese.
The Apollo and Daphne is an even
more extraordinary example
of how marble can be made
into something fluid and fleeting,
because it represents the moment when
Daphne, crying for help to her father,
is changed into a laurel tree.
Her fingers are becoming leaves already.
It's just beginning
to dawn on Apollo that he's lost her.
And if he could look down,
he would see that her beautiful legs
are already turning into a tree trunk.
And her toes are becoming
roots and tendrils.
All these brilliant works were done
for the Borghese family.
It was very bright of them
to commission so young a man,
but by the 1620s,
the rich Roman families,
who were, in fact,
the families of successive popes,
had begun to compete
as patrons and collectors,
often in a somewhat piratical manner.
One's reminded of the competition
between the monster American
collectors of 60 years ago -
Mr Frick, Mr Morgan -
with the difference that the Roman patrons
competed for the works of living artists,
not simply for certified old masters.
The leading Roman families put painters
under contract, like television stars,
and the painters really got paid,
which they never did in the Renaissance.
As often happens, I believe,
a sudden relaxation and affluence
after a period of austerity
produced creative energy.
The 1620s were relaxed, all right,
as one can see
from Bernini's portrait of that most
affluent cardinal, Scipione Borghese.
Of all these papal families, one easily
outshone the rest - the Barberini.
This was due to the pontificate
of Matteo Barberini
who, in 1623, became Pope Urban VIII.
He survived as Pope for 20 years
but, as he himself foresaw,
he survives in history very largely
because he was the patron of Bernini.
At the time of Urban's accession,
Bernini was only 25.
And the very next year
he was made architect of St Peter's -
a project that was to occupy him
for more than 40 years.
And at the end of that time
he had made visible
the victory of the Catholic church.
The pilgrim approaching St Peter's
before Bernini would have found himself
in a venerable and picturesque quarter
of the city with a few large buildings
isolated from one another
by trees and meadows,
individually grand, but not making the
impact of a complete architectural idea.
Now imagine his experiences
after Bernini had done his work.
He would cross the Ponte St Angelo
with its marble angels
from Bernini's workshop,
and from the other side
make his way to Bernini's piazza.
Bernini is perhaps
the only artist in history
who has been able to carry through
such a vast design over so long a period.
And the result is a unity of impression
that exists nowhere else
on so grand a scale.
(# GABRIELI: Canzon Primi Toni)
Then, when our pilgrim passes
through the enormous facade,
the feeling of complete unity of style
is maintained.
You can get a better impression
of the interior of St Peter's
from this painting than from a photograph.
It was painted 200 years ago
but, in fact, very little has changed.
Not only is the decoration basically all
conceived by Bernini in a uniform style,
but the eye passes without a break
through the baldachino
and up to that astonishing construction,
the Throne of St Peter.
But perhaps what would have
impressed our pilgrim most of all
would have been the bronze baldachino.
Bernini started work on it in the year
that he became the architect
of St Peter's,
and it's incredible. Yes, if one knows
anything about bronze casting,
it really ls incredible.
It involved every sort
of engineering difficulty.
And then there's the amazing richness
and audacity of Bernini's invention
and the perfection of craftsmanship
which extends to every detail.
More extraordinary still,
Bernini seems already
to have foreseen in his imagination
what the whole development
of St Peter's would be like,
because this work,
which is the first thing he designed,
is completely in harmony
with the great progression of works
executed over the whole span of 40 years.
I believe that anyone who uses
his eyes without prejudice
will find his emotions
stirred and enlarged
by these marvellous experiences.
As we enter this world
of light and movement,
of weightless angels and billowing bishops
and tumbling cherubs,
we are ourselves no longer
weighed down by earthly things.
We participate imaginatively,
as we do at a ballet,
in an ecstatic repudiation
of the forces of gravity.
But the word "ballet”
suddenly puts me on my guard.
It was no accident that Bernini was
the greatest scene designer of his age.
John Evelyn, the diarist, records how
in 1644 he went to the opera in Rome,
where Bernini painted the scenes,
cut the statues, invented the engines,
composed the music,
wrote the comedy and built the theatre.
