A Year in Europe

by Walter W. Moore

But we have allowed this clean, shrewd, racy American with his biting satire and his outspoken common sense, to lead us far away from our subject. Let us come back to the Church of the Cappuccini. For, besides its horrible cemetery, it contains another object of great interest, though of a very different character, viz., Guido's great picture of the Archangel Michael trampling upon the devil. The devil's face is said to be a portrait of Pope Innocent X., against whom the painter had a spite. It is not for the purpose of describing the picture that I refer to it, for I am not competent to do that, but for the purpose of quoting the animadversions of another American writer upon the custom of concealing this picture and others of special interest in Romish churches with closely drawn curtains, requiring the presence of an attendant to unveil them and the bestowment of a fee by the visitor. "The churchmen of Italy make no scruple of sacrificing the very purpose for which a work of sacred art has been created, that of opening the way for religious sentiment through the quick medium of sight, by bringing angels, saints and martyrs down visibly upon earth—of sacrificing this high purpose, and, for aught they know, the welfare of many souls along with it, to the hope of a paltry fee. Every work by an artist of celebrity is hidden behind a veil, and seldom revealed, except to Protestants, who scorn it as an object of devotion, and value it only for its artistic merit."

Sensuality versus Spirituality in Art.

The same author (Hawthorne), speaking of the terrible lack of variety in the subjects of the great Italian masters, says a quarter part, probably, of any large collection of pictures consists of Virgins and infant Christs.... Half of the other pictures are Magdalens, Flights into Egypt, Crucifixions, etc. "The remainder of the gallery comprises mythological subjects, such as nude Venuses, Ledas, Graces, and, in short, a general apotheosis of nudity.... These impure pictures are from the same illustrious and impious hands that adventured to call before us the august forms of apostles and saints, the Blessed Mother of the Redeemer, and her Son, at his death, and in his glory, and even the awfulness of him to whom the martyrs, dead a thousand years ago, have not dared to raise their eyes. They seem to take up one task or the other—the disrobed woman whom they call Venus, or the type of highest and tenderest womanhood in the mother of the Saviour—with equal readiness, but to achieve the former with far more satisfactory success. If an artist sometimes produced a picture of the Virgin possessing warmth enough to excite devotional feelings, it was probably the object of his earthly love, to whom he thus paid the stupendous and fearful homage of setting up her portrait to be worshipped, not figuratively as a mortal, but by religious souls in their earnest aspirations towards divinity. And who can trust the religious sentiment of Raphael, or receive any of his Virgins as heaven-descended likenesses, after seeing, for example, the "Fornarina" of the Barberini Palace, and feeling how sensual the artist must have been to paint such a brazen trollop of his own accord, and lovingly? Would the Blessed Mary reveal herself to his spiritual vision, and favor him with sittings alternately with that type of glowing earthliness, the Fornarina?"

The Kind of Character Produced.

True, Hawthorne proceeds at once to weaken the force of this criticism somewhat by referring to the throng of spiritual faces, innocent cherubs, serene angels, pure-eyed madonnas, and "that divinest countenance in the Transfiguration"—all of which we owe to Raphael's marvellous brush. But the criticism above quoted is sound. And that Hawthorne himself saw how little such "sacred art" had availed to lift the representatives of this kind of worship out of gross sensualism, let the following passage witness: "Here was a priesthood, pampered, sensual, with red and bloated cheeks, and carnal eyes. With apparently a grosser development of animal life than most men, they were placed in an unnatural relation with woman, and thereby lost the healthy, human conscience that pertains to other human beings, who own the sweet household ties connecting them with wife and daughter. And here was an indolent nobility, with no high aims or opportunities, but cultivating a vicious way of life, as if it were an art, and the only one which they cared to learn. Here was a population, high and low, that had no genuine belief in virtue; and if they recognized any act as criminal, they might throw off all care, remorse and memory of it, by kneeling a little while at the confessional, and rising unburdened, active, elastic and incited by fresh appetite for the next ensuing sin."

Of course all the priests are not such as above described, as Eugene Sue has endeavored to show in the character of Gabriel in The Wandering Jew, and Victor Hugo in the character of the good bishop in Les Miserables, and Marie Corelli in the character of the good Cardinal Bonpre in The Master Christian. Hawthorne simply describes the prevailing type. Let it be observed, too, that he is speaking of the priests in Italy, not of those in America, among whom we are glad to believe there is a much larger proportion of good men. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that the present Premier of Italy has himself stated publicly, in a passage which I have quoted in Chapter XXIX., that there has been some improvement, at least in the outward conduct of the clergy, since the overthrow of the papal government, and that the immorality of the priests and cardinals is not so shamelessly flaunted in Rome as it used to be under the popes.

The Other Type.

On the 20th of September, 1870, the Italian army entered Rome, after a slight resistance. This event, which marked the downfall of the temporal power of the papacy, the unification of Italy, and the establishment of religious liberty under the enlightened and progressive government of Victor Emmanuel, is properly commemorated in the name of a handsome street, Via Venti Settembre, which extends from the Porta Pia, where the army entered, to the Quirinal Palace, where the King resides. Appropriately placed on a street which thus commemorates the establishment of civil and religious freedom in Italy, are several of the Protestant churches, which for the last thirty years have caused a pure river of water of life to flow once more through Rome as in the days when the great Apostle of the Gentiles preached there the kingdom of God, and taught the things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness, none forbidding him.

At No. 7 on this high and pleasant street we find a tall, clean, handsome building, standing well back from the street, with a spacious, green yard in front, the whole occupying a portion of what were once the gardens of the Barberini Palace. A neat notice-board on the high iron picket fence informs us that this attractive building is the Presbyterian Church, and that the pastor is the Rev. J. Gordon Gray, D. D.

An Apostolic Preacher in Rome.