Chapter 9
DECIPHERING MICHAEL SWEERTS’S PLAGUE IN AN ANCIENT CITY
Franco Mormando
THE ENIGMA OF SWEERTS’S SUBJECT
One of the most enigmatic paintings to come out of baroque Rome is assuredly Plague in an Ancient City (fig. 9.1) by Michael Sweerts (1618–64), the Flemish master who resided in Rome from at least 1646 to circa 1652 and who is finally receiving the attention he deserves, thanks to an international monographic exhibition recently dedicated to him.1 Sweerts’s canvas is just one of several seventeenth-century paintings devoted to the theme of the plague in an ancient setting, of which Nicolas Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod (1630, Louvre) is undoubtedly the most famous. As Arnauld Brejon de Lavergnée observes, the popularity of this artistic subject has its origins not [239]only in the frequency of epidemic in early modern Europe, but also in Marcantonio Raimondi’s well-circulated engraving after Raphael, known as the Morbetto (ca. 1514), illustrating a scene from Virgil’s Aeneid. The Morbetto had a decisive influence on all subsequent treatments of this general theme, including, if only indirectly, Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City, both in terms of overall composition and specific iconographic details (such as the infant child in the foreground attempting to nurse at its dead mother’s breasts).2 However, nothing is known of the provenance of Sweerts’s painting before its arrival in England in the early nineteenth century. Executed most likely in Rome in the early 1650s and the most ambitious canvas of the Flemish master’s entire production, the painting’s debt to Poussin’s Plague at Ashdod is clear and has been frequently discussed.3 Equally clear in Swe erts’s canvas is the artist’s attempt at proving his painterly virtù both in the depiction of a historical scene of monumental bearing that encompasses a broad range of emotional-psychological states (the affetti) and in the emulation of the grand classicizing style of his older French contemporary and fellow resident in Rome, Poussin (1594–1665). As a complex, large-scale historical scene, Plague in an Ancient City is simply unique within Sweerts’s oeuvre. Although not without its flaws, the canvas does not fail to exert great fascination upon the viewer, for both its haunting visual beauty and its equally haunting historical subject.4
[240]Thucydides and The Plague of Athens
But what is its subject? As mysterious as the origins and pre-nineteenth-century whereabouts of Plague in an Ancient City is the specific episode here represented. In the nineteenth century and as late as 1984 when on the London art market, the painting was thought to depict the most famous description of epidemic from ancient times—Thucydides’ account of the fifth-century bc Athenian plague in book 2 of his Peloponnesian War. This ancient Greek text was well known in seventeenth-century Europe, in many translations and editions since Lorenzo Valla’s much-reprinted Latin version of 1452 commissioned by Pope Nicholas V.5 However, a careful comparison of text and canvas reveals that the similarities are, in the end, too few to make a convincing argument; at the same time, there is much taking place within Sweerts’s scene that the Greek text is simply incapable of explaining.
To be sure, Sweerts may have borrowed certain isolated elements from Thucydides. The Greek historian refers (2.47, 51, 52) to the Athenians’ many earnest “supplications” to the gods for relief from their affliction, and to the crowds congregating outdoors in public spaces, especially the sacred precincts, and to the profound depression of those not yet stricken by the disease. All of these elements are represented in Sweerts’s canvas; the response of despair is prominently reflected in the melancholy elderly woman seated, hand to cheek, in the left foreground. However, in the end, the differences between text and painting outweigh the similarities: there are too many features—important ones—in Sweerts’s canvas not found in Thucycides’ account or indeed, in any of the other familiar classical or biblical accounts.6
In recent years, scholars have uncovered much new information about Sweerts’s life and work, filling many lacunae in the knowledge of his life and artistic production. Alas, none of it has brought scholars any closer to deciphering the enigma of this canvas’s subject and its intended message. All that commentators have been able to say with confidence about its subject is what the painting’s current title declares: it is a scene of a plague in an ancient city. Is an actual historical plague being here represented? If so, which one and to what purpose? Some have speculated that the artist may be using a generic classical scene to depict and comment upon a contemporary Italian plague. No epidemic explicitly labeled by contemporaries as [241]“bubonic plague” or “the plague” struck Rome during Sweerts’s stay in the capital. However, epidemics of bubonic plague and other acute, massively fatal diseases were tragically common occurrences in this century, especially in Italy: one notable example is the great mortality in Rome in the spring and summer of 1649 caused by a quickly spreading “evil fever” reported by contemporary diarist, Giacinto Gigli.7 That Sweerts would be commenting on contemporary experience in indirect fashion would not be surprising given that artists of the time routinely used the cloak of ancient history to reflect on contemporary events and moral issues, as well as the perennial, universal features of the human condition.8 With specific respect to plagues and other epidemics, painters “often mitigated contemporary reality by depicting contagions either long past . . . or far away.”9 Other scholars are of the opinion that Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City is not “in any way a documentary work: rather a meditation on the disease’s effects on mankind assuaging its horrors through art.”10 Although reasonable, these assumptions do not help to illuminate the meaning of the various specific and puzzling details Sweerts has chosen to include in his scene—the behavior of certain of the human figures, the different architectural elements and their [242]function or historical referents, and the division of the canvas into two contrasting zones with distinct emotional atmospheres and human activities.
It is the thesis of this essay that in view of these highly specified features, Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City is neither a generic “meditation on the disease’s effects,” nor a representation of a contemporary Roman plague disguised in classical garb, nor an artistic exercise “simply painted to demonstrate his [technical] capabilities.”11 Instead Sweerts is here depicting a specific historical plague of ancient Roman, or more precisely, early Christian, times, which, although not among the most famous outbreaks in history and probably apocryphal, is nonetheless one that had been noted by ecclesiastical historians. It is also an outbreak that would have had much significance for the artist’s original seventeenth-century viewers. However, at the same time, the canvas was not intended for a general audience of ordinary lay viewers. Replete with much historical, religious, artistic, and archeological allusion, it was conceived as a highly erudite puzzle destined for a small group of cultural elite who delighted in such painted puzzles. (Seventeenth-century painters in Rome—most famously Poussin—produced many of these pictorial puzzles.) Only the cultural elite would have had access to the kind of rarified information required to unlock the enigma of this historical scene and understand its ultimate moral message for contemporary viewers. What Charles Dempsey has remarked about one of Poussin’s intellectually taxing historical scenes applies fully to Plague in an Ancient City: “Much is . . . demanded of the viewer.”12 But in meeting such demands, the viewer proved his intellectual virtù and confirmed his status as a member of the privileged cultural elite. Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City is, in short, “the consummate insider’s work.”13
THE VISUAL EVIDENCE
The Architectural and Geographical Setting of the Scene
The setting of Plague in an Ancient City is a broad, deep piazza, framed with a dark, cavernous, shadowy structure on the left and stately classical architecture on the remaining two sides (right and center). The classical architecture on the upper right-hand edge of the canvas includes portions of the façade and front steps of what apparently is a large, white, Roman templelike building. In the center of the canvas on the side of the piazza directly [243]opposite the viewer, is an elegant, two-storied, open-arched palazzo. In front of this palazzo stands a prominent obelisk aligned with the central arch of the building. The obelisk is copiously adorned with hieroglyphs; its summit, however, is cut off by the top of the canvas, perhaps to thus suggest a structure of great height.
The hilly landscape behind the central palazzo gives the impression that the piazza sits on a high and relatively narrow hill—much like the Capitoline of Rome—while the architectural style of the buildings on the square would also tend to call to mind, if not imperial Rome itself, then a location somewhere in the Roman Empire. The presence of the obelisk in front of the central background palazzo might cause some viewers to think first of an Egyptian city, such as Alexandria, the thriving, celebrated capital of Graeco-Roman Egypt, which was struck by plague in the third and sixth centuries. Alexandria, however, is a port-city, as Sweerts and his contemporaries well knew, and there is no sign of a port or any body of water in Plague in an Ancient City.14 Moreover, several famous obelisks were brought to Rome from Egypt at various junctures in ancient times, and remain there to this day. There is nothing in this canvas that excludes either Rome or Alexandria as the setting. At the same time, however, there is nothing that incontestably identifies them or any other imperial city as the artist’s intended city, even though the names of both Rome and Alexandria come up most often in the plague sources. Sweerts may here wish to represent merely a “generic city” of Roman antiquity.
The Plague Victims and Their Sources in Ancient Sculpture
In the foreground the viewer is confronted by a wide array of dramatically rendered human figures in various poses and states of dress and undress, most of them dead or dying victims of the plague, attended by grief- and horror-stricken family members, friends, or compatriots. Among them are the “Gladiators, Niobes, Vestals, Gauls” and other familiar figures from ancient sculpture used as models by Sweerts, as Roberto Longhi first pointed out.15 Spanning the ages of life from childhood to old age, these various individuals express different emotional responses to the calamity that has [244]befallen them and their city: grief, despair, anger, confusion, and silent, motionless shock. Some hold their hands to their noses as a reminder of the repulsive stench accompanying the scene and of plague-causing miasma, a visual topos appearing with regularity in plague paintings and engravings. A raking light from the left illuminates the melancholy old woman, whose source in ancient Roman statuary was identified by Longhi as the Vecchia Capitolina.16 The pose of Sweerts’s vecchietta, however, was most likely inspired by the well-known ancient Roman relief depicting the conquered barbarian province, Dacia Weeping. Now housed in the Capitoline Museum, Dacia was rediscovered in Rome in the 1530s and on display for years thereafter in the famed Cesi sculpture garden—it is recorded there, for example, in Jean Jacques Boissard’s Romanae urbis topographia et antiquitates (1:1).17 Just to the right of the despondent vecchietta, the same intense light draws attention to the pathetic grief of what seems to be a family group gathered around a dead mother stretched on a straw mattress, with her tiny child peering uncomprehending into her expressionless, lifeless face. The latter detail represents Sweerts’s version of an oft-reproduced plague topos popularized by Raimondi’s Morbetto, which has its ultimate origins in a brief but influential description of an ancient painting by Apelles’ contemporary, Aristeides of Thebes, found in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (35.36.98).