And we are told that
at Bernini's productions,
people in the front row
ran out of the theatre,
fearing they would be drenched
by water or burnt by fire,
so powerful was the illusion
that he created.
Of course, these stage sets
have all vanished,
but we have some evidence
of what they were like
in the fountain that Bernini designed
for the Piazza Navone here behind me.
It's an astonishing performance.
A sizeable Egyptian obelisk
is lifted up on a hollow rock
as if it weighed no more than a ballerina.
And round the rock
are four gigantic figures
symbolising the four
great rivers of the world.
First of all, the Danube,
with its symbolic animal, the horse,
emerging from a grotto,
said to be the only part of the monument
carved by Bernini himself.
Incidentally, it's the portrait
of a real horse called Monte d'Oro.
And then the Nile,
with a rather ridiculous lion.
And then the Ganges,
shrouded from the sun.
And finally the River Plate,
symbolised by heaven knows
what sort of fabulous crocodile.
The Plate seems to be
reeling back in horror,
and the people of Rome used to maintain
that he was showing his alarm
at the sight of the church facade
by Bernini's only serious rival,
the architect Borromini.
Of this theatrical element in Bernini,
a sublime example is the Cornaro Chapel
in Santa Maria delta Vittoria.
To begin with, Bernini has represented
the members of the Cornaro family
on either side of the chapel
looking as if they were in boxes,
waiting for the curtain to go up.
And when we come to the drama itself,
it's presented exactly
as if it were on a small stage,
with a spotlight falling
on the protagonists.
But at this point the theatrical
parallel must be dropped,
because what we see -
The Ecstasy Of Santa Teresa -
is one of the most deeply moving works
in European art.
Bernini's gift of sympathetic imagination,
of entering into the emotions of others -
a gift no doubt enhanced by his practice
of St Ignatius's spiritual exercises -
is used to convey the rarest
and most precious of all emotional states,
that of religious ecstasy.
He's illustrated exactly the passage
in the saint's autobiography
in which she describes
the supreme moment of her life,
how an angel with a flaming
golden arrow pierced her heart repeatedly.
"The pain was so great
that I screamed aloud,
"but simultaneously felt
such infinite sweetness
"that I wished the pain to last eternally.
"It was the sweetest caressing
of the soul by God."
(CHOIR SINGS Gloria Patri)
I don't think that anyone can accuse me of
underestimating the Catholic restoration
or its greatest image-maker,
Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
So may I end by saying that this episode
in the history of civilisation
arouses in me certain misgivings.
And they may be summed up in the words
"illusion" and "exploitation".
Of course, all art
is to some extent an illusion.
It transforms experience in order
to satisfy some need of the imagination.
But there are degrees of illusion,
depending on how far from direct
experience the artist is prepared to go.
Bernini went very far. Just how far
one realises when one remembers
the historical Santa Teresa, with her
plain, dauntless, sensible face.
The contrast with the
swooning, sensuous beauty
of the Cornaro Chapel is almost shocking.
One can't help feeling
that affluent Baroque,
in its escape from the severities of the
earlier fight against Protestantism,
ended by escaping from reality
into a world of illusion.
Art creates its own momentum
and once set on this course
there was nothing it could do except
become more and more sensational.
And this is what happens
in the breathtaking performances
that take place over our heads,
in the Gesù and Sant'Ignazio
and the Palazzo Barberini.
We feel that the stopper is out.
Imaginative energy is fizzing away
up into the clouds
and will soon evaporate.
As for my other misgivings,
of course there was exploitation
before the 16th century,
but never on so vast a scale.
In the Middle Ages
it was usually accompanied
by real popular participation.
Even in the Renaissance,
palaces were to some extent
seats of government
and objects of local pride.
But the colossal palaces
of the popes' relatives
were simply expressions
of private greed and vanity.
Faroese, Borghese,
Barberini, Ludovisi -
these rapacious parvenus
spent their short years of power
competing as to who should build
the largest and most ornate saloons.
