A visit to the Roman catacombs

by J. Spencer Northcote

But alas! the work of destruction began almost as soon as it was discovered that there was anything to destroy; and the labours of the few who appreciated what had been found, and would fain have handed down to posterity an accurate account of it, could hardly keep pace with the destroyer. From the first there were a chosen few who laboured hard in this new field of Christian archæology—in particular, a Spanish Dominican friar and two young Flemish laymen; but the fruits of their labours were never given to the public; and when Bosio took the work in hand, only fifteen years after the date of the original discovery, the paintings in the crypts on the Via Salara had already been destroyed.

Bosio seems to have paid his first visit to the Catacombs, in company with the learned antiquarian Pompeo Ugonio and some others, on the 10th of December 1593. They penetrated into a catacomb about a mile distant from St. Sebastian’s, and having found their way to a lower level by means of an opening in the floor of one of the chapels, they incautiously proceeded so far, that when they wished to return they could not recognise the path by which they had come. To add to their perplexity and alarm, their lights failed them, for they had remained underground much longer than they had intended, and “I began to fear,” he says, “that I should defile by my vile corpse the sepulchres of the martyrs.” However, this accident did not damp his courage nor divert him from his purpose; he only took precautions against its recurrence, and then devoted himself for the remaining thirty-six years of his life to the thorough prosecution of the work he had begun. He gave himself up with untiring energy to researches in the bowels of the earth on the one hand, and among old books and manuscripts on the other. His industry in both was amazing. As to his literary labours, there are still extant some thousands of folio pages in his own handwriting, showing with what care he had read the Fathers, Greek, Latin, and Oriental; the collections of canons and councils, ecclesiastical histories, lives of the saints, and an immense number of theological treatises, including those of the schoolmen; in fact, every work within his reach in which he thought there was a chance of finding anything in illustration of his subject. He had also transcribed numerous Acts of the Martyrs, especially of those who had suffered in Rome, together with any other ancient records which promised to throw light upon the topography of the Christian cemeteries. And when he had learnt in this way something as to the probable position of a catacomb, then began the anxious, fatiguing, and even dangerous work of his subterranean researches. He would examine with the utmost diligence all the neighbouring fields and vineyards, in order to discover, if possible, some entrance by which he could penetrate; and often, after returning again and again to the same spot, his labour still remained unrewarded. At another time he would hear of some opening having been accidentally made into a catacomb, by the digging of a new cellar or a well; and on hastening to the spot, he would find perhaps that the whole place was so buried in ruins that ingress was impossible. Even when an entrance was once effected, he still had to force a passage, often by the labour of his own hands, through the accumulated rubbish of ages; for we must not suppose that the pioneers in the work of exploring the Catacombs after their rediscovery found the galleries clear and empty as they are seen by ordinary visitors at the present day; on the contrary, some were filled to the very roof with soil that had been washed down in the course of so many ages through the open luminaria; others had been the scene of wilful injury done by Goth or Lombard, or by neighbours nearer home seeking forbidden treasures, or only anxious to make use of caves and cellars which they found ready-made to their hands. In some places the roofs of the galleries and chambers had given way under the shock of earthquakes, or from the continual disturbance of the surface of the ground for the purposes of building or agriculture. In a word, the work of exploration was attended with very real danger, so that no Christian archæologist can ever speak of Antonio Bosio—the Columbus, as he is often and deservedly called, of this new world of subterranean Rome—without admiration and enthusiasm.

