Rome, p.49
Rome, page 49
Both Pforr and Overbeck found the classical past, as promoted at the academies, not only irrelevant to the present but even slightly disgusting to a good Christian soul. “Why do we seek subjects so distant from our interests,” Pforr demanded, “why not instead those that concern us? In the old Israelite stories we find more material than anywhere else.” Overbeck was saying the same, in more high-flown accents of faith.
It seemed to them that there was only one place where such desires could be satisfied, where a young German could complete his religious and artistic education; Rome, just by virtue of being a religious capital, would provide the balance the young Germans sought between stylistic tradition and living faith. Overbeck and Pforr longed to immerse themselves in it, not for the ancient marbles (they had seen quite enough of the academy’s plaster casts of those) but for the accumulated deposit of Christian belief the city represented. The very name of Rome spoke to pious young Germans like these with an intensity and promise that no other place could offer. They were determined to move there. And so, in May 1810, Overbeck and Pforr, along with Hottinger and Vogel, left Vienna for the Holy City. They entered Rome a month later, scarcely stopping to look at anything on the way.
The city at the time was still occupied by the French, who had closed and secularized a number of its religious institutions. One of these was the Irish-Franciscan monastery of Sant’Isidoro, up on the Pincio, above Piazza del Popolo. The Napoleonic occupation had driven its monks out, and the four youngsters, with minimal bargaining, got a lease on rooms there. Wackenroder had written about the monastic ideal of an artist’s life, and where better to live it than in a real, if admittedly disused and rented, monastery? The pattern of activity was to work all day in one’s cell and then meet up in the refectory at evening, to argue, confess, and carouse. Many bottles of Frascati were consumed and then smashed. Soon the group became known as the Fratelli di Sant’Isidoro, a nickname given special point by their way of dressing in cowl-like hats and monkish habits; the street where the monastery stood became the Via degli Artisti.
Their group was quite short-lived. Seeing themselves as missionaries, bent on converting the “heathens” of art, they sought to establish the primacy of religious art as it once had been, before art lost its purity to secularism and academic thinking. Fra Angelico, early Raphael, and such Northern masters as Dürer and Jan van Eyck: these were their heroes and touchstones. Later, Overbeck would produce a large painting for a German client, The Triumph of Religion in the Arts, accompanied by a lengthy written explanation of how “true art” had petered out with the Renaissance, featuring some sixty portrait-heads of approved artists. Other young Germans would presently join this Roman nucleus of the Nazarenes. One was Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794–1872), son of a German history painter, who applied to Overbeck for admittance to the group, was accepted, and wrote his delighted thanks: “You have judged me worthy to join your glorious ranks as a brother. Thus take me into your arms! My being is now tied to yours!”
Some of these artists, including Carolsfeld, were deeply influenced by the German practice, strong among the expatriates in Rome, of painting what they called “friendship pictures,” portraits of themselves and their German friends far from their native homes but locked in the fealty of common interest, a mutual loyalty sanctified by its enactment in the Holy City. One eloquent example among many was Wilhelm Schadow’s Self-Portrait with Brother Ridolfo Schadow and Bertel Thorvaldsen (1815).
Wilhelm and Ridolfo were the two sons of the eminent Berlin sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow (1764–1850), who, as a friend of Canova’s, had made the decisive pilgrimage to Rome and converted to Catholicism in 1785. Going to Rome themselves, the brothers swore to each other that “they would rather stay dead in Rome than return unknown to their home city.” Wilhelm’s painting shows the taking of this oath. On the right, Wilhelm, with his palette and brushes, solemnly shakes hands with Ridolfo, who is holding his stonecarver’s hammer. Between them, the Danish sculptor Thorvaldsen, rests his left hand in comradely style on Wilhelm’s shoulder, his firm gaze fixed on Ridolfo. Between the Dane and the young German, linking the figures in the group, is the marble carving which won Ridolfo his early reputation in Rome, the Sandal-binderin, or Girl Fastening her Sandal. It had been much admired for its truth and sincerity by Overbeck and other Nazarenes.