Three Gesturing “Guides” and the “White Temple”
Also in the foreground, positioned prominently just to the right of the center of the canvas, is a mature, brown-bearded male figure in a brilliant blue toga and stately headdress. Flanking this distinguished and well-illuminated gentleman are two female cadavers; lying supine on the ground, they serve as a visual frame for him from below, thus heightening the attention drawn to him. Standing robustly erect and of great intellectual and moral stature, the “Blue Prophet”—as he will be called for convenience—is in earnest conversation with a bare-breasted blond woman.18 This woman pays close, [245]respectful attention to the words of her male interlocutor who is pointing downward with his left hand to one of the dead women at his feet. At the same time, his right hand points off to the viewer’s right, as if to make a connection between the dead woman’s fate and the faraway object of his gesturing, something else present in the scene, located behind him and to our right. Following the direction of his gesture—as well as the strong diagonal line of the overall composition moving from the lower left of the canvas to the upper right—the viewer is led to the templelike building on the right edge of the canvas. Of this temple are visible only five marble steps and one outermost fluted column with its capital, Roman Doric in style. For convenience, this structure will be called the “White Temple.” The White Temple is fairly well illuminated (as opposed to the structure just opposite on the left side of the canvas) and apparently in reasonably good state of repair.
On the temple steps stands another solemn male figure—the “White Prophet”—shrouded, head and all, in a voluminous, radiant white garment. The White Prophet repeats the same pointing gesture (and towards the same direction) as does the Blue Prophet standing front and center. This same attention-directing gesture is repeated by yet another figure, located farther in the background (just left of center and closer to the obelisk), possibly a female, dressed in white, with covered head, only sketchily rendered but intentionally singled out by the light. These three figures are all, it is reasonable to conclude, summoning the viewer’s attention to the White Temple and what it contains or represents. Although little is visible of its physical structure, the White Temple is clearly a house of worship: surrounding the building, on its steps and in its immediate vicinity, is a host of human figures, depicted in an array of reverential poses, including the distinctive early Christian orans position characterized by raised, outstretched arms. The demeanor of these figures around the temple clearly suggests devout prayer and worship. A reasonable, preliminary conclusion would be that the three gesturing figures are, in fact, beckoning their compatriots—and the viewers—to join in this activity.
The Left Half of the Canvas: The “Black Hall”
The left side of the painting, behind the foreground chorus of figures, presents a far different and deliberately contrasted scene. To begin with, this portion of the painting, representing a considerable amount of canvas space and crowded with wraithlike figures, is cast in deep, gloomy shadow. [246]This obscuring darkness has been deepened by oxidation over the centuries, but it seems clear that even in its original state, this tenebrous zone was meant by the artist to stand in chromatic contrast to the opposite side of the piazza. Unfortunately, these dark colors make it impossible to achieve a fully legible photographic reproduction of this portion of the canvas, even with recourse to the most technically sophisticated means available today. Fortunately, however, in the early nineteenth century, an engraving was made of Sweerts’s complete composition (by British artist James Fittler) when the canvas was in a far better state of conservation. Revealing the now obfuscated details of its oxidized upper left quadrant (figs. 9.2 and 9.3), Fittler’s engraving is helpful in describing the scene.19
The architectural center of focus of the canvas’s left sector is not a white temple with its simple, clean, straight lines and graceful, well-lit façade, but rather, a hulking, cavernous, rotunda-like structure, with massive open arches on at least three sides—the “Black Hall.” Although in obviously functional use, this rotund edifice appears to be in a worn, almost dilapidated state: the stones forming its arches are clearly decayed and chipped at their edges. In contrast to the White Temple, much of the actual structure of the Black Hall, including its internal activity, is visible through the open arches. At the same time, despite the visibility afforded by the artist, the impression conveyed by the overall obscurity that envelopes the Black Hall and the spectral figures who populate it is that the viewer is seeing, if not a secret, then certainly not a public, and most likely an “underground” venue, whether a place of burial, liturgical worship, or otherwise. It is as if the artist intends to suggest that, although the viewers have been granted privileged visual access to the internal activities of the Black Hall through a temporary cutaway of its walls, these are not normally witnessed by the general public and are perhaps taking place physically below ground or within a hill or cave.
The Black Hall’s Sole Ornament: The Caryatid
Although only a portion of its mass is shown, what is visible of this rotunda-like Black Hall with its large arched apertures suggests a certain generic resemblance to an ancient Roman monument, the Temple of Minerva Medica, that is, Minerva the Healer (fig. 9.4).20 On the present-day Via [249]Giolitti just northwest of Porta Maggiore, this ten-sided structure is currently thought to be a nymphaeum from the Gardens of Licinius, but in Sweerts’s day it was believed to be a pagan place of worship, due to the putative rediscovery there of the famous Minerva Giustiniani (now in the Vatican), an ancient statue of the goddess in her healing aspect; she holds a snake in her hand, the same attribute as that of the ancient god of healing, Asclepius.21 Interestingly, the association of this district of Rome with the pursuit of healing did not disappear with the waning of paganism and the triumph of Christianity: near the Temple of Minerva Medica stands the church of Santa Bibiana, honoring a young fourth-century Christian martyr whose cult, active since the fifth century, supplanted that of the pagan goddess as medical healer. As Tod Marder explains, associated with Bibiana’s cult were “curative herbs, which had probably been gathered in the vicinity of the temple of Minerva Medica since ancient times” and “a well with purifying waters,” [250]standard features of the saint’s traditional iconography.22 It may be no mere coincidence that Sweerts here, if only indirectly, recalls Bibiana’s memory.
The connection between the Black Hall and pagan places of worship and healing becomes even more compelling when one notes the single and thus highly conspicuous decorative element on the edifice: a caryatid incorporated into the left arch. Yet another enduring invention of classical antiquity, the caryatid in early modern Italy was an architectural element that bore, above all, pagan connotations and was used principally (albeit not exclusively) in secular settings. Subject of a famous digression in Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture (1:1.5–6), duly glossed in by Daniele Barbaro (1514–70) in his widely studied edition of that ancient treatise, the caryatid had its prototype in ancient Greek architecture: the Erechteum (or Caryatid Portico) on the Athenian Acropolis. According to the etiological explanation supplied by Vitruvius, the Erechteum females represented the noble matrons, “weighted down forever by a burden of shame,” of the Peloponnesian city of Caryae that had sided against Athens in its war against Persia. The Romans incorporated this Greek element into their own architecture and it is their use of caryatids that gave this ornament a further specific association in seventeenth-century Rome: it was among the standard ornamental features of the classicizing gardens of Italian villas that became popular in the sixteenth century, especially the rustic fountain grottoes built in imitation of ancient Roman nymphaea. Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, the object of much archeological study in the sixteenth century (most notably by Pirro Ligorio [d. 1583]) boasted a series of these load-bearing female figures, which were likewise incorporated into the nymphaeum of the sumptuous Villa Giulia built (1550–55) by Pope Julius III.23 In ancient lore, nymphaea were originally and literally “gardens of the Nymphs,” dwelling places of the pagan female water deities. However, as Oratorian archeologist Antonio Bosio points out in his monumental work of 1632, Roma sotterranea, the term nymphaea (ninfei) in both ancient pagan and early Christian usage [251]already came to mean simply places where fountains, streams, and other sources of water were present.24
At the same time, as Andrea Palladio explains in his Four Books on Architecture, natural sites marked by the presence of freshwater sources were precisely the settings chosen by the ancients for the construction of temples dedicated to their gods of healing: “For Asclepius, Salus, and those gods of medicine by whom it was believed many were healed, [the ancients] built temples in locations which were particularly healthy and close to pure waters, so that the sick, coming from foul and contagious air to fresh and healthy air and drinking those waters, would recuperate more quickly.”25 All of the preceding visual evidence and historical information—transmitted in well-known works readily available to Sweerts—might suggest that the artist is possibly alerting the viewer to the fact that (although no sign of water is discernible) this dark edifice is pagan, not Christian, and that it somehow relates to the pursuit of health and healing. Given the massive presence of disease and death at the very doorstep of the structure, this would hardly be surprising. However, as would have been also well known in the seventeenth century, the ancient temples associated with the official state religion were largely open-air structures, built to house the images of gods and goddesses; they were never entered except by priests, who performed their sacrifices outdoors, in front of, and not inside, the buildings. So one must conclude that, although pagan, Sweerts’s Black Hall is not likely to belong to the realm of traditional Roman religion. Moreover, it is “not an archeologically correct depiction” of any known ancient edifice and its “entire structure is unlike anything that ever existed” in antiquity.26 To what kind of religion, then, might it pertain? Might it instead be connected with the mystery religions of late imperial Rome, the appearance and contents of whose temples, unknown and unknowable in baroque Rome, Sweerts would have been obliged to invent for himself? This possibility will be entertained in greater detail, but first it is necessary to further examine the activity taking place within the Black Hall.