He was preparing to communicate to the world the fruits of all his toil, when he was cut off by death at the early age of fifty-four. His work, however, was published by others some five or six years later, in 1635. It was presently translated into German and Latin; an abridgment of it also was published in Holland, and at once the Catacombs resumed their ancient place as one of the wonderful sights of Rome which all intelligent travellers should visit. More visitors, however, were attracted by religious than by scientific motives, for Bosio’s book had been the means of recalling some to the Catholic faith; and it was obvious that a voice, issuing as it were from the graves of some of the very earliest professors of Christianity, had a right to claim a hearing amid the din of religious strife which was then raging. Moreover, the devotion of the faithful had been excited by the hope of finding the bodies of saints and martyrs still lying in their graves; and concessions were therefore made to certain religious communities, and even to pious individuals, to search for them. In this way excavations were going on in a number of places at once, quite independently of one another, and no trustworthy record was kept of any. At last, in 1688, all private concessions were finally revoked, and henceforward the matter was reserved entirely to official hands. Even so, however, the scientific history of the Catacombs scarcely fared better than before. The literature which appeared on the subject, with hardly an exception, was controversial or apologetic rather than archæological. Nobody followed the historical and topographical system of Bosio; so that from his death down to the year 1740 we have no chronicles of each new discovery as it was made, but only a number of independent treatises, on single epitaphs perhaps, or on some special class of ancient monuments, out of which a diligent reader may laboriously extract for himself some very imperfect account of the results of the excavations that were in progress. Then there followed another hundred years, during the greater part of which the Catacombs remained almost in the same obscurity in which they had been buried for so many ages before Bosio was born.

At the beginning of the present century, tokens of a reviving interest in them may be traced in the proceedings of the Roman Archæological Society. But it was not until the year 1840 that this interest spread to any wide circle. The main impulse to it was then given by Father Marchi, S.J., who had been appointed custode of the Catacombs, and devoted himself to their study. In 1841 he began to publish a work on the monuments of early Christian art. Only the first volume, however—on architecture—was ever published, and then it was abandoned, partly in consequence of the political troubles of the times, by which his own Order was so seriously affected, but chiefly because, through the new discoveries that were made, he became conscious of its grave imperfections. He saw that he had begun to publish prematurely. He had, however, imparted his own enthusiasm to one of his scholars, who was at first the frequent companion of his subterranean exploring expeditions, whom he soon recognised as a valuable fellow-labourer, and whom he finally urged in the most pressing manner to undertake the work which he found too great for his own failing strength. This scholar was Giovanni Battista de Rossi, a Roman gentleman of good family, who has now for more than thirty years devoted his means, time, and talents to the prosecution of the task intrusted to him.

It has been well said that “archæology, as tempered and directed by the philosophic spirit, and quickened with the life and energy of the nineteenth century, is a very different pursuit from the archæology of our forefathers, and has as little relation to their antiquarianism as modern chemistry and modern astronomy have to their former prototypes, alchemy and astrology;” and nowhere can the justice of this remark be more keenly appreciated than in comparing De Rossi’s works on the Catacombs with all that have gone before them. It is true that he has had some advantages which his predecessors had not; he has had access to newly recovered, or more carefully edited, documents, amongst which are even ancient guides to those sanctuaries, or at least exact descriptions of them, before they had been abandoned and their sacred treasures removed. He has also had the assistance, as intelligent as it has been indefatigable, of a brother whose mechanical genius has invented an instrument whereby the process of surveying and mapping any subterranean excavations has been rendered infinitely more easy, as well as more accurate, than it was before. But, after all, the chief secret of De Rossi’s wonderful success is to be sought for rather in his own patient industry, his scrupulous caution, and the excellence of his scientific method, than in any extraordinary superiority of his literary or physical apparatus. He has studied every monument in its own place. He has examined with his own eyes every detail of the subterranean topography where it has been possible to penetrate, and then recorded his observations with a minuteness of analysis which it is sometimes almost wearying to follow in print, and which nothing but the most enthusiastic love of truth and the most indomitable perseverance could have enabled him to execute in fact. Thus his conclusions are drawn from the monuments themselves; or rather, they are little more than a résumé of the observations he has had to record upon those monuments. He has had before him, and, as far as possible, he sets before his readers, the precise situation and the measurements of all the crypts and galleries on all the different levels, and even of the thousands upon thousands of the individual tombs throughout this Christian necropolis; he marks the place and characteristics of every inscription, painting, and other monument he comes across in them; then, side by side with this immense mass of data, so important and so entirely trustworthy, he places every shred of old historical documents that he knows of, and which he thinks capable of throwing any light upon them; and finally proceeds to interpret them according to the very best rules of archæological criticism. The result has been a reconstruction of the history of the Catacombs, and in part also of their geography, in such perfect accord with all the facts and phenomena of the case, that there is probably no group of ancient monuments which can now be classified more exactly and with greater certainty than those in the Roman Catacombs.

CHAPTER V.
THEIR PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURE.