Overbeck refused to paint or even look at the female nude. To do so, he thought, was immoral. This shifted the terms of allegory; an earlier artist might have painted “Italy” as a splendid naked nymph, but Overbeck would not. The painting that most expressed the Nazarenes’ feelings about Italy was probably the pair of fully clothed figures by Overbeck depicting the cultural union of Italy and Germany. Blonde Maria and dark Shulamit. The left-hand figure, crowned with a wreath of olive and bending attentively toward her companion, is “Italia,” and the landscape behind her is that of Italy: rolling hills, a rural casa colonica. The one on the right, who bends eagerly forward, holds Italia’s hand, and whispers lessons about painting and morals to her, is “Germania,” with her rosebud chaplet, her plaited braids, and the German city-on-the-hill with its medieval spire in the background.
Overbeck firmly maintained what he held to be his duties as an artistic and moral teacher. Basically, he believed that nothing good had happened since the Renaissance—he must have viewed the monuments of Baroque Rome with horror—and so he missed out on the powerful spirituality of the newer art made by such Italians as Bernini in the seventeenth century. But he did not have much opportunity to do public art in Rome. His biggest commission came from Pius IX: it was a scene of Christ Evading His Pursuers on the Mountain near Nazareth, an allegory of the imprisonment of Pius VII by Napoleon, painted on one of the ceilings of Palazzo del Quirinale—a devout but insipid work at which few visitors, if any, look today. The Nazarenes certainly left an impression on Roman art, but it did not prove to be deep or lasting; meanwhile, the cultural energies of Italy had shifted almost entirely to the sphere of politics and its contentions. Pius IX, in particular, was so preoccupied with trying to hold on to his domains in the Papal States that he had little time for being an art patron. But in Germany, Overbeck’s influence, and that of the Nazarenes in general, was widespread.
Interestingly, it also spilled into one area of French painting. The French had rarely been influenced by stylistic events in Germany, but in a city bustling with so many foreign artists, it was bound to happen and did, because of one major French artist who was resident there. The oldest of the various foreign academies in Rome was that of France; it had been instituted in 1666, under Louis XIV, impelled by Colbert and Charles Le Brun. In a very short time it had acquired great prestige, and its pensionnaires (the painters, sculptors, and musicians whose talent, officially recognized by the Prix de Rome, had been rewarded with a stipend from the French government and a spell on its premises) were considered to have made an important start to their public careers. In 1806, the brilliantly talented young painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was awarded a pension from the academy and settled in Rome. The academy had been located in Palazzo Mancini, in Via del Corso, but in 1803 one of the great sites of Rome became available to the French government, which bought it: the Villa Medici, at the head of the Spanish Steps. This became Ingres’s studio and home for much of the rest of his life. The nineteenth century was an exceptionally rich period in the history of the French Academy in Rome. Among its pensionnaires, apart from Ingres, were the architects Baltard and Garnier, the sculptor Carpeaux, the composers Berlioz, Bizet, and Debussy. Ingres worked there as a pensionnaire, staunchly defending the classical tradition that surrounded him in Rome, from 1806 to 1820, and after a return to Paris he came back to Rome again in 1835, now as the director of the academy in the Villa Medici. In this position, as the grand cham of French art teaching, the paladin of the classical style, he exerted an incalculable influence on thought and practice in French art. He was not a man prone to self-doubt, and one of the pictures he was proudest of was his first official commission in Rome since the fall of Napoleon in 1815—Christ Giving the Keys to Saint Peter (1820). It depicts the moment at which Christ entrusted the future of his newly formed church to the first of the line of future popes, Saint Peter, who kneels at his feet and looks up at him; Christ, too, is looking up, but to his Father in Heaven, while with his left hand he points to the keys in Peter’s hands, the power to open or close the doors of salvation, which he has just passed on to his successor. Everything about this image, but especially its almost stonily firm construction and its powerful sense of hierarchy, points to the origins of at least some of Ingres’s ideas in Nazarene painting—hardly a surprise, since the monastery where Overbeck and Cornelius had been working was next door to the Villa Medici.
All this artistic flourishing took place against a turbulent political landscape. Especially post-Napoleon, Italy was considered so hopelessly divided that it could barely have been called a single country at all. “We have no flag, no political name, and no rank among European nations,” lamented one of the patriots whose efforts would eventually bring its unification about, Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72), who had been born and raised in Genoa, then under the rule of the French Empire, being part of the Ligurian Republic.