Is it the pursuit of health and healing, evoked by the caryatid and its traditional associations, that is actually taking place within the Black Hall? The edifice could indeed be normally and principally devoted to that pursuit, but at first glance, it would seem that, in this moment, the very opposite is occurring; that is to say, the activity appears to be the burial rite of a plague victim, an appropriate enough activity to depict, given the epidemic raging in the vicinity. On a long, three-tiered interior ramp, a formal line of somber men and women processes through the various levels of the structure accompanying what is apparently the body of a deceased member of their family or community; covered in a white shroud and carried upon a litter, the body can be seen in the middle tier of the ramp. Included in the procession, on the lowest level, is a priestly figure vested in liturgical garb, with a miterlike headdress and book in hand. At the very top of the ramp, one figure carries a small, probably metal container, presumably for oil or perfume, while the woman next to him (or her) holds a handkerchief to her nose: is she crying or protecting herself against the odor or miasma of the underground locale? On the middle ramp, closest to the right-hand pier of the arch, a figure processes forward holding up some unidentifiable, slightly raised small object shrouded in a cloth, probably something needed for the ceremony in process. Others in the procession bear torches, while a young man a short distance in front of the priest visibly struggles to carry a large, well-filled, and presumably heavy sack. What is he carrying? As Jean Jacques Boissard reports in his Romanae urbis topographia et antiquitates,27 the ancients did have the custom of burying along with the deceased personal items belonging to or associated with him or her: is that what is depicted here? But, if that is the case, then why are these items stuffed and carried in rather undignified fashion, in just this one sizable, bulging, and unwieldy sack?
The first impulse may be to read the human activity within the Black Hall as a burial rite; however, while this should not be excluded as the correct interpretation, it is important to note some obstacles in the way of such a reading of the scene. By the time Sweerts painted Plague in an Ancient City, much was known about ancient Roman and early Christian funeral and burial practices, and known in rather detailed fashion, from the closing of the eyes of the deceased on their deathbed to the burial of their remains. This was thanks to a series of works on the subject (most notably those by Palladio, Boissard, Giraldi, Guichard, Panvinio, and Kirchmann), published during the great antiquarian vogue of the sixteenth and [253]seventeenth centuries, and based upon an abundance of archeological and literary evidence.28 Sweerts’s scene does not correspond to any of the descriptions found in these contemporary treatises. No tombs, open graves, funerary monuments, decorations, or inscriptions are evident in the structure. Its sole decorative element, the caryatid, is not a feature normally associated with places of death and burial; there is no basis for such an association in any of the archeological evidence available to Sweerts.
Moreover, if this is indeed a scene of burial, then the presence of the litter would lead to the conclusion that the deceased is being interred, body fully intact, and not cremated. Yet, there is no sign of a burial place, such as a sarcophagus, of which many ancient Roman examples abounded in Swe erts’s Rome. By late imperial times, as early modern sources report, the Romans were practicing both forms of burial, that is, interment of the whole untouched body (humatio) and cremation (combustio). Cremation—the “mos Romanus,” according to Tacitus—was far more common, with burial of the cremated remains occurring most typically in small, aboveground tombs or mausolea (to contain the crematory urns), along the sides of the extra-urban roads, as could still be easily seen by anyone living in seventeenth-century Rome.29 Giraldi’s De sepulchris mentions the underground burial crypts used by the Romans called conditoria (hypogea in Greek), which, he says, could be readily visited in Rome and throughout Lazio. (By the mid-seventeenth century, there had been several such structures uncovered in the area occupied by the Villa Pamphilj, the suburban home of the papal family who employed Sweerts during his Roman years.) But apart from the presence of the litter, there is no visual evidence in Sweerts’s Black Hall identifying it unambiguously as a conditorium. There is, furthermore, no reference in the early modern treatises to the funeral procession actually entering into the underground crypt, whose small dimensions and confining spaces would have not easily accommodated so many mourners, musicians, singers, and the host of burial accoutrements.30
[254]Just as importantly, given the acute fear of contagion, in actual practice, both ancient and early modern, plague victims were usually not given this sort of formal, ritualized burial. The highly infectious cadavers of the disease’s victims were not normally paraded around in public, especially in the presence of large gatherings of people, much less so in such close confined spaces as the interior of the Black Hall. Even if all fear and caution had somehow been miraculously overcome, in the midst of a virulent outbreak of deadly plague such as is seen outside the Black Hall, hundreds of men, women, and children died on a daily basis—why then is there only one litter here?
Also raising doubt about an interpretation of this interior scene as the interment of a plague victim is the presence of many people who, although in the one same processional line, seem to have an air of complete psychological detachment from the burial ritual. In stark contrast to those impassioned foreground figures outside on the public square in the throes of their pain and despair, the participants in the procession show little sign of grief or any other emotion (the woman at the very top of the ramp seems to be shielding her nose from odor rather than weeping); there are no distraught faces, no discernible gestures of prayer or lamentation or grief-filled beseeching of the heavens. Calm and stiffly erect, are these processing figures here for another purpose, and not primarily to be part of a funeral service? The same question must be asked about the even calmer men and women lined up on the external ramp just outside the lower, right-hand arch of the Black Hall, awaiting entry and the beginning of their own ascent up the passageway. Furthermore, as can be seen in Fittler’s engraving, there is, seated placidly just below the caryatid and thus presumably also inside the Black Hall, an elderly man who seems to be looking down at something in his lap, paying no attention to the ritual that is being enacted: what role does the artist intend for this mysterious figure in the overall economy of his interior scene? Is this seated figure somehow a part of this funereal event, or just a detached nonspectator? As for that multi-leveled ramp or passageway, if one follows it all the way upward (towards the upper left), it appears to lead to an unseen room or some further section of the structure beyond the viewer’s sight, from which rays of bright light are shining. Is this another room, or is it merely a second entrance to or exit from the Black Hall? If it is just another door to/from the exterior, why are [255]some members of the congregation, somewhat solemnly, entering the temple from the ramp on the lower right? Is the distinction between these two portals significant?
Further speculation as to the exact nature of the activity occurring within the Black Hall must be postponed until Sweerts’s overall scene has been examined more and additional historical information has been brought to bear on its details. Returning once again to the open air, there is one final important element to note in Plague in an Ancient City—the references to heliolatry, or sun worship. These references are communicated not only by the presence of the tall obelisk in the center of the square, but also by the demeanor of many individuals scattered amidst the space. Just behind the “hall” on the same left-hand sector of the scene, a small crowd of people appears to be standing in rapt attention facing toward the sun. Seated and dispersed throughout the remaining area of the piazza are other similarly sun-gazing figures. The sun is not directly visible on the canvas, but it is clear that it is rather low in the sky. Contrary to the most recent description of this canvas—“an eerie twilight pervades the scene as the sun sets beneath a darkening sky”31—the sun is rising, not setting. Furthermore, the people on the piazza facing the sun are not merely gazing disinterestedly at that source of light, but rather, if not worshipping it, are at least reverencing it in deliberate, active fashion.
SWEERTS’S VISUAL CLUES: PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS
Having taken careful stock of the painting’s most significant elements, one can draw some preliminary conclusions. On the basis of visual evidence alone, it is reasonable to assume that the artist is here contrasting two distinct forms of religion or worship in which the citizens of this plague-besieged city are engaged in the midst of this horrendous outbreak of disease. The one is represented on the right by the White Temple; the other, on the left, by the Black Hall. A second, reasonable assumption is that Sweerts is at the same time telling the viewer, again in clear visual terms, that one is to be preferred over the other, namely, the religion represented by the White Temple. The latter visual clues come in various forms. The first is architectural, in the very depiction of the two buildings: the White Temple—elegant, illuminated, and firmly intact (as the many carefully depicted metal butterfly clips on the marble steps suggest)—is clearly portrayed as superior to the Black Hall, which is shrouded in gloom and in somewhat dilapidated and by [256]no means manicured or stately condition. The geographical position of the two edifices affords a second clue: the White Temple has been placed on the right, more noble side of the canvas, as opposed to the Black Hall, which is on the left, the “sinister” side.32 Furthermore, the three figures are gesturing unmistakably towards the house of worship on the right. Finally, the general placement of all the figures in this canvas is such that a strong diagonal line is formed in the composition, leading the eye inexorably upward toward the White Temple. The same movement is reinforced by the progress in the canvas from darkness to light, from left to right, that is, away from Black Hall and towards White Temple, the focus of the attention of the three “guides.”
Principal among the three guides is the centrally placed, visually striking, solemn Blue Prophet. With his strong, intelligent facial features and noble bearing, clothed in celestial blue and stately headdress identifying him as one of high social status, he is clearly the key figure in Sweerts’s composition. Drawing further attention to the Blue Prophet is his interlocutor, the bare-breasted, well-illuminated blond woman who listens intently to his speech, reminding the viewer to do likewise. But she is not the only one to do so; also attending to the discourse of this gentleman is another figure, somewhat in the shadows just to the left and behind the Blue Prophet, a young man with brown hair parted in the middle who bears a distinct resemblance to Michael Sweerts himself. Is this indeed a self-portrait?33 Has Sweerts placed this portrait so close to the canvas’s main figure, the Blue Prophet, in order to somehow associate himself more personally with the message being imparted?
To miss the message of the body language of the Blue Prophet and the other two related gesticulating figures is to miss the message of the entire painting: their role is crucial within the overall economy of the scene. By including such figures within his composition, Sweerts follows a time-honored pictorial custom deriving from the well-respected and much-heeded advice of Leon Battista Alberti: in book 2 of his De pictura (1435), Alberti discusses the role of gesturing characters within a historia (narrative composition) as an important vehicle of communication to the viewer about significant elements of the scene or indeed about its whole meaning.34 In Poussin’s The Plague of Ashdod, the obvious point of departure for Sweerts in the conception of this canvas, this same Albertian element appears in the figure of the white-robed priest (reincarnated in Plague in an Ancient City as the White Prophet); with his raised right arm, the white priest calls the attention of the townspeople—and of the viewer—to the ill fortune of the [257]Philistine idol, Dagon. Also calling the attention of the spectator is the young boy in the lower right who points to the foreground plague victims, who were punished for the profanation of the ark of the covenant. Sweerts himself makes use of this element in even more explicit fashion in another canvas, Clothing the Naked (ca. 1646–49, Rijksmuseum), from his “Seven Acts of Mercy” series. In that canvas, an elderly male figure to right of center is looking straight at the viewer while pointing to the scene behind him in which the relevant act of charity is being performed, thus reminding the viewers of their obligation to “go and do likewise.” Furthermore, yet another such pointing figure is found in Sweerts’s later Double Portrait, also known as Two Men in Oriental Costume (fig. 9.5). However, in Plague in an Ancient City, Sweerts has inserted three such figures, not just one, lest the viewer miss the point!