There is no branch of Christian archæology in which the labours of De Rossi have produced a more startling revolution than in the history of Christian art. When the Reformers of the sixteenth century protested against the use of pictures and images in churches, and boldly declared that it was contrary to the practice of primitive ages, Catholics had no monuments to appeal to in refutation of such a statement. The remains of the Christian literature of those times were scanty, and more or less silent upon the subject, and the paintings in the Catacombs were buried in darkness. Even when they were brought to light, it was not easy at once to speak positively as to their chronology. By and by, in proportion as the Catacombs were more explored, and it became possible to compare the paintings of one cemetery with those of another, and all of them with the paintings of Pompeii, the baths of Titus, the tomb of the Nasones, and other newly-recovered Pagan monuments whose ages were known, Catholic writers began to assume a bolder tone, and to claim a greater antiquity for the Christian use of painting than they had done before. Still it was impossible to fix any dates with precision so long as men confined themselves to the examination of single monuments, illustrating them perhaps with great learning, but without reference to the place where each monument had been found, the circumstances under which it had been executed, its connection with the history of the period, and the internal and external development of the Christian community at the time and place to which it belonged.

Now the Roman Catacombs are a vast gallery of ancient Christian art. Single specimens, indeed, may exist elsewhere, and wherever they are found they deserve attentive examination; but it is obvious that the largest and most valuable collection in the world is to be found in subterranean Rome; and here, if anywhere, the subject may be thoroughly sifted and settled. It is to the minuteness of the topographical researches of De Rossi that we are indebted for the solid basis on which the earliest chapters of the history of Christian art can now be made to rest. His plan here, as well as in every other branch of his subject, has been simply to note all he sees; and then, when he has collected sufficient materials, to arrange and generalise, not according to any preconceived theory of classification, but absolutely according to the strict, stern facts before him. If these facts, arranged in their true historical and geographical order, present a harmonious whole, and suggest or support a theory which can otherwise be shown to be probable, he accepts it gladly; if not, he is content to leave the facts to speak for themselves, and to trust to further discoveries, or to the ingenuity of future commentators, to introduce light and order where at present there may seem to be chaos. For he never shrinks from acknowledging his inability to explain this or that phenomenon, and he prefers to leave a matter in doubt rather than to dogmatise on insufficient authority. Such moderation naturally inspires confidence; and perhaps another presumption in favour of the impartial accuracy of his statements may be found in the fact that sometimes they militate against the theories of those who would assign to every monument a greater antiquity than it is entitled to, and sometimes against the theories of the opposite and more numerous school. On the whole, however, whatever his opinion may be as to the age of any particular monument that has been called in question, his testimony as to the free use of painting by the early Christians is distinct and positive, and supported by irrefragable proofs.

“It may be asked,” he says, “whether it is credible that the faithful, in the age of the Apostles or their disciples, when the Church, fresh from the bosom of the image-hating synagogue, was in deadly conflict with idolatry, should have so promptly and so generally adopted and (so to speak) baptized the fine arts?” And he replies, “I can only say that the universal use of pictures throughout the subterranean cemeteries, and the richness, the variety, and the freedom of the more ancient types, when contrasted with the cycle of painting which I see becoming more stiff in manner and poorer in conception towards the end of the third century,—these things demonstrate the impossibility of accepting the hypothesis of those who affirm that the use of pictures was introduced little by little, on the sly, as it were, and in opposition to the practice of the primitive Church.” He points out also that the (comparatively) flourishing condition of the fine arts, and the large number of their professors in Rome during the reigns of Trajan, of Hadrian, and of the Antonines, materially favoured the early introduction and development of pictorial art amongst the faithful; and that the conversion to Christianity of wealthy personages, and even of members of the imperial family, such as Domitilla and Flavius Clemens, told powerfully in the same direction; “whereas, on the contrary, the decline of the fine arts in the third and fourth centuries, the increasing cost of the handiwork of the painter and sculptor as their numbers diminished every day, the gradual but continuous impoverishment of public and private fortunes, which induced even the Senate and the Emperors to make their new monuments at the expense of others more ancient,—all this could not facilitate the multiplication of new works of Christian art during that period; so that, even if the faithful were gaining in the number of converts, in power and in liberty, they lost quite as much, if I may say so, in the conditions required for the flourishing of Christian art.”