In doing so, they commissioned
some great works of art
and one can't help admiring
their shameless courage.
At least they weren't mean and furtive,
like some modern millionaires.
But their contribution to civilisation
was limited to this kind
of visual exuberance.
The sense of grandeur
is, no doubt, a human instinct,
but carried too far,
it becomes inhuman.
I wonder if a single thought
that has helped forward the human spirit
has ever been conceived
or written down in an enormous room.
The ancient church of St Mary Major,
Santa Maria Maggiore,
stands in the centre of modern Rome.
The hellish Roman traffic
swirls all round it.
But if you go inside,
you'll find the original columns
of the 5th-century church
built in rivalry with the neighbouring
Temple of Juno, the mother goddess.
Since old St Peter's was pulled down,
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.
Above the columns,
the mosaics of Old Testament stories
are almost the earliest illustrations
of the Bible that exist.
Brilliant fresh colours,
like early Matisse.
One sees what was lost
when almost the whole
of early Christian art was destroyed.
(GREGORIAN CHANT)
From the roof of Santa Maria Maggiore,
I can see long, straight streets
stretching for miles up and down
and each ending in front
of a famous church.
Down there is St John Lateran.
And in the opposite direction
is Santa Trinità dei Monti.
And in each of the piazzas
are Egyptian obelisks,
symbols of that god-directed state
which Rome had superseded.
Papal Rome - the Rome of Sixtus V.
It's the most grandiose piece
of town planning ever attempted
and it anticipated by 50 years
all the great town plans
of France and Germany.
And the amazing thing is that
it was done only a generation
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
that the papacy's only course
was to face the facts.
Accept its dependence on the gold
of America, doled out through Spain.
Well, as you can see, this didn't happen.
Rome and the Church of Rome
regained many of the territories
it had lost
and became once more
a great spiritual force.
But was it a civilising force?
In England, we tend to answer no.
We've 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 outpouring of human genius
in the service of God
which is made triumphantly visible to us
every step we take in Baroque Rome.
(# GIOVANELLI: Nunc Dimittis)
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, 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've had a look
at the Rome of the Popes.
The first thing that strikes one
is that those who say
that the Renaissance had exhausted
the Italian genius are wrong.
After 1527, there was a moment
of discouragement,
a failure of confidence, and no wonder.
Historians 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 had witnessed it.
Michelangelo's Last Judgment,
which was commissioned by Clement VII
as a kind of atonement for the Sack,
fills the whole end wall
of the Sistine Chapel behind me.
It's a disturbing, a crushing work.
Most of the figures
are embodiments of fear or despair.
Look at the damned being ferried
across the Styx.
If you compare them
with The Creation of Adam on the ceiling,
you can see that something very drastic
has happened to the foremost
imagination of Christendom.
Michelangelo had been reluctant
to undertake The Last judgment.
Under Clement's successor,
Paul III Faroese,
he was persuaded to continue it,
although with rather a different purpose.
It ceased to be an act of atonement
or an attempt to externalise a bad dream
and became the first and greatest
assertion of the Church's power,
and the fate that would befall
heretics and schismatics.
The Last Judgment
belongs to a period of severity
when the Catholic Church
was approaching its problems
in rather the same puritanical spirit
as the Protestants.
It's curious that this period should
have been inaugurated by Paul III,
because he was in many ways
the last of the humanist popes.
He was cradled in corruption.
He was made a cardinal because
his sister, known as La Bella,
had been the mistress
of Alexander Borgia.
At first sight, he looks a crafty old fox.
But if you look at Titian's
portrait of him in Naples -
one of the greatest portraits
ever painted -
it's a wise, old head,
and the longer you look,
the more impressive it becomes.
And he took the two decisions that were
successfully to counter the Reformation.
He sanctioned the Jesuit Order
and he instituted the Council of Trent.
For almost 20 years,
several hundred bishops and cardinals
from all over the Catholic world
met in the Cathedral of Trent
to discuss the future of the Church.
There was a good deal of high politics
as well as theology.
But in the end, the Council did draw up
a plan for the Catholic revival
which held good right up
to the middle of the 19th century.