Given the clear historical context of both the painted scene—a city within the ancient Roman empire—and of the canvas itself—an art object produced in papal Rome of the seventeenth-century—it requires no great leap of imagination, nor represents any act of scholarly daring, to further conclude that these two opposing religions are, in fact, Christianity (represented by the White Temple) and paganism (the Black Hall). Evidence pointing to the pagan identity of the Black Hall has been discussed above. As for the White Temple, apart from its more attractive depiction and more favorable position within the composition, there is only one explicit cue to help identify its nature, but this one cue is significant: the orans (raised, extended hands) prayer pose of two of the figures on the steps of the Hall.35 In historically conscious baroque Rome, learned artists—and all serious artists were expected to be learned or have learned consultants36—and [258]learned viewers were likely to have known that this, the orans form of prayer, was one of the characteristic features of early Christian worship.
Even though the orans mode of prayer, as is now known, did not originate with the Christians nor was unique to them, in the seventeenth century it was understood as a defining trait of early Christian prayer. The “father of modern church history,” author of the monumental and vastly influential [259]Annales ecclesiastici, Cardinal Cesare Baronio (1538–1607), devoted an entire section of his first volume (Annus Christi 58, cc. 109–11, “De ritu standi, genuflectendi, et procedendi”) to the orans pose and the other early Christian modes of prayer and worship with respect to the physical disposition of the body. In this discussion, Baronio cites as one of his sources the well-known treatise on prayer by third-century Christian apologist Tertullian, a seminal, enduring, and oft-quoted source of Christian identity and apology throughout the centuries.37 As Tertullian explains, the early Christians were known (and ridiculed) for their mode of prayer: “In our case, not only do we raise [our hands when praying], we even spread them out, and, imitating the Passion of our Lord, we confess as we pray.”38
Corroborating this textual proof was the abundant visual evidence produced from the highly decorated catacombs of Rome, which, beginning in the late sixteenth century, had been the subject of intense exploration and documentation, inspired by the dramatic and accidental discovery of new catacombs in 1578. This discovery led to the unearthing and widespread exploration of several other catacombs, producing an enormous wealth of archeological findings, published two decades before the painting of Sweerts’s canvas in a lavishly illustrated and meticulously prepared work, Antonio Bosio’s Roma sotterranea (1632), followed later by a greatly expanded and revised version, Roma subterranea novissima (1651) by Paolo Arringhi. Among the visual findings from the catacombs publicized and illustrated by Bosio and Arringhi were the many representations of the orans figure—the early Christian at prayer—similar to the one in Plague in an Ancient City before the White Temple.39 It is also worth noting that none of the abundant visual evidence publicized by these two texts (including the markedly different manner of burial illustrated prominently in their frontispieces), shows up in Sweerts’s Black Hall: this absence represents yet another argument in favor of the non-Christian nature of that building.
THE SUM OF THE PARTS: A FORGOTTEN PLAGUE AND A FORGOTTEN TEXT
Julian the Apostate and the (Apocryphal) Plague of 361–63 ad
Unless Sweerts decided to dispense completely with historical accuracy or verisimilitude—not likely in the case of a serious, ambitious artist working [260]in lofty ecclesiastical circles—one must ask at what point in recorded history paganism and Christianity existed side by side, legally and freely practiced by their respective adherents. Paying close attention to the visual detail supplied by Sweerts, the question must be further refined to ask not only when the two religions coexisted, but also when Christianity enjoyed a greater state of well-being (recall the fine, intact White Temple), while paganism had lapsed into a state of decay (recall the dilapidated conditions of the Black Hall). But there is a further element to factor into the interrogation. When, under these two conditions, did a violent plague strike the Roman Empire? The only answer possible turns out to be in the first half of the fourth century ad, during the brief but memorable reign (361–63) of Emperor Julian, called the Apostate.
That a deadly punishing plague struck during the reign of the apostate emperor Julian came as no surprise to Christian apologists of his century or later. Jesuit Antonio Possevino (d. 1611) gives voice to the common, enduring belief of premodern Christian doctrine in his widely disseminated spiritual treatise, Cause et rimedii della peste (Causes of and Remedies for the Plague) in stating that God frequently and by preference sends plague (of all sorts) to punish sinful peoples, sinful nations, or their sinful rulers. The most famous examples are those recounted in the Bible, the ten plagues of Egypt sent to punish Pharaoh (and all the Egyptians along with him) for his enslavement of the Hebrews (Exodus 7–11) and the plague sent by God as punishment upon the Israelites when their king, David, dared to contravene the divine will by undertaking a census of his people (1 Chronicles 21 and 2 Samuel 24). However, there are other egregious examples in postbiblical Christian history as well, such as the one that fell (along with other scourges) upon the Roman Empire during the reign of Julian. Possevino explains:
Keep in mind that whenever evil has reached its peak or whenever God has wanted to fill Paradise with the souls of the poor and the patiently suffering, or else whenever governments had to be changed in the world or when the Catholic religion had to separate itself from people who had rendered themselves unworthy of her, either because of their sins or their embracing of false doctrines and heresies, or when in the governments of the Christian republic, there were those who commingled worldly judgment with the ways of God, it was then that certain emissaries arrived to announce a most horrifying war to be waged by God. Thus did it happen that before the infliction of that great ruin upon the Christian Church by Julian the Apostate, that honored ecclesiastical philosopher, by name of Dydimus, while in prayer in Alexandria, foresaw the earthquake and the flood that submerged almost all of Alexandria, the drought, the plague, the famine, [261]all of which followed, one upon the other, in order to wake up the world that was asleep and to bestow the crown of victory upon the good who persevered in their faith and love of God.40 (emphasis added)
As is evident in Possevino’s pages and in other texts of Christian apology, the Julianic plague—together with the emperor’s untimely, ignominious death (ordered by the Virgin Mary herself, according to some embellished versions of the legend)41—was seen by Christians as an express act of divine retribution and celebrated by them as a further sign of the special status of their faith as the “one true religion,” constantly protected and nurtured by heaven. In Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City, the most significant visual components can be explained by means of this new information; the important details of Sweerts’s canvas—the pieces of his puzzle—find a ready, coherent explanation by means of this hypothesis, namely, that the historical, spiritual scenario depicted is, in fact, the Julianic plague, the punishment sent by God upon the Roman empire for the apostasy of Julian, for his abandonment of the true faith (White Temple), and for the resurgence, under his rule and guidance, of paganism (Black Hall). As was common knowledge in Sweerts’s Europe, in the late fourth century, despite the official political triumph of Christianity under Constantine the Great and his successors earlier in the same century, paganism, though languishing, had by no means died out; it continued to be practiced, the physical structures of its cult remaining intact, even if the state was no longer committed to [262]their maintenance. Once the reins of power were firmly and solely in his hands, Julian (Constantine’s nephew) attempted to turn back the clock; through personal example and active encouragement, the emperor strove to overthrow the “one true faith” by various means (though never through actual physical harm) and to return the empire to the ancestral religion of its fathers.
In Plague in an Ancient City, therefore, calling attention to the true faith and the true source of salvation from the calamity of plague is Sweerts’s Blue Prophet, who, together with his two other gesturing companions on the piazza, points emphatically to the White Temple, that is, the seat of worship of the one true God. On the opposite side of the canvas the pagans are engaged in the vain pursuits of their heathen liturgy, directed to their “false gods.” If the liturgy in question is indeed the funeral of a pagan, then according to Christian doctrine, no matter how many prayers were offered up on behalf of the deceased, he or she had no possibility of new life after death, for resurrection of the body and salvation of the soul were reserved exclusively for believers in Jesus Christ the Savior.
Julian himself is not visually present in Sweerts’s canvas, since the artist is concerned with depicting the effects of the plague on a whole population, and not on one individual, the emperor. The emperor did not personally suffer any of the effects of the plague and, in any case, would have not acknowledged himself as its cause. Nonetheless, ranking with Judas Iscariot as one of the most notorious and perennially “favorite” and fascinating villains of Christian history, Julian would have been quite present to the minds and imaginations of the seventeenth-century viewers of this canvas. There was by 1650 a massive body of literature surrounding Julian, transmitted over the generations by multiple means of dissemination—through printed texts such as the Golden Legend, preached sermons of church orators, public performances of morality plays, Jesuit or otherwise, and, of course, art.
In the wake of the enthusiastic paleo-Christian revival that took place in Rome beginning in the late sixteenth century (partly in response to the Protestant assault against the Roman Church), the memory of the never-forgotten Julian gained even further notoriety. This revival, manifest in printed word and painted or sculpted image, focused especially on the heroic testimony of the early Christian martyrs, who died for their faith at the hand of persecuting Roman emperors, including Julian. A prominent example of the renewed fame and polemical currency acquired by Julian in the seventeenth century is the Pauline Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore, built and decorated earlier in the century under the patronage of Pope Paul V Borghese and his family. The fresco cycle of that famed chapel is devoted in large part to the theme of the defeat of heresy—a theme dear to the heart of Counter-Reformation Rome—and dramatizes in one of its scenes the violent, humiliating death of the emperor Julian, ordered by the [263]Virgin Mary herself.42 Another prominent vehicle for Julian’s enduring memory is the cult of Saint Bibiana, the fourth-century martyr who died during the Julianic persecution. In the mid-1620s, Bibiana’s small church on the road linking the main pilgrimage stations of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura and Santa Maria Maggiore, was rebuilt (by Bernini, who also sculpted the statue of the saint on the main altar) and redecorated with frescoes (by Pietro da Cortona and Agostino Ciampelli) illustrating scenes from her life and passio.43 During the refurbishment of her church, Bibiana’s body was rediscovered and to commemorate the rediscovery and the renovations, Domenico Fedini composed a popular life of the saint, Vita di Santa Bibiana vergine e martire romana, which includes many introductory pages on the life and character of Emperor Julian. Bibiana’s memory is relevant to the discussion of Swe erts’s canvas not only because of her connection to the emperor Julian, but also because of the long association of her cult with the pursuit of healing (as the curative plants inserted at the base of Bernini’s statue indicate). This would be a most appropriate allusion in a canvas involving a deliberate contrast between pagan and Christian responses to sickness and death.
