But where was it?
I raised my own lantern, sending the shadows shifting over the wall, casting light at last upon the door itself, which was slightly recessed in the wall.
There he knelt, Giordano Bruno himself—the true shadow of the man!
I had not expected this. No one had described him. In the Church records, there was no mention of the shadow’s posture.
As I have said, he was kneeling. His head leaned forward. In his perfect silhouette I could see the blunt, broken shape of his nose, barely touched to his upraised fingertips. His hands were together in prayer. Thus had the heretic portrayed himself— worshipful, dedicated, a devout shadow darkly captured on the door of his cell, imposed in turn on the inverted sky above (or beneath) the courtyard.
I brought my lamp close to his shadow. More than the perfectly rendered pillars, trees, and arches, it was Bruno’s own outline that fascinated me. I had seen him before, naturally, in his crumbling self-portraits. But those had been done in the brief days of his glory, most of them in Wittenberg. Here in Rome at the end of his life he seemed a different man, broken—
Yet not without his triumph.
He had achieved a great part of his aim, had he not? The wall bore testimony to the scope and practicality of his dreams. Here was miraculous evidence that fleeting man could collaborate with the immortal sun. He had proven it in the face of the Church’s ban on cameras, when all chiaroscurographers had been considered heretics— with Bruno merely the worst of them.
In 1591 Giordano Bruno had returned to Italy, his birthplace, in order to convince Pope Clement VIII that the camera and its images were divine in nature—direct gifts from God. Bruno had made a name for himself as a chiaroscurographer and philosopher of the camera. In his De umbris idearum, he had eloquently stated his thesis that no other instrument was so inspired by pure, heavenly principles. In its renderings of light and darkness, the camera seemed to Bruno the perfect tool for the Church, an actual key to the Kingdom of God, the City of the Sun. He pointed out that while the Bible was itself largely incomprehensible to the common man, these images—named chiaroscurographs by their inventor, Leonardo da Vinci—could be widely appreciated, highly instructive, and capable of infinite subtlety, surpassing even the interpretive powers of a Michelangelo, a Raphael.
But Bruno’s words had gone no farther than the porches of the papal ears. The Church had already condemned all camera images; the instrument itself was dubbed the Eye of the Devil. For it was blasphemy to think of collaborating with the sun. The hand of a painter at least was guided by God, who could thus reveal or disguise His plan as He saw fit. But this perfection—it was unholy! Clement himself had toyed briefly with the device—and with impunity, given his position—but he abandoned it as too complex and never looked kindly on the attempts of lesser men to “dabble in light.” So Bruno asked, How will we ever erect the City of God unless each man understands the design and knows his part in the building thereof?
Clement remained silent, averted his gaze. For Bruno, to be ignored was the greatest of hardships. He decided he must go beyond words to make his point. He must let the images themselves speak to the Church and to the common mind.
In Wittenberg, Bruno had been welcomed and much admired by the Lutherans. He had taught chiaroscurography at Luther’s own university until Calvinist scholars rose to power and drove him out, protesting in particular his scandalous use of the town’s young men and prostitutes in composing his more elaborate scenes. He had never lost his fondness for the memory of Martin Luther, and now he followed Luther’s example from the Diet of Worms—although in a style more true to his own extravagance. To the doors and walls of the Vatican he fastened a hundred of his images, the best of his life’s work. He hoped they would persuade the Church to reconsider its position. And indeed the Church did revise its previous attitude, much to Bruno’s misfortune.
That very morning, while Rome babbled of all it had seen or thought it had seen on the Vatican walls, Giordano Bruno was arrested. His camera was destroyed, his chiaroscurographs seized, and his soul confined to a dark cell where it was hoped that he would presently rot.
The Inquisition could not comprehend a creature that flourished in the dark. Apparently the masterpiece on his cell wall was the heresy that made all the others seem unbearable. Composed on Midsummer Day in 1599, it was not discovered until the following year. He was promptly burned at the stake, on February 17, 1600, like a martyr lit to warm in the chilly new century.
I marveled that the Inquisition had let the image stand.
For two hundred years no one had touched this wall. No other prisoner had occupied the cell. It had been sealed, toured occasionally by prison curators and Vatican scholars, and whispered of in imprecise terms. But it had not been destroyed. The Church kept it locked away but perfectly preserved, in the most perverse hypocrisy imaginable. They found the image intolerable and yet they treasured it, just as they treasure their pagan idols, their hundred-breasted Aphrodites, their forbidden books, and the thick compendiums of heretical chiaroscurographs which lie under lock and key in carefully humidified vaults in the Vatican library.
No one but those librarians and a few select others have been allowed to glimpse Bruno’s camera work for these two hundred years. I have looked on them. I have seen the hundred images he tacked defiantly to the Vatican wall. De imaginum, signorum et idearum compositione. They were seized by the Church so quickly that none of the public seemed quite sure of what they had witnessed. But those images will never leave my mind: softly lit nudes—male and female both. Adam and Eve stand gleaming like statues in a sunlit grove, their hands joined, staring up at the sun. No fig leaf hides Adam’s sex; no modest torsion of the pelvis obscures the folds of Eve’s thighs, the curls of her pubic hair.
A pale Madonna nurses a silver babe, her face half in darkness with one eye gleaming out of the darkly textured shadows.
A white dove’s weight curves the olive branch on which it rests, forming a precise and delicate arch that resembles the expression of some forbidden equation.
Sunlight on craggy mountains; sunlight on the towers of a walled town; pillars of sunlight falling through broken clouds, setting pools of fire upon a sea of grain.
White breasts, dark nipples, the faint gray stipple of pores—all against a background of deepest black.
A penis, uncircumcised, nested in dark curls. Another standing erect against a shadowed backdrop. I remember the smooth arch of pubic bone beneath the flesh. A couple entwined in a forest, their clothes piled at the base of a tree whose long branches stroke his back and her legs.
Images of dangerous beauty, of course these dominate the memory.
But had the scandalized church fathers even looked at half the images they snatched down? What of the street scenes? What of the portraits? These were the people of Bruno’s day, the people of any day. Laughing, grieving, beautiful, and disfigured. One was a man who posed for the sculptors of gargoyles, his face hideously contorted by a syndrome which has yet to be named. Then a succession of dark-eyed Magdalens, all of them different yet somehow similar. Bruno’s lovers? I wonder. I wonder that these marvels have survived.
The door creaked and swung open, taking Bruno’s captive shadow with it.