Michelangelo could refuse him nothing.
He not only finished
The Last Judgment,
but in 1546 he accepted from the Pope
the post of architect of St Peter's.
Thus Michelangelo, by his longevity
no less than by his genius,
became the visual link between the
Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation.
One of the reasons why
medieval and Renaissance architecture
is so much better than our own
is that the architects were artists,
individual artists of genius.
The master masons of the Gothic cathedrals
started as carvers working on the portals.
In the Renaissance, Brunellesco was
originally a sculptor, Bramante a painter.
And of the great architects whom we
shall see later on in the programme,
Pietro da Cortona was a painter
and Bernini was a sculptor.
And this has given to their work
a power of plastic invention,
a sense of proportion and articulation
based on the study of the human figure,
which knowledge
of the tensile strength of steel
and other prerequisites of modern
building doesn't always produce.
Well, of all non-professional architects,
Michelangelo was the most adventurous,
the least constrained either by classicism
or functional requirements.
Not that he was unpractical.
He did drawings for the
fortification of Florence
which, from standards
of military necessities,
are most ingenious and are also like
the most superb works of abstract art.
For that matter, all his ground plans
are thrilling abstract designs.
But he felt himself free to play
with the elements of architecture
in such a way as to express his feelings,
and, as so often happens
with a great artist,
they were prophetic feelings.
You can see what I mean
in the building that stands behind me -
the Palazzo dei Conservatori
here on the Capitol of Rome.
Grandeur and obedience.
Well, it's grand all right.
And if man is to take any pride
in his history,
the Roman Capitol should be grand.
But the extraordinary thing
is how Michelangelo
has expressed in his architecture
the principle of subordination.
In an early Renaissance building,
the parts maintained their identity
with a harmonious independence.
In the Michelangelo facade, everything
is subordinate to powerful rhythms
that run right through the building.
He gave his immense authority
to the device of a single pilaster
running up through two storeys.
We know in Renaissance architecture,
and in Roman buildings for that matter,
you had one column per storey,
one on top of the other.
In this building, the small columns
are pressed into the foot
of the giant pilaster.
They don't assert themselves,
they simply add to its power.
And these commanding verticals are met
by even more assertive horizontals.
And the inevitable collision
of these two directions
gives the building
an extraordinary feeling of energy.
It seems as dramatically tense
as the human situation.
Perhaps only Michelangelo
had the energy of spirit to pull together
the vast inchoate mass of St Peter's.
Four admirable architects
had worked on it before him.
The central piers were already built
and part of the surrounding walls,
but le was able to give it
the unifying stamp of his own character.
(# MONTEVERDI: Toccata from L'Orfeo)
It's the most sculptural
of all his designs,
perhaps the grandest piece
of architecture ever built.
A vast, simple unit
that carries the eye round
as if it were the carving of a torso.
People don't always appreciate
the awe-inspiring grandeur
of the walls and cornices of St Peter's,
but everybody knows the dome.
For centuries, lovers of art
have gone into ecstasies
about its noble energetic arc, expressive
of Michelangelo's spiritual aspirations.
It is perhaps the most
commanding dome in the world,
easily dominating the other Roman cupolas
one sees as one looks across the city.
However, all the evidence suggests
that it does not represent
Michelangelo's final intention.
As you can see in this print,
he wanted it to be much more spherical,
less pointed.
It was, in fact, designed
by an architect called Della Porta
after Michelangelo's death.
Well, we can go on admiring it
and think rather more of Della Porta.
The last stone of the dome of St Peter's
was put in place in 1590,
a few months before the death of Sixtus V.
The long period of austerity
and consolidation was almost over.
The Catholic Church was victorious.
How had that victory been achieved?
In England, most of us
were brought up to believe
that it depended on the Index,
the Jesuits and the Inquisition.
Well, I don't believe that a great
outburst of creative energy,
such as took place in Rome
between 1620 and 1640,
can be the result of negative factors.
But I do admit that
the civilisation of those years
did depend on certain assumptions
that are out of favour
in England and America today.
