1 Here, the word “holocaust” is given its earlier and correct meaning: a multiple sacrifice and incineration which is pleasing to the Lord, not the mass murder of an unwilling people.
2 Mithraism was practiced by the pirates whom Pompey suppressed in 67. It took hold in ancient Rome in the first century B.C.E. Its spread was so rapid that the Emperor Commodus was initiated into the cult at the end of the second century C.E., and it was an important factor in the religious initiation of Julian the Apostate, in the fourth century.
5
Medieval Rome and Avignon
Roman Christianity began (largely) as an imperial project. That is to say, it came up from below but was consolidated on high. The first Christian churches in Rome, such as the first Saint Peter’s, were paid for by the emperors, notably by Constantine. This was bound to change as the Church accumulated power, prestige, and money—as the political concept we think of as the Papal States replaced the older forms of the Roman Empire, as the Papacy took over from the Imperium. The building that most vividly marks this transition is Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the city’s earliest pilgrimage churches, atop the Esquiline Hill. In this undertaking, for the first time, the onus of church building shifted from the emperor to the pope.
Santa Maria Maggiore has been so much restored and rebuilt that almost nothing visible in it today, except for its mosaics, dates from before the Renaissance. The original foundation of the church, however, was made by Pope Liberius in 352–56. It was financed by a childless rich Roman patrician couple, who wished to make a spectacular offering to Mary, the mother of Jesus. Near the site of this church had been a Roman temple dedicated to a goddess of childbirth, Juno Lucina, much frequented by women in late pregnancy; the raising of a basilica to the Christian birth goddess, Mary, in such a spot is one of the direct transferences of pagan into Christian cult in which the early history of Christian Rome abounds. It is also called the Church of Our Lady of the Snow, because of a miraculous snowfall that supposedly took place outside it in August, at the height of the Roman summer, perhaps in 358. In memory of this supposed event, every year a bagful of white petals is shaken free high up inside the nave and allowed to drift to the floor.
The outstanding works of art in Santa Maria Maggiore are the apse mosaics, depicting the Coronation of the Virgin, by the thirteenth-century painter Jacopo Torriti, who had worked on frescoes for the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi and came to Rome to work for the Franciscan Pope Nicholas IV in the 1280s. In them, the figure of the Virgin has equal importance and size with that of her Son, Jesus—an iconographic invention which would soon become commonplace, but was not at the time. The chronicler Gregorovius described how the apse mosaic “fills the building with a solemn golden splendour that is more than earthly. When illumined by the sunlight falling through the purple curtains, it reminds us of that glowing heaven, bathed in whose glories Dante saw SS. Bernard, Francis, Dominic, and Bonaventura. Then the spell of the work seizes us with its radiance like the music of some majestic anthem.”
This is one of the few mosaic works in Rome that one may compare, in grandeur and intensity, to the Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna. Another is to be found in one of the ancient Roman churches, that of Saints Cosmas and Damian. Its history is actually much older than Christianity, since it was built, in the early sixth century C.E., into and on top of two Roman structures whose remains stood in the Forum of Vespasian. One of these was the Temple of Romulus—not Romulus the legendary cofounder of the city, but one Valerius Romulus, son of the Emperor Maxentius, who died in 309 and was designated a Roman god, with a Roman basilica raised in his honor. The other, adjacent to it, was the Biblioteca Pacis or Library of Peace. Both these sites were given by Theodoric the Great, the Christian king of the Ostrogoths, and his daughter Amalasuntha, to Pope Felix IV (reigned 526–30).
The pope had the idea of uniting the two buildings with a new structure over them, which was dedicated to a pair of Arab Christian doctors, Cosmas and Damian, brothers martyred during the persecutions of Diocletian. The pope seems to have meant it to be a Christian version of, or answer to, the cult of the pagan twins Castor and Pollux, to whom a nearby temple had been dedicated. Fortunately, this radical change did not end in the destruction of the old temple fabric; in fact, the Temple of Romulus, which now serves as a vestibule to the church, compares to the Pantheon as the best-preserved ancient temple in Rome.
The finest thing about the church, however, is the sixth-century mosaic in its apse, depicting the parousia or Second Coming of Christ.
In its center, his right arm extended in a gesture of recognition and blessing of the faithful, is Jesus Christ, robed in gold and descending a heavenly stair of many-colored clouds, in whose strata pink and crimson predominate, fading out to silvery gray as the eye moves higher.
It is, almost literally, a stairway to Paradise.
On the right of Jesus is Saint Peter, and on the left Saint Paul, both in white Roman togas; they are ushering the martyrs Cosmas and Damian into his divine presence. The new saints carry martyr’s crowns. On the far left is Pope Felix, holding a model of his new church; a figure of Saint Theodore, or more likely the Emperor Theodoric, the donor of the site, appears on the far right. Below this zone, which fills the curving wall of the apse, is a band of mosaic sheep, those ancient symbols of obedience—the flock of the faithful. There are twelve of them, symbolizing the twelve apostles.
Rome has seven chief pilgrimage churches, the greatest of which is the Basilica of Saint Peter, where the apostle and first pope was allegedly buried after his martyrdom. The others are the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, San Giovanni in Laterano (the actual cathedral of Rome), Saint Sebastian Outside the Walls, Santa Maria Maggiore (the greatest church dedicated specifically to the cult of Jesus’ mother, Mary), Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, and Saint Lawrence Outside the Walls. The “walls” in each case are the Aurelian wall, erected around 271–75 C.E. to girdle the city. Only one of them, Saint Sebastian Outside the Walls, has no works of art of special interest; its attraction—now much diminished, because of the general loss of interest in the cult of relics as distinct from the drawing-power of famous works of art—lay in its relics, among which is a stone carrying the footprints of Jesus, an arrow which once pierced the body of that popular third-century martyr Saint Sebastian, and a fragment of the column to which he was tied while his fellow soldiers, having learned of his Christian conversion, shot at him. Of course, other pilgrimage churches do contain artworks, some of them fine; but the emphasis had always been more on their saintly associations than on their quality, sometimes very slight, as aesthetic objects.
The Church of Saint Lawrence was dedicated to San Lorenzo, the deacon martyred by the Emperor Valerian in the year 258.
Pious legend (no more than that) has it that the Holy Grail, the cup, dish, or chalice from which Christ and his apostles drank at the Last Supper, which had contained the wine converted into his holy blood, passed into Saint Peter’s hands and thence to Saint Lawrence’s safekeeping, and that he hid it: in Huesca, Spain, during the third century, according to one version, or in the sanctuary of Montserrat in Catalunya, by another. Yet another version of Grail fantasy has the precious chalice entrusted to the protection of the Knights Templar. A fourth places it in the hands of a noble Irish family, the Dwyers; a fifth holds (insecurely) that it was brought to Lake Memphremagog in Canada a century before Columbus sailed the Atlantic. There are many versions of the post-crucifixion wanderings of the Grail, some pseudo-historical, others openly fictional, all of them absurd.1 Several Roman churches are dedicated to Saint Lawrence. The place of his burning is marked by the minor Church of San Lorenzo in Panisperna. His supposed burial spot is commemorated by the pilgrimage Church of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura. The two chief relics of his martyrdom are a gridiron on which he was supposedly roasted (in another Roman church, San Lorenzo in Lucina) and his burned head, kept in a reliquary in the Vatican but not, it seems, regularly shown to the faithful. Considering what this gruesome souvenir might look like after the ravages of fire and time, that may be just as well.