We have no common center,…no common market. We are dismembered into eight states—Lombardy, Parma, Tuscany, Modena, Lucca, the popedom, Piedmont, and the kingdom of Naples—all independent, without any alliance, with no unity of aim and no organized connection between them.… There are eight different systems of currency; of weights and measures; of civil, commercial, and penal legislation; of administrative organization; and of police restrictions. They all divide us and make us foreign to each other as much as possible.
As Mazzini was coming of age, there was a slowly growing current in the direction of change. What growing numbers of Italians—liberals, intellectuals, dissenting patriots, anti-imperialists who resented the rule of Austria—looked toward and longed for was a risorgimento, or “resurgence,” that would unify Italy as an independent country, free of Austrian influence. Of course, Italy never had been unified; it was always a patchwork of post-medieval entities, its dominant unit being the Papal States, whose size, wealth, and centrality gave enormous political power to the pope as a temporal ruler.
At first, the main revolutionary action came from a secret society called the Carbonari, or Charcoal Burners. They were originally centered in Naples, from about 1806 onward, and they were hailed as brethren by all Italians of a radical disposition, as well as by such foreigners as Lord Byron, who called them his “cronies” and generously gave them rooms in his residence in Ravenna in 1821. “My lower apartments are full of their bayonets, fusils, cartridges, and what not. I suppose that they consider me as a depot, to be sacrificed, in case of accidents. It is no great matter, supposing that Italy could be liberated, who or what is sacrificed. It is a grand object—the very poetry of politics. Only think—a free Italy! Why, there has been nothing like it since the days of Augustus.”
The Carbonari were fiercely persecuted: to be caught meant jail or death, and often these amounted to the same thing, since the usual jail was the dreaded Spielberg Fortress in Moravia, by all accounts the most miserable sort of place imaginable. (One unfortunate Italian writer named Silvio Pellico, arrested in 1820 for a trivial offense, wrote a book about his treatment there, Le mie prigioni [My Prisons, 1832], which was said to have damaged Austria more than a lost battle.) But sometimes they were executed right away in Italy, with hardly more than the semblance of a proper trial.
This was the fate of two such dissidents in November 1825, Angelo Targhini and Leonida Montanari. They had long been cooking up plots against the papal government of Leo XII Sermattei della Genga (reigned 1823–29), being fiercely opposed to the continuation of that pope’s absolute power in the Papal States. One can hardly blame them. Leo XII was one of the vilest reactionaries ever to occupy the Fisherman’s Chair. Not only did he insist that all court proceedings of the Papal States be conducted in Latin by ordained priests; he forbade Jews, especially those in Rome, to own property, and ordered that they sell their possessions without delay and attend Christian catechism. Their only recourse was to emigrate from the political control of the Church—to nonpapal states, such as Lombardy or Tuscany. All charitable institutions in the Papal States were put under direct Church supervision, as were all libraries and, of course, schools. The pope’s neurotically suspicious dread of enemies only made the enmities, and his reaction against them, worse. If a dressmaker designed low-cut or in any way revealing dresses, she would be excommunicated. If her clients wore them, the same applied. Papal fear of unorthodoxy led to a system of denunciation, torture, and arbitrary arrest for imagined doctrinal crime beside which the excesses of the Inquisition paled. And it often ended in death for the suspects.
So it was with the unfortunate Targhini and Montanari, whose paths in Rome had crossed with that of a papal double agent named Spontini. On finding out Spontini’s real mission, which was to entrap Carbonari, Targhini enticed him onto a dark Roman street and stabbed him in the chest. The blow was not fatal, but in the denunciations that followed it, both Targhini and Montanari were condemned to death. Papal law decreed their beheading. They declared their innocence and impenitence right up to the last moment.
The pope, as monarch of the Papal States, had his very own boia or executioner—a functionary named Mastro Titta, who later (without the least trace of remorse) wrote his memoirs. Targhini and Montanari were beheaded on Piazza del Popolo in November 1825.