The first of these, of course,
was the belief in authority,
the absolute authority
of the Roman Church.
And this belief extended
to sections of society
which we now assume to be
naturally rebellious, like artists.
It comes as something of a shock
to find that, with a single exception,
the great artists of the time
were all sincere, conforming Christians.
Guercino spent much
of his mornings in prayer.
Bernini frequently went into retreats
and practised the spiritual
exercises of St Ignatius.
Even Rubens attended Mass
every morning before beginning work.
This conformism wasn't
based on fear of the Inquisition
but on the simple belief that the faith
which had inspired the great saints
of the preceding generation -
saints like St Filippo Neri -
was something by which
a man should regulate his life.
The mid-16th century was a period
of sanctity in the Roman Church
almost equal to the 12th.
St John of the Cross,
the great poet of mysticism.
St Ignatius Loyola, the visionary soldier
turned psychologist.
St Teresa of Avila,
the great headmistress
with her irresistible combination
of mystical experience and common sense.
And St Carlo Borromeo,
the austere administrator.
One doesn't need to be a practising
Catholic to feel immense respect
for a half-century that could produce
these great spirits.
However, I'm not trying to pretend
that this episode
in the history of civilisation
was of value chiefly because of its
influence on artists or philosophers.
On the contrary,
I think that intellectual life
developed more fully
in the freer atmosphere of the North.
The great achievement
of the Catholic Church
lay in harmonising, humanising, civilising
the deepest impulses of ordinary people.
Harmonising, humanising, civilising.
Take the cult of the Virgin.
In the early 12th century,
the Virgin had been
the supreme protectress of civilisation.
She had taught a race of tough
and ruthless barbarians
the virtues of tenderness and compassion.
The great cathedrals of the Middle Ages
were her dwelling places upon Earth.
And then in the Renaissance,
while remaining the Queen of Heaven,
she became also the human mother
in whom everyone could recognise
those qualities
of warmth and love and approachability.
Now, imagine the feelings
of a simple-hearted man or woman -
a Spanish peasant, an Italian artisan -
on hearing that the Northern heretics
were insulting the Virgin,
desecrating her sanctuaries,
pulling down or decapitating her images.
He must have felt something deeper
than indignation.
He must have felt that some part of his
whole emotional life was threatened.
And he would have been right.
The stabilising, comprehensive
religions of the world,
the religions which penetrate
to every part of a man's being -
in Egypt, India, China -
gave the female principle of creation
almost as much importance as the male
and wouldn't have taken seriously
a philosophy
that failed to include them both.
Of course, I'm bound to say that
these are all what HG Wells called
"communities of obedience".
The aggressive, nomadic societies -
what he called "communities of will" -
Israel, Islam, the Protestant North,
conceived their gods as male.
Now, it's a curious fact
that the male religions
have produced
very little religious imagery,
in most cases
have positively forbidden it.
The great religious art of the world
in every country
is deeply involved
with the female principle.
Of course, the ordinary Catholic
who prayed to the Virgin
wasn't conscious of any of this.
Nor was he or she interested in the
really baffling theological problems
presented by the doctrine
of the Immaculate Conception.
He knew simply that heretics
wanted to deprive him
of that sweet, compassionate,
approachable being
who would intercede for him,
as his mother might have interceded
with a hard master.
Take another human impulse
that can be harmonised
but shouldn't be suppressed -
the impulse to confess.
The historian can't help observing how
the need for confession has returned,
even - or especially -
in the land of the Pilgrim Fathers.
The difference is that instead
of confession being followed
by a simple, comforting rubric which has
behind it the weight of divine authority,
the modern confessor must grope his way
into the labyrinth of the psyche
with all its false turnings
and dissolving perspectives -
a noble aim,
but a terrifying responsibility.
No wonder that psychoanalysts have
the highest suicide rate of any vocation.
And perhaps, after all, the old procedure
had something to recommend it,
because, as a rule, it's the act
of confession that matters,
not the attempted cure.