Furthermore and just as significantly, during Sweerts’s own lifetime, all of Julian’s extant works were republished in Paris in 1630 by a distinguished publishing house (the brothers Cramoisy), under the care of an equally distinguished Jesuit scholar, Denis Petau. In the Praefatio to this edition Petau supplies the reader with the conventional, Christian (that is to say, demonized) portrait of the emperor. Petau’s work is just part of a vast body of Julian-related material produced in this century, much of which is conveniently documented in L’Empereur Julien: De l’histoire à la légende (331–-1715), edited by René Braun and Jean Richer. What is important to note is Julian’s vividly enduring memory in the collective consciousness of early modern Europeans and, thus, of the original audience of Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City.
It is not difficult to imagine the great resonance of this piece of “history,” the Julianic plague (apocryphal, no doubt) of 631–33, within the hearts of seventeenth-century Roman Catholics. Not only were they assailed by continual visitations of deadly plague, they were also the constant target of incessant attack (military, editorial, or otherwise) by their Protestant enemies who, like the apostate emperor, had supposedly abandoned the “one true faith.” Before looking in greater detail at Julian and his plague, as well as at the meaning of the various details in Sweerts’s canvas in the context of this chapter of history and its relevance to seventeenth-century Christendom, [264]a further word is in order about the question of Sweerts’s own historical sources. Was Possevino’s Cause et rimedii the immediate source of this historical information for Sweerts or for the learned friend or consultant—such as his Roman patron, historian abbate Antonio degli Effetti, or erudite humanist librarian Lucas Holstenius44—who might have advised the painter about the subject and its details? This may well have been the case since that popular treatise was close enough to him in both time and place (most recent edition, Milan, 1630). Equally as important, it represents only one of three texts found to mention the Julianic plague at all.45 However, even if Sweerts or his advisor had read Cause et rimedii, Possevino’s one paragraph on Julian would not have sufficed to allow the painter to understand the fuller historical context of this episode of early Christian history and thus fill in the details needed to compose his complex, monumental canvas. For that they would have been obliged to consult, to begin with, Possevino’s own source, the Ecclesiastical History of Nicephorus Callistus Xanthopoulus (ca. 1256–ca. 1335).46
Nicephorus’s Ecclesiastical History
Julian is the object of much attention in Nicephorus’s Ecclesiastical History, which describes the apostate emperor’s entire life from childhood to death in generous detail. At the conclusion of his account of the most inglorious and premature death of the thirty-one-year-old Julian in battle against the Persians, Nicephorus summarizes the evil fruits of the emperor’s reign:
During the entire time of [Julian’s] reign, indeed, an angry God sent various calamities and innumerable evils upon the dominions [265]of the Romans. Thus, the earth was convulsed by extraordinary quakes so that it was not safe for people to remain in their homes, nor could they safely find refuge even in the open air. During his reign, calamity befell that most celebrated city of Alexandria, which was struck by a violent flooding of the sea. . . . . Intense drought also struck while he was in power, wiping out crops and bringing about pestilential air as well . . . . Plague itself followed this famine, which infested the body with a variety of maladies, from which multitudes of mortals died. (10:35)47
Although none of the more ancient and more venerable sources of early Christian history note this Julianic plague, seventeenth-century readers of Nicephorus would have had no trouble in accepting it as fact, inasmuch as it fit squarely into the firmly held conviction of early modern Catholics, as in Possevino, about the vengeful hand of God who punished (especially by means of plague) all those who opposed his people. Cardinal Baronio does not mention the Julianic plague in his Annales ecclesiastici, but does discuss, with an air of obvious satisfaction, the violent plague that struck the empire during the earlier reign of Maximinus, another instance of direct divine retaliation for imperial persecution of the Christians: “Such was the reward and recompense,” Baronio reports, quoting Eusebios of Kaisareia’s Ecclesiastical History, “of the arrogant Maximinus” for his decrees against God’s people.48
EXCURSUS: NICEPHORUS AND THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS BETWEEN CATHOLICS AND PROTESTANTS
In addition to the seemingly unanimous belief in the plague-as-divine-punishment topos among Christians, another reason for the ready acceptance of Nicephorus’s account by early modern readers was the popularity and esteem enjoyed by his Ecclesiastical History in seventeenth-century Europe. The authority of that text in that age was such that Nicephorus’s word alone sufficed to establish historical fact as fact. This is the impression conveyed by the great encomia heaped upon the work by its sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editors and publishers and by the frequency and unquestioning manner with which this Byzantine history is quoted by [266]numerous early modern texts.49 Although nowadays Nicephorus is far from being a household name (even in academic households), in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries quite the opposite was true. Why this was so has to do not only with the state of that era’s knowledge of the origins and nature of the Byzantine text but also and equally as important with the religious environment of the European continent. This is the same environment in which Plague in an Ancient City was produced and which is reflected in that canvas. Hence, the story of the early modern reputation and vicissitudes of this text, Nicephorus’s Ecclesiastical History, has much direct bearing on understanding Sweerts’s painting, its meaning and its message.50
A member of the imperial court of Constantinople, the Byzantine priest Nicephorus was the author of several other fairly well-known and regularly consulted works of varying genre (liturgical, hymnological, exegetical, literary), although none enjoyed the reputation of his Ecclesiastical History. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, this work was, by any reckoning, a bestseller. In 1553, it was published in Basel for the first time as a separate volume with a competent Latin translation by distinguished German scholar-statesman Johann Lange (Johannes Langus, 1503–67). This 1553 edition, made possible by the avid patronage of “King of the Romans” and future Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand (“Sacratiss. Rom. Regis Ferdinandi liberalitate”), boasted in its very title of “the extraordinary value” of Nicephorus’s history “compared with all other ecclesiastical histories thus far published” (“eximia utilitas, prae ceteris Ecclesiasticorum scriptorum historijs hactenus editis”). Early modern Europeans, it would appear, were indeed convinced of Nicephorus’s “extraordinary value,” for the work, in the same translation and as a separate title unto itself, was reprinted several times in rapid succession: Antwerp, 1560; Basel, 1561; Paris, 1562, 1566, 1567 (in French), 1576, 1573; and Frankfurt, 1588 (and perhaps 1597 as well).51
[267]All of these sixteenth-century editions were eventually superceded by a new, bilingual (Greek-Latin) version in folio, printed in Paris in 1630, entirely revised and newly annotated by eminent Jesuit scholar and editor of ancient Byzantine Christian texts, Fronton Du Duc (Ducaeus). This handsome edition was dedicated to Cardinal Richelieu, whose intervention had been necessary in order for the editor to gain access to the precious sole surviving manuscript housed in the Imperial Library in Vienna.52 Interestingly enough, in the same city and year, and from the same publishers, the brothers Cramoisy, came the new, scholarly, and likewise bilingual (Greek and Latin) edition of the works of Emperor Julian himself, Juliani Imp. Opera, quae quidem reperiri potuerant omnia. Edited by another Jesuit scholar, Denis Petau (Dionysius Petavius, 1583–1652), the edition comprised all of the emperor’s known works, including some never before published. Petau’s copiously annotated edition came only fifty years after the Paris 1583 bilingual edition of Julian’s collected works edited by Pierre Martinez (d. 1594) and Charles de Chantecler (fl. 1577–1620).
All but forgotten in the West since its original publication in the thirteenth century, why had Nicephorus’s history become once again popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? The principal reason was the Protestant Reformation. The war between Protestants and Catholics was waged as much on scholarly-historical battlefields as on military and political ones, with each side brandishing venerable, authoritative texts and newly minted historiae ecclesiasticae to assert the legitimacy of their respective version of Christian doctrine and ecclesiastical polity.53 This type of warfare entailed the rediscovery and recirculation of rare and neglected texts, in new, more accessible editions and translations, which were necessary for the manufacture of the new church histories.54 The first monumental volley of polemical-apologist scholarship based on resurrected primary historical sources was launched by the Protestants in the form of Magdeburg Centuries, thirteen volumes covering the first thirteen centuries of church history, a [268]project conceived by Croat Matthias Flacius Ilyricus but executed (in 1559–74) by a group of Lutheran scholars known collectively as the “Centuriators of Magdeburg.”55 The principal Catholic response eventually came in the form of the twelve-volume Annales ecclesiastici (1588–1607) by Cesare Baronio. Enormously influential and even more monumental than the Magdeburg Centuries, Baronio’s Annales were likewise compiled from ancient and medieval primary sources, both sacred and profane; prominent among them, and cited explicitly in text and footnotes, was Nicephorus’s Ecclesiastical History.56
Both the Magdeburg Centuries and Baronio’s Annales, in turn, inspired further recovery of historical texts and further widespread publicizing of the facts of Christian history. Heightened public awareness of the facts of church history was at the same time being fed by the remarkable progress in ancient Christian archeology sparked by the accidental discovery on 31 May 1578 of new, extensive, long-forgotten Roman catacombs, rich with images of early Christian art, on the Via Salaria. This epoch-marking discovery eventually led to a vast systematic, scholarly exploration of many other catacombs (in fact, almost all of those known today) and the publication of the wealth of findings in Bosio’s Roma sotterranea and Arringhi’s Roma subterranea novissima. The discovery of the catacombs and their visual contents is of direct relevance to Sweerts’s plague painting, reflected in the presence of the orans figures in front of the White Temple.