The Carbonari had unofficial enemies, too. The Sanfedisti, a secret society supported by nobles and peasants alike, took an oath “not to spare anyone belonging to the notorious gang of liberals, regardless of his birth, lineage, or fortune … and to spill the blood of the infamous liberals to the last drop, regardless of sex or rank.” The Sanfedisti were an Italian equivalent of such hysterically rightist Spanish terror organizations as the Exterminating Angels. But their membership came nowhere near that of the Carbonari, of whom there were claimed to be between 300,000 and 1 million. The loathed sbirri, or political police, could not field a fraction of that. Nevertheless, Mazzini, who had joined the Carbonari in 1830, estimated that his home district of Lombardy contained 300 police agents, 872 gendarmes, 1,233 police guards, and a swarm of semi-official delators, all of whom reported back to Vienna. In 1830, while in his mid-twenties, he was arrested and locked up without trial for conspiring against the Piedmontese state. When his father protested to the governor of Genoa, he was told, “Your son is a man of some talent, and he is too fond of walking by himself at night deep in thought. What on earth has he to think about at his age? We do not like young people to think unless we know the subject of their thoughts.” Mazzini was then clapped behind bars in the Savona Fortress.
He was freed in 1831, but offered the unappetizing prospect of what amounted to permanent house arrest in a provincial town. Instead, he chose exile, moving to Marseilles, where he started a society called La Giovane Italia (Young Italy), whose political program was based on the creation of a free Italian republic by the merger of several states. It had some success in the next few years, claiming sixty thousand adherents by 1833—not enough to convert all Italy, but certainly enough to perturb the government of Savoy, which ruthlessly clamped down on the young movement, sending twelve of its members to the gallows. Mazzini’s best friend, Jacopo Ruffini, killed himself. Mazzini, tried and convicted in absentia, was forced into exile in London; from there he sent out a stream of letters and pamphlets to other countries—Germany, Poland, Switzerland—urging the creation of independence movements by national youth. He even tried to foment one among army cadets in Turkey, known, prophetically, as the “Young Turks.” From their ranks, Kemal Atatürk, the future Westernizer of Turkey, would eventually arise.
Mazzini theorized and argued incessantly, but he never led a militant revolt. His hopes for a continuous ignition of riots proved delusive. Every insurrection failed. Austrian police power was too strong. Centralization on Austria was so extreme that, at one point in the 1840s, worn-out police boots had to be sent to Vienna to be repaired. Nevertheless, through the 1830s and 1840s, brush fires of dissent kept flaring up across Europe, demanding local constitutional rather than Austrian colonial rule. Their emblematic focus was Italy. In 1846, a Roman pamphleteer complained about unrestrained police power. “The police can imprison a man, banish him, confine him to a district, rob him of office, forbid him to carry arms or to leave his house at night. They open his letters in the post and make no effort to conceal it. They can invade his house, close shops, cafés, and inns, and fine us at their pleasure.” In Rome, political suspects (and it took very little to qualify as one) were confined to their houses from sundown to morning. They were also obliged to take the sacrament of confession once a month, and of course what they told the priest under the seal of the confessional was routinely disclosed to the authorities as part of the “special surveillance of the class called thinkers.” Most foreign books were proscribed or placed on the Index, the banned reading list; even private reading groups on economic theory were banned, and old or dying persons were refused absolution by their priests unless they betrayed their friends and relatives.
The Italian liberals and nationalists struck back as best they could, sometimes with ingenuity; thus, in January 1848, the protestors staged a civil-disobedience strike in Lombardy, which consisted of citizens collectively refusing to smoke or play the state lottery; this caused grievous embarrassment to Austria through loss of income, both the lottery and the tobacco industry being state monopolies. Pro-constitutional revolts and demonstrations broke out in Tuscany, Naples, Sicily, and Milan. But serious, open conflict did not come until the appearance of Giuseppe Garibaldi.
Garibaldi had been born and raised in Nice (Nizza), then a part of the Kingdom of Savoy, with a large Italian-speaking population. He took naturally to the sea and was working as a merchant-marine captain when, laid over for a few days in 1833 in the Russian port city of Taganrog, he made the acquaintance of a political exile from Italy, Giovanni Battista Cuneo. Cuneo, a follower of Mazzini, was a member of the illicit Giovane Italia, and he soon converted the young Garibaldi. From now on, the sea captain would be dedicated to the vision of an Italy free from Austrian control. It made him feel, he said, “as Columbus must have done when he first caught sight of land.”
