Rome

C’e st’illuminazzione bbenedetta,

Che tt’intontissce e tte fa pperde er fiato?

??????What people, and what sovereign,

??????Have in their home a little dome

??????Like that of our Saint Peter in the Vatican?

??????In what other city, in what other country,

??????Is there this blessed light

??????That stuns you and takes your breath away?

The answer is still essentially what it was back then, in 1834: Rome, and only Rome. So, too, “classical,” in the Roman sense, suggests something solider, more enduring, than the Greek. For all its glories, and for all the legacy it left in art, thought, and politics, Greek civilization did perish. That of Rome is still somewhat with us. One would need to be strangely indifferent not to appreciate what Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 330–95 C.E.), writing after the effective collapse of the great empire, had to say about Constantine’s arrival there in 357, for there is a little Constantine left in all our reactions, in our undying sense of astonishment at this city of prodigious and overweening ambition (italics my own):

Then, as he surveyed the sections of the city and the suburbs … he thought that whatever first met his gaze towered above all the rest; the sanctuaries of Tarpeian Jove so far surpassing as things divine excel those of earth; the baths built up in the manner of provinces; the huge bulk of the Amphitheater, strengthened by its framework of travertine, to whose top human eyesight barely ascends; the Pantheon like a round city-district, vaulted over in lofty beauty; and the exalted columns which rise like platforms to which one may mount, and bear the likeness of former emperors; the Temple of the City; the Forum of Peace; the Theater of Pompey, the Odeum, the Stadium, and in their midst the other adornments of the Eternal City. But when he came to the Forum of Trajan, a construction unique under heaven, as we believe, and admirable even in the unanimous opinion of the gods, he stood fast in amazement, turning his attention to the gigantic complex about him, beggaring description and

never again to be imitated by mortal men.

Epilogue

That summer evening of 1959, standing before the great statue of Marcus Aurelius during my first trip to Rome, I was struck with the sense that the Rome I was standing in was the Rome it had always been, and would continue to be—a pervasive naivete, I see now, born of crude imaginings. It has been interrupted, that sense of continuity broken, by the foul, corrosive breath of our own centuries. For their own protection from terrorism, the horse and rider have now been removed to the Capitoline Museum, and they have been replaced on Buonarotti’s pedestal with a replica. It won’t matter that many passersby won’t see that it is a replica. Just knowing it is will spoil the pleasure of its viewing.

What makes it worse is that whoever installed the great sculpture inside the Capitoline deprived it of its base and placed it slantwise, cantilevered out on an inclined ramp. This is vandalism. It is absolutely intrinsic to the meaning of the Marcus Aurelius that the horse and rider should be level and horizontal; otherwise, their firm authority is lost. In its new installation, slanting meaninglessly upward in a way Michelangelo would never have countenanced for an instant, the sculpture becomes a parody of the huge bronze of Peter the Great by the French sculptor Etienne-Maurice Falconet (1716–91), the “bronze horseman” of Pushkin’s poem, riding up his rock in Saint Petersburg. It would be very hard to imagine a more stupid treatment of a great sculpture than this: “design” run amok, vulgarizing the work it was meant to clarify, ignoring all ancient meanings for the sake of an illusion of “relevance” (to what?) and “originality” (if you don’t know the Falconet). But, unfortunately, that’s Rome now—a city which, to a startling extent, seems to be losing touch with its own nature, and in some respects has surrendered to its own iconic popularity among visitors.

The “tourist season” of Rome used to be confined, more or less, to the months of July and August, when the city was filled with visitors, when restaurants were overcrowded, hotels jammed, and reservations for anything hard to get. The principal “sights,” such as the Vatican Museums and the Sistine, were best skirted during those eight weeks, or even avoided, by the clued-in traveler. That is no longer feasible. Today this season has lengthened to embrace the whole year. And if you think the Sistine Chapel is a tad overcrowded now, just wait another five or ten years, when post-communist prosperity has taken hold in China and expresses itself as mass tourism. A good preparation in the present would be to visit the Louvre (if you haven’t done so already) and make for the gallery in which the Mona Lisa is displayed to a crowd: a fortress wall of blinking, clicking cameras, all taking bad, vaguely recognizable pictures of the picture, whose function is not to preserve and transmit information about Leonardo’s painting but to commemorate the fact that the camera’s owner was once in some kind of proximity to the insanely desired icon. All the high points of Rome will be like that, I gloomily think, before so very long. Some will survive it—at least partially; others cannot and will not, because it is not in the nature of works of art to do so. The closed spaces—museum galleries, churches, and the like—will suffer most; it will not make much difference to one’s experience of the Forum, not at first. But who can tell what the big outdoor spaces of Rome will begin to feel like once they have twice as many people in them, and their perimeters are jammed even more thickly with buses?

The degree to which the Sistine Chapel is overcrowded represents the kind of living death for high culture which lurks at the end of mass culture—an end which Michelangelo, of course, could not possibly have imagined, and which the Vatican is completely powerless to prevent (and would not even if it could, since the Sistine is such an important source of revenue for the Vatican). You cannot filter the stream. Either a museum is public, or it is not. To imagine some kind of cultural means-test and try to impose it on people who want to visit the Sistine Chapel is, of course, unthinkable. But since the Sistine is one of the two things (the other being Saint Peter’s Basilica itself) that every tourist in Rome has heard of and wants to see, the crush there is numbing; it defeats the possibility of concentration. At least the basilica is huge enough to accommodate crowds of people. The Sistine, and the way into it, are not.

It was not always like that. One reads in Goethe’s Italian Journey his account of walking more or less casually into the Sistine to escape the baking heat of the Roman summer, two hundred years ago. A cool, approachable place where one could be alone, or nearly so, with the products of genius. The very idea seems absurd today: a fantasy. Mass tourism has turned what was a contemplative pleasure for Goethe’s contemporaries into an ordeal more like a degrading rugby scrum. The crowd of ceiling seekers is streamed shoulder to shoulder along a lengthy, narrow, windowless, and claustrophobic corridor in which there is no turning back. At last it debouches into an equally crowded space, the chapel itself, which scarcely offers room to turn around. These are the most trying conditions under which I have ever looked at art—and over the past fifty years I have looked at a lot of art. Some of the arts benefit from being shared with a large audience. All kinds of music, whether rock-and-roll or piano recitals, seem to. Dance sometimes does, and so might theater and poetry readings. But the visual arts, especially painting and sculpture, do not. Throngs of other people just get in the way, blocking your view and exasperating your desire for silence with their overheard comments, which are always a distraction, even if they are intelligent—which they seldom are. Fellow humans are fellow humans, endowed with certain inalienable rights which we need not go into here, but you no more want to hear their reactions in front of a Titian or below a Michelangelo fresco than you would like to have your neighbor in a concert hall beating time on the arm