Nicephorus’s role in the battle of the books between Catholics and Protestants is explicit in the written documentation of the age. In his 1665–79 history of the Imperial Library in Vienna, Peter Lambeck reproduces a January 1621 letter from Jesuit editor Fronton Du Duc to imperial librarian Sebastianus Tegnagelius in which he explains the urgency of a new, accurate Catholic edition of Nicephorus and hence the need for the loan of the sole “pretiosissimus codex.” Referring to Nicephorus’s history as “that outstanding monument of ecclesiastical antiquity,” Du Duc explains that a certain man, Philippus Mornaeus (Philippe de Mornay, seigneur du Plessis-Marly, 1549–1623), who one time claimed to be Catholic but has been condemned as a Lutheran by Cardinal Perronio (Jacques Davy Du Perron, 1556–1618), appears to be planning his own edition of the Byzantine historian.57 Even stronger echoes of the Catholic-Protestant struggle can be heard in the earlier, [269]French-language edition published in Paris in 1567 by Sebastien Nivelle. Replete with references to “heretics,” “schismatics,” and “enemies of the church,” the long dedicatory “Epistre” to Charles IX, king of France, by a certain “Jean Gillot, Champenois” claims that, after the Bible, Nicephorus was simply the most useful text for strengthening one’s Catholic faith; this is so, he explains, because the Byzantine historian communicates teachings that “console us” and “give us hope” while all around us we see “this poor Christian Republic so fiercely tossed by the winds of evil doctrine.” Gillot’s “Epistre” goes on to say that not only does Nicephorus present the material in much better and more useful form than do his predecessors, but his history also demonstrates the fact that, despite the great adversity experienced through the centuries by the church, despite the many assaults of her enemies, she managed not only to be born, but also to mature and to persevere, at all times victorious against those who opposed her.
Although not in any technical sense a primary source, Nicephorus’s work possessed in the eyes of early modern Christians an aura of venerable authority, given its provenance in the court of the Byzantine emperor to which it had originally been dedicated. Moreover, the very circumstances of its survival, detailed in the 1630 dedication of the Parisian publishers, seemed to show the direct hand of divine providence at work preserving it for posterity. This would have only served to endow the work with an aura of even greater venerability, notoriety, and authority than imparted by its age, exotic origins, and imperial connections. “Heu quibus ille jactatus fatis!” (Alas, by what calamities has [this codex] been tossed about!), exclaim the Parisian publishers of the 1630 edition; stolen in Buda by a member of the invading Turkish army from the library of Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus, it was taken to Constantinople where it was later ransomed by a Christian, eventually finding its way to the Imperial Library in Vienna. Furthermore, as the Parisian publishers relate, the 1630 reappearance of the Ecclesiastical History was a result of the direct intervention of none other than the prime minister of France himself, Cardinal Richelieu, a fact also reported by Lambeck who reprints some of the correspondence between Paris and Vienna regarding the publication of the Nicephorus manuscript. When the new Paris edition of the Ecclesiastical History was finally published, that fact was noted with pleasure in Rome, as seen in a 1630 letter to the librarian of the Imperial Library in Vienna from erudite bibliophile and future custodian of the Vatican Library, Lucas Holstenius, then residing in the Eternal City under the employment of the Barberini.58
[270]Nicephorus as Widely Consulted Sourcebook for Artists
The utility of Nicephorus’s Ecclesiastical History, however, was not confined to controversialists, apologists, and historians. Its contents were of vital interest to another group as well, the artists of Catholic Europe. When Gian Lorenzo Bernini, for example, was planning his equestrian statue of the great Christian hero Constantine for Saint Peter’s Basilica, that architectural expression of the triumphant baroque papacy, it was, as Wittkower relates, “Nicephorus’s much-used thirteenth-century Historia Ecclesiastica” that the artist consulted for what was then considered an authentic description of the emperor’s physical appearance.59 In fact, Nicephorus and Nicephorus alone offers what he claims are authentic descriptions of the “true likeness” of several New Testament figures, including that of Jesus Christ himself (1:40) and his mother Mary (2:23). These obviously would have been of great interest to artists and patrons alike. In the late sixteenth century, the Holy Shroud of Turin, purporting to preserve a “true likeness” of the dead Christ, began to receive great attention in the Christian world, so much so that in Rome its image was incorporated into the decorative program of the Chapel of the Pietà in the Chiesa Nuova, the chapel for which Caravaggio’s Entombment of Christ had been commissioned. According to Sheldon Grossman, most likely responsible ultimately for the inclusion of this reproduction was the 1598 book (reprinted in 1599) on the Holy Shroud, Explicatione del lenzuolo, ove fu involto il Signore . . . , by Alfonso Paleotti. One of the sources of Paleotti’s work was, not surprisingly, Niceph-orus’s Ecclesiastical History whose description of Jesus’ face is cited.60
Another New Testament figure for whom Nicephorus furnishes a physical description is Saint Peter, called “prince of the apostles” and “first pope.” Peter’s true likeness was the object of much attention on the part of the post-Tridentine papacy (and the artists in its service), which aggressively used “the power of images” to defend its legitimacy and sovereignty. Hence, in his very much pro-papal Annales, Baronio quotes verbatim Nicephorus’s description of the face of Peter.61 Also of great interest to Catholic artists [271]and their patrons, as well as to all those in the church concerned with the production and devotional use of sacred images, is another of Nicephorus’s reports: in book 6, section 16, the Byzantine historian relates that “many painted portraits” (coloribus adumbratas imagines plurimas) were made of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Peter, Paul, and other apostles during their lifetimes. Some of these portraits, he tells further, came from the hand of Luke the Evangelist and were still extant at the time of his writing, as were many personal objects belonging to or intimately connected with these persons, such as the Virgin Mary’s dress (15:24) and the throne of James, “the brother of the Lord . . . first bishop of Jerusalem” (6:16). Nicephorus also recounts (2:7) the story of the miraculous image of the face of Christ, the Mandelion of Edessa, much venerated in Saint Peter’s during the seventeenth century and beyond. For his testimony to the fact that Jesus, Mary, and the apostles allowed such images to be created, Nicephorus had an important role to play in the Catholic struggle against the Protestant iconoclasts.62
READING PLAGUE IN AN ANCIENT CITY THROUGH THE EYES OF NICEPHORUS AND OTHER APOLOGISTS
The Demonization of Pagan Religion by Christian Apologists
After this long but necessary excursus on Nicephorus’s text and the religious struggles of early modern Europe, it is time to look again at the painted scene with much new information in hand. Even though a great deal of the more immediate visual focus of Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City is on the dramatic physical and emotional effects of the plague upon a disparate array of poignantly portrayed individuals in the foreground—the dead and dying, male and female, young and old—there is much else being depicted and communicated to the viewer. With the help of Nicephorus, as well as other works of Christian history and apology readily available to the artist and his contemporaries, it is possible to shed light on many of the other significant details Sweerts has purposefully included in his painting, especially those thus far left unexplained or only partially explained. Prominent among the latter is the Black Hall and the activity therein.
After the crowd of compassion-stirring plague victims placed closest to the viewer in the foreground, the Black Hall represents the segment of the canvas that perhaps most claims the attention: not only does this area occupy a substantial portion of the canvas, but it also represents the most enigmatic element of Sweerts’s larger enigmatic composition and has, to my knowledge, no counterpart in the architectural settings of any other depiction of ancient plagues. One wonders what precisely is taking place within that building. Is it indeed a real temple, that is, a place of worship [272]and other ritual, or is it merely a place of burial? Or both? The possibility that the rite occurring within the Black Hall is simply the funeral of a plague victim has been examined, but whether the funeral of a victim of the plague or any other cause, natural or unnatural, its inclusion in this canvas would have served to highlight the futility of pagan prayer and ritual as far as the eternal destiny of the soul of the deceased is concerned—only through the Christian religion can one expect resurrection of the body and salvation of the soul in the afterlife. However, as explained earlier, there are several factors militating against this interpretation, requiring consideration of alternative readings of the visual evidence. One thing that seems certain is that there is a body—presumably a dead body—being carried in procession in the lugubrious, probably underground structure that is the Black Hall, but what does it mean? If not a victim of the plague or some other natural cause, was the deceased the victim of some other unnatural cause, like homicide or ritual sacrifice?
While these are real and significant questions, finding definitive answers is not essential to understanding the ultimate message of Sweerts’s canvas. Given the dark, baleful air that envelops the dilapidated hall and, just as important, given the universally negative and often demonized fashion in which Christians, from the birth of their faith through the seventeenth century, viewed pagan religion and its rituals, it is reasonable to conclude that Sweerts intends the viewer to understand that nothing good is occurring within this tenebrous pagan gathering place. In the eyes of the church, although pagan mythological personages and narratives could be used in art and literature as convenient, entertaining instruments for the purpose of moral instruction, ancient Greek and Roman religion, as a theological system and body of liturgical practices, was simply to be despised and rejected. Only Christianity—and for Roman Catholics, only Roman Catholicism—represented the one, true faith and secure path to salvation. This black-and-white dichotomy, permeating all of the religious literature of the Christian centuries, is painted in stark chiaroscuro fashion. Therefore, whatever precisely is being acted out in the Black Hall, it would have been considered by Sweerts’s original Roman viewers as, at best, a spiritually futile and misguided form of a superstitious and idolatrous religious cult, at worst, a sinister form of demonolatry and barbarism. In fact, most of the literature relating to Julian the Apostate tends to emphasize the latter, more contemptuous interpretation of pagan worship.
Unfortunately, unless some new detailed contemporary description or other reliable documentation regarding Plague in an Ancient City is found, scholars will never be able to unravel completely the mystery of Sweerts’s Black Hall. However, in the meantime, from what Nicephorus and the early Christian apologists communicate about the nature of pagan religion and its liturgy, especially with respect to the emperor Julian, it is possible to be a [273]little more specific in deciphering the contents of that dark edifice, and of the remainder of the canvas. By investigating the precise historical, religious, and political context in which Sweerts produced his canvas, one can also speculate with greater specificity about the canvas’s intended message (a warning to those who persecute the Church or stray from its teachings) and its intended targets.