The leaders of the Catholic restoration
had made the inspired decision
notto go halfway to meet Protestantism
in any of its objections,
but rather to glory
in those very doctrines
that the Protestants had most forcibly,
sometimes, it must be admitted,
most logically, repudiated.
Luther had repudiated
the authority of the Pope.
Very well, no pains must be spared
to make a gigantic assertion
that St Peter, the first Bishop of Rome,
had been divinely appointed
as Christ's vicar on Earth.
Ever since Erasmus, intelligent men in the
North had spoken scornfully of relics.
Very well, their importance
must be magnified,
so that the four piers of St Peter's
itself are gigantic reliquaries.
This one contained parts of the lance
that pierced Our Lord's side.
And in front of it stands Longinus,
looking up with a gesture
of dazzled enlightenment.
The veneration of relics was connected
with the cult of the saints,
and this had been equally condemned
by the reformers.
Very well, the saints should be made
more insistently real to the imagination,
and, in particular,
their sufferings and their ecstasies
should be vividly recorded.
In all these ways, the Church
gave imaginative expression
to deep-seated human impulses.
And it had another great strength,
which one may say was part
of Mediterranean civilisation,
or at any rate, a legacy
from the pagan Renaissance -
it was not afraid of the human body.
Titian's Assumption Of The Virgin,
a Baroque picture almost
100 years before its time,
was painted in the same period
as his great celebrations of paganism.
Early in the 16th century,
Titian had given his immense authority
to this union of dogma and sensuality.
And, when the first puritan influence
of the Council of Trent was over,
Titian's work was there to inspire both
Rubens, who made superb copies of it...
...and, I think, Bernini.
Protestantism, in its overzealous
condemnation of sins of the flesh,
had also cut itself off from the kind
of the comforting physical presence
that one finds in Bernini's Charity.
For all these reasons,
the art we call Baroque was a popular art.
The art of the Renaissance had appealed
through intellectual means -
geometry, perspective, knowledge of
antiquity - to a small group of humanists.
The Baroque appealed through the emotions
to the widest possible audience.
Sometimes it does so
by dramatic illustration.
This is The Calling of St Matthew
by Caravaggio,
who was, on the whole, the greatest,
certainly the most original,
painter of the period,
and like many other artists of the time,
he uses a means of communication
that reminds one of the films.
Caravaggio experimented -
as you see here -
with violent contrasts of light and shade
that were popular
in high-brow films of the '20s.
And later Baroque artists, like Bernini,
delighted in the emotive close-up,
the tears and open lips
and restless movement,
all those devices that were to be
rediscovered in the movies.
The extraordinary thing
is that the Baroque artist did it in
bronze and marble, and not on celluloid.
Of course, in a way,
it is a frivolous comparison,
because however much
one admires the films,
one must admit that they are
often vulgar, always ephemeral,
whereas the work of Bernini
is ideal and eternal.
He was a very great artist,
and although his work may seem
to lack the awe-inspiring seriousness
and concentration of Michelangelo,
it was, in its century,
even more pervasive and influential.
He not only gave Baroque Rome
its character
but he was the chief source
of an international style
that spread all over Europe,
as Gothic had done
and as the Renaissance style never did.
He was dazzlingly precocious.
At the age of 16, one of his carvings
was bought by the Borghese family,
and by the time he was 20,
he was already commissioned
to do a portrait
of the Borghese Pope, Paul V.
In the next three years, he became
more skilful in the carving of marble
than any sculptor has ever been,
before or since.
His David, in contrast with
the static David of Michelangelo,
catches the sudden twist of action.
And the vehement expression
of the head is almost overdone.
Actually, it is a self-portrait
of the young Bernini,
who made a face into a mirror,
a mirror said to have been
held for him by his patron,
the Cardinal Scipione Borghese.
The Apollo and Daphne is an even
more extraordinary example
of how marble can be made
into something fluid and fleeting,
because it represents the moment when
Daphne, crying for help to her father,
is changed into a laurel tree.
Her fingers are becoming leaves already.
It's just beginning
to dawn on Apollo that he's lost her.
And if he could look down,
he would see that her beautiful legs
are already turning into a tree trunk.
