While it is true, as stated in the outset, that Art and Architecture are the chief features of modern Rome, yet Art is of primary, and Architecture of secondary consideration. Italians build fine houses, not for the sake of the houses themselves, but that they may display their “tasteful talents” in ornamenting and decorating them. I speak especially of churches, from the very fact that the Italians have not, nor do they want, fine Court-houses and costly Capitol buildings, as we have. They exercise their taste, and lavish all their wealth and art upon the churches or cathedrals. There are eighty odd cathedrals in Rome dedicated to the Virgin Mary alone. Besides these there are scores of others dedicated to men, and monks, seraphs, saints and sinners—one, I believe, a small one, to Christ. Some of these, St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s especially are reckoned among the finest cathedrals in existence; and yet the external appearance of these buildings is not so imposing as one might imagine. It is their interior that has rendered them famous.
Without entering these palaces of worship, one can have no just conception of their resplendent glory. They shine with burnished gold. They glow with pictures. The mirror-like pavements are a mosaic of rare workmanship. The walls, columns, and arches seem a vast quarry of precious stones, so rich and costly are the many-colored marbles with which they are inlaid. Their lofty cornices have flights of sculptured angels, and white doves bearing green olive branches gemmed with pearls and emeralds. And within the vaults of the ceiling, and the swelling interior of the dome, there are frescoes of such brilliancy, and wrought with such artful perspective, that the sky, peopled with sainted forms, appears to be opened only a little way above the spectator.
Any one of the four churches mentioned has at least a dozen altars—St. Peter’s has twenty-nine—and upon each altar princely fortunes have been lavished. Each is a marvel of artistic beauty; each glows with burnished gold, and sparkles with precious stones. The evening sun, softened and mellowed by the many-colored glass through which it is reflected, falls like golden fire upon these shrines. The statues standing around and the angels hovering above the altars seem warmed into life by this radiant glow; the marble men struggle to speak, and the sculptured angels spread their wings and try to rise in the glorified atmosphere. One would naturally think that, in these shrines, the unspeakable splendor of the whole edifice would be intensified and gathered to a focus, but not so. It would be true elsewhere, but here they are of no separate account. They all “melt away into the vast, sunny breath,” each contributing its little toward “the grandeur of the whole.”
Imagine “a casket, all inlaid in the inside with precious stones of various hues, so that there would not be a hair’s breadth of the small interior unadorned with resplendent gems. Then conceive this minute wonder of a mosaic box increased to the magnitude of a miniature sky,” and you have the interior of the greatest structure ever built by the hands of man, the Cathedral of St. Peter.
CHAPTER XLVII.
BAPTIST MISSION WORK IN ITALY.
BY JOHN H. EAGER, ROME, ITALY.