The unfortunate parents had no illustrious name to bequeath to posterity. The discreet marble only echoes a profound grief.
Here is a landmark, rounded at the top, and hewn to a point at the bottom, the better to insert it in the ground, that once stood on the Appian Way, which passes triumphantly through the arch raised to the glory of Trajan at one end of Beneventum.
Beneventum, which copied Rome, even in the device of its senate: S. P. Q. B.—Senatus populusque Beneventanus—had a magistrature of ediles at its head, who made generous provision for the embellishment of the city. Here is a pedestal on which this municipal corps pompously proclaimed itself:
Splendidissimus ordo Beneventanorum.
One cannot help exclaiming, in view of the present order of things:
“Comment en un plomb vil l’or pur s’est-il changé!”
How into vile dross hath the pure gold changed!
The Romans loved statuary, and were lavish of it in all their public as well as private dwellings. Above all, their sculptors produced divinities and illustrious men, but sometimes the principal members of a household, if not the whole family, to adorn the atrium. Who does not remember the Balbus family in the Museum at Naples, the father and son on horseback, and the rest gathered around them? Here we find several statues, both nude and draped. Nudity was chiefly confined to heroes and the gods. It signified apotheosis—the ascension to a higher world. The terrestrial garb was laid aside; only a glorified body remained. Pagan art showed itself incapable of fully expressing a state indicated in the middle ages by a radiance surrounding the transfigured body. We have an admirable example of the immediate change to the glorified state in Perugino’s immortal production in the Sala del Cambio at Perugia. There the bankers and money-changers have constantly before their eyes a symbol of the change wrought by divine power on a body in the state of celestial beatitude. Paganism divested the body of its garments, but did not render it luminous. It only invented a symbol which the church has retained to designate the saints—the nimbus around the head, as the most noble part of man because the seat of the intelligence. But it could go no further. From Apollo, who alone had the nimbus in the beginning to express in a measure the luminous atmosphere of the sun, personified in him, it passed to other divinities, and finally even to those to whom the senate accorded the title of divine, thus becoming the equivalent of divus. It is really amusing to see, on the Arch of Constantine at Rome, the Emperor Trajan so divinized that his bare head is surrounded by a nimbus, though he is engaged in the chase. The nude among the Romans was, therefore, a conventional way of expressing what was right in substance, the immutation wrought by glory, and was not intended to excite ignoble passion. In other cases their statues were modestly draped, though sometimes a little too much of the form was revealed by the clinging folds of the garments.
There are several sarcophagi in the court, with nothing extraordinary about them, but even in the most unpretending affording proof of artistic taste. They are adorned with scenic masques, vases of fruit, the genii of the seasons, etc., which have their significance and are not without poetry. Here is one with a medallion of its former occupant in the centre—a portrait full of life and animation, as if he still were under illusion as to his nothingness. It is supported by two genii, winged and nude, as if bearing him to the celestial regions—winged, because they are fulfilling a mission; nude, to indicate their celestial origin. This emblem was common in ancient times. The middle ages did nothing but Christianize it by substituting angels for genii, and placing in their hands, not the body, but the soul, of the deceased, about to receive the reward of his sanctity and good works. We see them on the tomb of King Dagobert, in the abbatial church of St. Denis, snatching the soul of the king from the demon who was endeavoring to bear it away.
But we have lingered too long in the precincts. Let us enter the palace, and first visit the prisons—for prisons there are, the archbishop of Beneventum, as we have said, having formerly a twofold jurisdiction, temporal as well as spiritual. His tribunal of justice imposed the canonical penalties. Fines seem to have been specially employed, for among the officials of the Curia there was one to receive and apply them to some religious object. At the same time there was a register in which they were faithfully recorded. There were, too, different degrees of imprisonment. In the carcere alla larga there was comparative liberty. The purgatorio indicates a temporary expiation. The inferno was perhaps the prison from which death alone could be looked forward to as a release. The two latter correspond to the carcere duro of the Venetians. There are similar ones, but not so spacious, in the governor’s castle overlooking Beneventum, which also bore the terrible names of purgatorio and inferno.[[54]] Cardinal Orsini, who, though severe, was of a humane disposition, visited these prisons in 1704, at which time there were only three prisoners, it appears, from the report of his visit. After assuring himself that the vaults were in a good condition, capable of resisting all efforts at escape, confornicatæ et proinde tutæ, he saw the necessity of obviating the dampness of the ground by a brick pavement, ut humiditas arceatur, and ordered the inferno to be closed for ever, because, as he said, it was a very damp and atrocious place. A thoughtfulness so full of humanity is something to dwell on. The very text should be cited: “Eminentissimus archiepiscopus utpote humidissimam et immanissimam claudi demandavit et quod sub pœna excommunicationis nemo ibi detendatur.” The prisoners must have been delighted at a threat so much to their advantage.