And her toes are becoming
roots and tendrils.
All these brilliant works were done
for the Borghese family.
It was very bright of them
to commission so young a man,
but by the 1620s,
the rich Roman families,
who were, in fact,
the families of successive popes,
had begun to compete
as patrons and collectors,
often in a somewhat piratical manner.
One's reminded of the competition
between the monster American
collectors of 60 years ago -
Mr Frick, Mr Morgan -
with the difference that the Roman patrons
competed for the works of living artists,
not simply for certified old masters.
The leading Roman families put painters
under contract, like television stars,
and the painters really got paid,
which they never did in the Renaissance.
As often happens, I believe,
a sudden relaxation and affluence
after a period of austerity
produced creative energy.
The 1620s were relaxed, all right,
as one can see
from Bernini's portrait of that most
affluent cardinal, Scipione Borghese.
Of all these papal families, one easily
outshone the rest - the Barberini.
This was due to the pontificate
of Matteo Barberini
who, in 1623, became Pope Urban VIII.
He survived as Pope for 20 years
but, as he himself foresaw,
he survives in history very largely
because he was the patron of Bernini.
At the time of Urban's accession,
Bernini was only 25.
And the very next year
he was made architect of St Peter's -
a project that was to occupy him
for more than 40 years.
And at the end of that time
he had made visible
the victory of the Catholic church.
The pilgrim approaching St Peter's
before Bernini would have found himself
in a venerable and picturesque quarter
of the city with a few large buildings
isolated from one another
by trees and meadows,
individually grand, but not making the
impact of a complete architectural idea.
Now imagine his experiences
after Bernini had done his work.
He would cross the Ponte St Angelo
with its marble angels
from Bernini's workshop,
and from the other side
make his way to Bernini's piazza.
Bernini is perhaps
the only artist in history
who has been able to carry through
such a vast design over so long a period.
And the result is a unity of impression
that exists nowhere else
on so grand a scale.
(# GABRIELI: Canzon Primi Toni)
Then, when our pilgrim passes
through the enormous facade,
the feeling of complete unity of style
is maintained.
You can get a better impression
of the interior of St Peter's
from this painting than from a photograph.
It was painted 200 years ago
but, in fact, very little has changed.
Not only is the decoration basically all
conceived by Bernini in a uniform style,
but the eye passes without a break
through the baldachino
and up to that astonishing construction,
the Throne of St Peter.
But perhaps what would have
impressed our pilgrim most of all
would have been the bronze baldachino.
Bernini started work on it in the year
that he became the architect
of St Peter's,
and it's incredible. Yes, if one knows
anything about bronze casting,
it really ls incredible.
It involved every sort
of engineering difficulty.
And then there's the amazing richness
and audacity of Bernini's invention
and the perfection of craftsmanship
which extends to every detail.
More extraordinary still,
Bernini seems already
to have foreseen in his imagination
what the whole development
of St Peter's would be like,
because this work,
which is the first thing he designed,
is completely in harmony
with the great progression of works
executed over the whole span of 40 years.
I believe that anyone who uses
his eyes without prejudice
will find his emotions
stirred and enlarged
by these marvellous experiences.
As we enter this world
of light and movement,
of weightless angels and billowing bishops
and tumbling cherubs,
we are ourselves no longer
weighed down by earthly things.
We participate imaginatively,
as we do at a ballet,
in an ecstatic repudiation
of the forces of gravity.
But the word "ballet”
suddenly puts me on my guard.
It was no accident that Bernini was
the greatest scene designer of his age.
John Evelyn, the diarist, records how
in 1644 he went to the opera in Rome,
where Bernini painted the scenes,
cut the statues, invented the engines,
composed the music,
wrote the comedy and built the theatre.
And we are told that
at Bernini's productions,
people in the front row
ran out of the theatre,
fearing they would be drenched
by water or burnt by fire,
so powerful was the illusion
that he created.
Of course, these stage sets
have all vanished,
but we have some evidence
of what they were like
in the fountain that Bernini designed
for the Piazza Navone here behind me.