Secret Underground Sanctuaries: Julian, Mithraism, and the Mystery Religions of the Late Roman Empire
In his account of the Julianic reign Nicephorus tells that the young Julian, although a baptized Christian, was strongly attracted to the paganism of the traditional Roman state religion and secretly trained in its doctrine and rituals. Especially during his years of peripatetic schooling in various parts of the empire, the future emperor was also equally drawn to the more exotic mystery religions then extremely popular throughout the empire. To make matters worse (in Christian eyes, that is), Julian had also become deeply fascinated with and actively participated in various forms of occult magic and other superstitious practices, such as divination.63 Once he became sole emperor, uncontested in his power, Julian ended his Christian masquerade and gave himself totally and publicly to paganism and the occult; undertaking in earnest the political and social repression of his former religion, he began to make life increasingly difficult for Christians.64
As far as the nature of Julian’s liturgical experiences is concerned, Nicephorus (10:3) writes that on one occasion, in the course of secret sacrificing to demons in some secret underground sanctuary (“cum celebre quoddam adytum divinationis gratia subiret”), “horrenda spectra” (horrifying ghosts) were conjured up, which so frightened the future emperor that, forgetting himself, he spontaneously made the Christian sign of the cross in order to chase away these evil spirits. Earlier in the tenth book of his Ecclesiastical History, Nicephorus relates that Julian had “washed away” the sacred mark of his Christian baptism “through certain sacrifices and abhorrent invocations of demons and the blood of victims,” a detail singled out and amplified by Baronio’s Annales, which give a meticulous description of this supposed ablutionary rite of Julian’s. Baronio’s lurid description is, in fact, borrowed verbatim from the early Christian Latin poet, Prudentius (348–after 405); in his long and well-known hymn, Peristephanon Liber (Crowns of Martyrdom), with no reference to Julian, Prudentius supplies an extensive account of the taurobolium, the initiation rite of the cult of the Great Mother [274]goddess Cybele that entailed a shower of ox blood poured down over the individual undergoing this ablution.65
Although in Sweerts’s canvas, there is inside or outside the Black Hall no sign of ritualistic animal slaughter or of the conjuring of “horrenda spectra,” the two episodes recounted by Nicephorus are nonetheless relevant. First, they illustrate the association that Nicephorus and many other Christian sources66 constantly make between pagan ritual, especially the secret ritual of the mystery cults, and macabre demonolatry or sanguinary barbarism. Thanks to this consistent message, it is certain that even if the seventeenth-century viewers of Sweerts’s canvas were not able to understand all of what was taking place within the Black Hall, they would nonetheless have been taught to assume the worst—that what they were witnessing, by the mere fact of belonging to the realm of pagan ritual, was in its essence horror-inspiring and repulsive. If not explicitly present in the canvas—perhaps for reasons of early modern decorum—the demonic and the barbaric (viewers would have assumed) could not be far away. At the same time, it goes without saying that such rites were not only humanly repulsive but also, even more importantly, spiritually futile. Sweerts’s original audience would have understood that, even if the individuals occupying the Black Hall were not (at that moment) worshipping demons, they, by virtue of being pagans, had no hope of salvation through any ritual or prayer. They were all, to put it bluntly, going to hell after death, their prayers, sacrifices, and rites utterly rejected by the one true and Christian deity.
The second relevant piece of information supplied by Nicephorus’s anecdotes about Julian’s ritual experiences is their subterranean location, a smaller but significant detail for the deciphering of Sweerts’s canvas. Nicephorus takes it for granted that the pagan rites in question were customarily performed in secret underground sanctuaries; this is hardly surprising given the fact they were understood to be part and parcel of some mystery religion. This geographical detail is relevant because it confirms that assumption about the location and hence the nature of the Black Hall: although visually on the same horizontal plane as the rest of the activity in [275]the square, the structure, in reality, pertains to a different—that is, secret underground—realm to which the viewers have been granted momentary privileged access by the artist.
In the two passages regarding Julian’s secret rituals, however, Nicephorus does not supply the name of any specific cult. In this he reflects the customary disinterest on the part of Christian apologists and polemicists in the real distinctions between one pagan cult and another. Inasmuch as they were not antiquarians nor archeologists, the Christian apologists and apologetic historians like Nicephorus were simply not interested in providing and adhering to a careful taxonomy of pagan religious practice, even though they do supply abundant, specific reference to the various cults and the distinct activities and beliefs pertaining to them. Whatever the specifics and the distinctions, pagan religion was all equally damned in all of its multiple manifestations, and the apologists’ goal was primarily to condemn and demonize this enemy, while proving and defending the veracity of their own faith.
Yet, in another episode included in Nicephorus’s account of the Julian years, the Byzantine historian does give name to a specific cult, and this specification bears even more direct relevance to Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City. In Ecclesiastical History 10:6, under the orders of their bishop George, the Christians of Alexandria demolished a pagan temple, explicitly identified as a mithraeum, the cavelike house of worship of Mithras, in order to build a temple of their own on the site. The demolition uncovered the contents of the underground mithraeum (“subterraneum antrum”), that is, various idols and other instruments used in their secret rites. Finding them both ludicrous and foul, the Christians placed the liturgical objects on public display in deliberate derision of pagan religion. The devout pagans of Alexandria were not amused and, provoked to wrath, rose up against the Christians, killing many of them, including unlucky Bishop George.
At this point in the text, appended to Nicephorus’s account of this episode are two footnotes of great interest. Supplied by the Latin translator of the text, Johann Lange, they both relate to Mithras and Mithraism and are integral to the early modern understanding of Nicephorus’s text.67 Quoting the late tenth-century Greek lexicon, the Suidas, the first footnote begins: “The Persians believed Mithras to be the Sun, to whom they offered many sacrifices. Only those who had passed through various grades of torments and had declared themselves holy and experienced in suffering could be initiated into these rites.” After informing the reader that a mithraeum is a “temple of the Sun,” the same note goes on to repeat a statement from the short biography of Roman emperor Commodus (reg. 180–92 ad) by Aelius Lampridius (fl. 4th century) to the effect that “he [Commodus] had polluted the [276]rites of Mithras with homicide.”68 The second footnote reports that in the mithraea while “making sacrifice to Mithras, the Greeks used to slaughter humans,” citing the Ecclesiastical History of Socrates Scholasticus (ca. 380–450) as the source of this information.69 Socrates Scholasticus in book 3, chapter 2, includes the following chilling detail about the homicidal nature of Mithraic ritual:
There was a place in that city which had long been abandoned to neglect and filth, wherein the pagans had formerly celebrated their mysteries and sacrificed human beings to Mithras. This, being empty and otherwise useless, [Emperor] Constantius had granted to the church of the Alexandrians; and [Bishop] George, wishing to erect a church on the site of it, gave directions that the place should be cleansed. In the process of clearing it, an adytum [innermost sanctuary] of vast depth was discovered which unveiled the nature of their heathenish rites: for there were found there the skulls of many persons of all ages, who were said to have been immolated for the purpose of divination by the inspection of entrails, when the pagans were allowed to perform these and suchlike magic arts in order to enchant the souls of men.
Like the Nicephorus text they gloss, the two Lange footnotes and their sources confirm the polemical Christian association of pagan ritual—here, specifically Mithraic ritual—with the horrendous and the repulsive, in this case, the shedding of human blood. Although there is no sign of active slaughter, animal or human, in Sweerts’s scene, one cannot help wonder about the body being carried in procession within Sweerts’s Black Hall. During catastrophic outbreaks of plague in both ancient and early modern times, the highly contagious cadavers of victims would never have been thus carried about in public, much less given a normal burial within the context of a traditional organized ritual. The fear of further spreading the disease simply precluded such behavior. Thus, the question becomes: if the individual in question did not die of the plague, what then was the cause of his or her death? Was it, one wonders, a result of the cultic initiation rites held [277]within the Black Hall? In this discreet, decorum-preserving fashion, does Sweerts mean to suggest some such foul homicidal activity, as recounted in the Nicephorus footnotes and in so many well-known texts of Christian apologetic literature? Though unprovable given the current lack of documentation about Sweerts’s painting, this remains, nonetheless, an intriguing possibility.
