1 Of these the most popular was The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, a wretchedly ill-written but hugely successful tale in which the holy relic is secreted in a Scottish chapel and under the floor of the Louvre.
2 However, the Chapelle du Saint-Sang (Chapel of the Holy Blood) in Bruges claims to possess a phial containing drops of Jesus’s blood, collected by Joseph of Arimathea, which had been given to Thierry, count of Flanders, by the patriarch of Jerusalem in 1149. Other claimants to possession of specimens of this precious fluid are Weingarten Abbey in Germany and the cathedral of Menton in France. One of the rival Crowns of Thorns, acquired by Saint Louis, king of France, and kept in the Sainte-Chapelle, disappeared during the French Revolution and is unlikely to resurface except, perhaps, as a fake of a fake.
3 Among the survivors, which give at least a partial and fragmentary idea of Catharist belief and were preserved by the Catholics as examples of heresy, were The Book of Two Principles (an exposition of the Catharist doctrine that the world had two gods, one evil and one good), the Rituel cathare de Lyon, and the Nouveau Testament en provençal.
4 A papal bull, meaning an official declaration of policy from the pope, was so called because of the bulla or seal affixed to such documents, affirming their papal origin.
6
Renaissance
The overwhelming fact about architecture—the built, manmade environment—is that it tends to be the first thing you see in cities. It gives them their character. It is a thing in the world, irrefutably present, not an illusion like painting. So when we mention the word “Renaissance,” it is the architecture that comes to mind as the most potent symbol of that spirit of rebirth that swept European culture starting in the fourteenth century. Architecture refers, first and foremost, to large manmade things which afford shelter and gathering places to social groups and have a clear-cut political intent behind them. At the same time, the origin of these things, their roots, are often deeply buried and obscure. No single person “invented” Gothic architecture, and we will never know who was the first to lay a horizontal tree trunk across the tops of two vertical ones. But there has never been much dispute about who was the “father” of Renaissance architecture. He was Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), the son of a Florentine notary, who was (in Vasari’s words) “sent by Heaven to invest architecture with new forms, after it had wandered astray for many centuries.”
The new forms, of course, were old forms: those of ancient Rome. This picture of Brunelleschi as a savior sent from on high to redeem the art of building and rescue it from the barbarous, pointy-arched Gothic squalor into which it had fallen may seem, to put it mildly, a little simplified today—but, as far as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were concerned, it was the plain and only truth. Everything Brunelleschi designed and built, from the Ospedale degli Innocenti and the Pazzi Chapel to the immense octagonal dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, the cathedral that dominates the city, was done in his native Florence. But many of their prototypes, the structures and remnants by which his architectural thought was stimulated, were in Rome. Brunelleschi was no copyist, but he was wide open to inspiration from the remote past. The great dome of ancient Rome, the Pantheon, is not like Brunelleschi’s dome on Santa Maria del Fiore. It is a structure that relies entirely on mass, whereas Brunelleschi’s dome is a highly sophisticated framework covered with a membrane. Nevertheless, Brunelleschi derived his language of building all’antica from Rome, and part of the excitement his buildings still transmit comes from the rapturous sense of making the old new which accompanied his discovery of ancient architecture in Rome.
Curiously, although early humanists had talked quite a lot about the physical antiquities of Rome, none of them seem to have made a concentrated effort to examine and record the ruins before Brunelleschi. Ancient Roman texts, inscriptions, and manuscripts, eagerly sought and examined by literary humanists, were of course a different matter.
Little is known about Brunelleschi’s early life, but certainly he did not begin as an apprentice architect. Though his father expected him to be a civil servant like himself, the son showed early artistic ambitions, enrolling in the Arte della Seta, the Silkworkers’ Guild, among whose members were goldsmiths and bronze workers. He had a vocation for work in gold and semi-precious metals, diligently turning himself (wrote his first biographer, Antonio Manetti, 1423–97) into “a perfect master of niello, enamel, and colored or gilded ornaments in relief, as well as the cutting, splitting, and setting of precious stones. Thus in any work to which he applied himself … he always had wonderful success.” In 1398, he was recognized as a master goldsmith. His first important building, the Ospedale degli Innocenti, or Foundlings’ Hospital, in Florence, was paid for and commissioned by the goldsmiths’ guild in 1419 and finished around 1445. With its long portico of round arcades carried on eight-meter-high Corinthian columns, it was the first clear echo of classical Roman architecture in Florence. It had resulted from a study trip Brunelleschi had made with his friend the sculptor Donatello to Rome, after they had both been narrowly defeated by Lorenzo Ghiberti in the competition for the design of the east doors of the Baptistery of Florence Cathedral. Manetti has the disappointed Brunelleschi reflecting, “It would be a good thing to go and study where sculpture is really good,” and so, around 1402–4:
He went to Rome, for at that time there were plenty of good things that could be seen in public places. Some of the things are still there, though few. Many have since been stolen … by various pontiffs and cardinals, Romans and men of other nations. While looking at the sculpture, as he had a good eye and an alert mind, he saw the way the ancients built and their proportions.… He seemed to recognize quite clearly a certain order in their members and structural parts.… It looked very different from what was usual in those times. He proposed, while he was looking at the statues of the ancients, to devote no less attention to the order and method of building.
It must have been one of the great dramas of discovery in art’s history, a Quattrocento buddy movie: Brunelleschi and Donatello, one at each end of the measuring string, flushed with effort and determination, clambering over the ruins, chopping aside the entangling bushes and creepers, measuring heights, widths, and spacings, tirelessly noting inscriptions, discovering a lost Rome. It requires a real effort of imagination to envisage what Rome looked like in those far-off days. The Forum was a kind of wilderness with ruins, commonly referred to as the Campo Vaccino—the Cow Pasture—which it actually was, with animals grazing about. Shops, restaurants, workplaces—forget them. One traversed the place by stumbling hither and thither. Nothing was self-evident, as Roman ruins are today. The city was a jumble of fallen old columns and ruinous early walls, collapsed vaults, broken arches. The Roman natives who saw them at work on their quest for “the excellent and highly ingenious building methods of the ancients and their harmonious proportions” thought they were nothing more than crazy treasure-hunters—which in a sense they were. “Neither was bothered with family cares because neither had a wife or children.… Neither was much concerned with how he ate, drank, lived, or dressed himself, provided he could satisfy himself with these things to see and measure.”