It's an astonishing performance.
A sizeable Egyptian obelisk
is lifted up on a hollow rock
as if it weighed no more than a ballerina.
And round the rock
are four gigantic figures
symbolising the four
great rivers of the world.
First of all, the Danube,
with its symbolic animal, the horse,
emerging from a grotto,
said to be the only part of the monument
carved by Bernini himself.
Incidentally, it's the portrait
of a real horse called Monte d'Oro.
And then the Nile,
with a rather ridiculous lion.
And then the Ganges,
shrouded from the sun.
And finally the River Plate,
symbolised by heaven knows
what sort of fabulous crocodile.
The Plate seems to be
reeling back in horror,
and the people of Rome used to maintain
that he was showing his alarm
at the sight of the church facade
by Bernini's only serious rival,
the architect Borromini.
Of this theatrical element in Bernini,
a sublime example is the Cornaro Chapel
in Santa Maria delta Vittoria.
To begin with, Bernini has represented
the members of the Cornaro family
on either side of the chapel
looking as if they were in boxes,
waiting for the curtain to go up.
And when we come to the drama itself,
it's presented exactly
as if it were on a small stage,
with a spotlight falling
on the protagonists.
But at this point the theatrical
parallel must be dropped,
because what we see -
The Ecstasy Of Santa Teresa -
is one of the most deeply moving works
in European art.
Bernini's gift of sympathetic imagination,
of entering into the emotions of others -
a gift no doubt enhanced by his practice
of St Ignatius's spiritual exercises -
is used to convey the rarest
and most precious of all emotional states,
that of religious ecstasy.
He's illustrated exactly the passage
in the saint's autobiography
in which she describes
the supreme moment of her life,
how an angel with a flaming
golden arrow pierced her heart repeatedly.
"The pain was so great
that I screamed aloud,
"but simultaneously felt
such infinite sweetness
"that I wished the pain to last eternally.
"It was the sweetest caressing
of the soul by God."
(CHOIR SINGS Gloria Patri)
I don't think that anyone can accuse me of
underestimating the Catholic restoration
or its greatest image-maker,
Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
So may I end by saying that this episode
in the history of civilisation
arouses in me certain misgivings.
And they may be summed up in the words
"illusion" and "exploitation".
Of course, all art
is to some extent an illusion.
It transforms experience in order
to satisfy some need of the imagination.
But there are degrees of illusion,
depending on how far from direct
experience the artist is prepared to go.
Bernini went very far. Just how far
one realises when one remembers
the historical Santa Teresa, with her
plain, dauntless, sensible face.
The contrast with the
swooning, sensuous beauty
of the Cornaro Chapel is almost shocking.
One can't help feeling
that affluent Baroque,
in its escape from the severities of the
earlier fight against Protestantism,
ended by escaping from reality
into a world of illusion.
Art creates its own momentum
and once set on this course
there was nothing it could do except
become more and more sensational.
And this is what happens
in the breathtaking performances
that take place over our heads,
in the Gesù and Sant'Ignazio
and the Palazzo Barberini.
We feel that the stopper is out.
Imaginative energy is fizzing away
up into the clouds
and will soon evaporate.
As for my other misgivings,
of course there was exploitation
before the 16th century,
but never on so vast a scale.
In the Middle Ages
it was usually accompanied
by real popular participation.
Even in the Renaissance,
palaces were to some extent
seats of government
and objects of local pride.
But the colossal palaces
of the popes' relatives
were simply expressions
of private greed and vanity.
Faroese, Borghese,
Barberini, Ludovisi -
these rapacious parvenus
spent their short years of power
competing as to who should build
the largest and most ornate saloons.
In doing so, they commissioned
some great works of art
and one can't help admiring
their shameless courage.
At least they weren't mean and furtive,
like some modern millionaires.
But their contribution to civilisation
was limited to this kind
of visual exuberance.
The sense of grandeur
is, no doubt, a human instinct,
but carried too far,
it becomes inhuman.
I wonder if a single thought
that has helped forward the human spirit
has ever been conceived
or written down in an enormous room.