Since the name of Mithraism has been raised in connection with Julian, a word is in order about that ancient mystery religion and, more specifically, about what Sweerts and his contemporaries would have known about it, beyond the meager references in Nicephorus. Associated with Zoroastrianism, Mithraism was an extremely popular cult of Persian origin centering on worship of the sun god Mithras, or Mithra, that flourished during the late Roman Empire.70 In the late imperial age, by the time of Constantine the Great, Mithraism had extended to all parts of the empire, as is known from many extant inscriptions, statues, sculpted reliefs, and mithraea uncovered over the centuries. Apart from the few notions and impressions supplied by Nicephorus and his annotators, informed Catholics of the seventeenth century would have been well aware of the existence of Mithraism and of certain of its general features—albeit in a distorted and fragmentary fashion—through numerous references in the classics of early Christian apologetic literature. Among these sources are the works of Tertullian, who seems to have been well acquainted with that cult and who naturally has nothing good to say of it, setting the tone and topoi for subsequent Christian polemic against the cult. “For a Christian writer such as Tertullian,” Manfred Clauss points out, “the [Mithraic] temples were . . . ‘in truth strongholds of darkness.’”71
Another early Christian apologist who has much to say about Mithraism in even stronger, more mocking terms is Firmicus Maternus, whose fiery polemical text of circa 350, The Error of the Pagan Religions, was rediscovered in the late sixteenth century by Lutheran scholar Matthias Flacius Ilyricus (dean of the Centuriators of Magdeburg), and much republished in various editions through the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Of the Persian sun god and his cult, Firmicus declares: “Him they call Mithra, and his cult they carry on in hidden caves, so that they may be forever plunged in the gloomy squalor of darkness and thus shun the grace of light resplendent and serene.” Elsewhere he taunts the adherents of Mithraism: “You will not be able . . . to adorn yourself with the splendor of heavenly light. You are flung forth into darkness and squalor. There reign filth, squalor, gloom, darkness, and the horror of perpetual night.”72 Tertullian and Firmicus [278]Maternus are, in fact, using a familiar topos of early Christian polemic against paganism: the same image of subterranean darkness is applied to all pagans by the third-century bishop of Carthage, Saint Cyprian, who at the conclusion of his apologetic treatise, An Address to Demetrianus, exhorts the proconsul of Africa and his coreligionists “to emerge from the abyss of darkling superstition into the bright light of true religion.”73
To learn about Mithraism, seventeenth-century Catholics would have also had at their disposal the rather detailed (if not entirely accurate) accounts in the well-circulated and continually republished handbooks of pagan mythology, which enjoyed great popularity among artists, such as Lilio Gregorio Giraldi’s De deis gentium and Vincenzo Cartari’s Le vere e nove imagini de gli dei delli antichi, two books “to be found in every cultivated man’s library” in early modern Europe. The latter is especially informative on the subject in the annotated, illustrated edition by Lorenzo Pignoria.74 These accounts were based upon not only ancient written sources, but also archeological remains that Sweerts and his contemporaries would have had ample opportunity to examine in the various collections of antiquities in Rome.75 As far as archeological traces of Mithraism are concerned, these came, above all, in the form of the mostly iconographically uniform Mithraic relief showing the god in his distinctive Persian dress (most notably the Phrygian cap) and framed by two torchbearers and various creatures (among them the scorpion, raven, and lion), in the act of slaying a bull.
Examples of such reliefs were plentiful in early modern Rome, to be found, inter alia, in the collections of Cardinal Pio da Carpi, the Borghese and the Giustiniani families, as well as on the Capitoline itself. Colloquially [279]referred to as Lo Perso (The Persian), the sculpture from the Capitoline was the sole artifact remaining of a mithraeum located under the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli. This mithraeum had been known (albeit not for what it truly represented) as early as the time of Cola di Rienzo in the fourteenth century. Surviving intact on that Roman hill until the late sixteenth century, it was destroyed in the early throes of the Counter-Reformation, with, unfortunately, no verbal or visual documentation preserved regarding its appearance.76 Where there were no images, there might be inscriptions containing the name of Mithras: hence, in the volume of his Romanae urbis topographia devoted to epitaphs and other memorial inscriptions (Antiquitatum seu inscriptionum et epitaphiorum quae in saxis et marmoribus visuntur), Jean Jacques Boissard includes in the annotated index of abbreviations, the item, “D.S. IN. MIT,” which, as he explains, stands for “Deo Soli Invicto Mithrae” (To the Invincible Sun God Mithras).
Although Nicephorus’s own reference to Mithraism does not connect that cult directly to Julian, seventeenth-century Europeans knew from the emperor’s own writings that he himself was a devotee of the sun god. As, for example, Giraldi and Cartari report in their handbooks of mythology, the sun god was worshipped in antiquity under many different names, above all, that of Phoebus Apollo and Sol Invictus, but also that of Mithras. Among Julian’s extant works (published more than once by 1650) is a devout philosophical treatise on the subject of the sun god (Oratio in Regem Solem ad Salustiam); at the very beginning of this treatise, the emperor declares his personal devotion to the Deus Sol Invictus, while later making specific reference to the widespread Roman worship of Mithras.77 Hence, given all this [280]historical information about underground pagan cults, Mithraism, and Julian, Nicephorus’s seventeenth-century readers would have very likely assumed that the location of the rituals involving Julian, the horrenda spectra, and the taurobolium was a mithraeum. In turn, furthermore, Sweerts’s original audience, reading Plague in an Ancient City through Nicephorus’s eyes and understanding the canvas as a depiction of the Julianic plague, might have likewise interpreted Sweerts’s Black Hall in this same way. Such an interpretation is encouraged, furthermore, by a passage in the apologist Firmicus Maternus. In commenting on the belief in Mithras as the “god born from a rock” and contrasting it with the Christian notion of Jesus as the cornerstone upon which the church is built, Firmicus evokes a distinctive feature about the Black Hall, its disintegrating stone structure, which is in clear opposition to the firm, solid, intact state of the White Temple:
Different is the stone which God promised He would lay in making strong foundations of the promised Jerusalem. What the symbol of the worshipful stone means to us is Christ. Why do you, with the knavery of a thief, transfer to foul superstitions the dignity of a worshipful name? Your stone is one that ruin follows and the disastrous collapse of tumbling towers; but our stone, laid by the hand of God, builds up, strengthens, lifts, fortifies, and adorns the grace of the restored work with the splendor of everlasting immortality.78
But is this indeed a correct reading of the Black Hall? Is this what Sweerts himself intended, to evoke a place of Mithraic worship? One must again turn to the visual evidence, being aware, however, that neither Swe erts nor his contemporaries had any real conception of what a mithraeum (or any abode of the mystery religions) looked like, given the total absence (in 1650) of unearthed archeological remains or written descriptions of such locales. Wishing to depict a mithraeum, the artist would have been obliged to invent its contours himself. He would have, however, known some of the Mithraic imagery. But in or around the structure there is none of the specific iconography associated with Mithras or with any other exotic mystery religion, such as that of the great earth mother goddess, Cybele (also traditionally associated with caverns and mountains) and the mystery religion surrounding her son, Attis, whose supposed resurrection from the dead caused him to be seen as a protector of deceased souls [281] (and hence his frequent appearance on Roman funerary monuments). Attis was the focus of another popular late imperial cult that would have been well known to Sweerts through the works of Giraldi, Cartari, and company, as well as through the abundant archeological remains in Roman collections. Like Mithras, Attis was associated with the sun and sun worship, according to Lorenzo Pignoria’s treatise, Magnae Deum Matris Idaeae et Attidis Initia ex vetustis monumentis.79 Among the extant works of the emperor Julian available to seventeenth-century readers was the Oration upon the Mother of the Gods, in which he discusses the figure of Attis, “he that resembles the sunbeams,” who “descended into the cave and conversed with the nymph,” as a symbol of philosophical principles.80 It is unlikely, however, that Sweerts means to invoke Julian’s rather esoteric metaphysical notions, nor any of the rites of Cybele and Attis. The latter rites included yearly commemoration of his death, as Firmicus Maternus relates: “In annual rites honoring the earth there is drawn up in array the cortege of the youth’s funeral, so that people are really venerating an unhappy death and funeral when they are convinced that they are worshiping the earth.”81 There is not enough visual evidence to support such a conclusion; absent, for instance, is any sign of Attis’s sacred pine tree. Furthermore, thanks to the outraged condemnations in Firmicus, in Augustine’s The City of God Against the Pagans (2:5 and 7:26), and in other paleo-Christian apologetic works, the rites of Cybele and Attis were also understood to be marked by sexual obscenity and other moral filth, of which there is no sign in Sweerts’s canvas.
On the other hand, there is enough in the depiction of the Black Hall itself to strongly suggest a structure pertaining to secret underground ritual: it is clearly not one of the aboveground public temples belonging to the traditional religion of the Roman state. It indeed has all the air of one of Tertullian’s “strongholds of darkness,” pointedly contrasted by Sweerts with the fully illuminated, intact marble White Temple opposite it. More specifically, as Giraldi points out more than once in his account of Mithras, this god of Persian origin was worshipped in caves or caverns, especially those containing or located near natural springs: these are the localities with which caryatids, the one ornamental detail of Sweerts’s Black Hall, were conventionally associated.82 There is, moreover, elsewhere in the canvas, pointed reference [282]to sun worship in the form of the obelisk and the many sun-transfixed individuals scattered throughout the piazza, and heliolatry was a defining feature of Mithraism.
Given the perplexing state of the visual evidence discussed, it is not possible to give a secure answer to the precise cultic identity of the Black Hall. It is possible that Sweerts intended to conjure up the notion of secret underground mystery religion in only a generic, somewhat abstracted way, appropriately shrouding it in mystery, just as it had been in late imperial times. His intent may not be to portray in detailed fashion the realm and rites of any particular cult such as those of Mithras, Cybele, or Attis; not only could he have had no accurate idea of what these places looked like, he may have also considered such iconographical specificity irrelevant to the ultimate message of his canvas (namely, a warning to the enemies of the Catholic Church about the swift and fierce reality of divine retribution). The fact is, nonetheless, that the specific name of Mithraism has surfaced in the written sources in connection with Julian, and there is nothing in the canvas that excludes it as a possible informing element in Sweerts’s invenzione. Furthermore and more importantly, there are certain details in the canvas that seem to more positively allude to Mithraism. Hence, the cult remains a useful, if not inevitable, point of reference in attempting to decipher Sweerts’s canvas.
Grades of Initiation and Ascent of the Soul
The Lange footnotes to Nicephorus’s text supply two other details that may help further unlock the mystery of Sweerts’s canvas: the practice of sun worship and the existence of multiple grades of initiation within Mithraism. One of the most salient physical features of the interior of Sweerts’s Black Hall is its multileveled structure: is this ramplike passageway a straightforward means to get from top to bottom within the structure or does it have some symbolic meaning? Is the long line of men and women entering and ascending the Black Hall by means of the multilevel ramp meant to be an allusion, albeit generic, to the various grades of the cult’s initiates mentioned by Suidas? And is some sort of encounter with the sun the ultimate object of their movement? At the apex of the ramp in the upper right, there is an unseen room or other area from which rays of the sun are pouring forth into the darkness of the edifice. Is the artist communicating here something about the ritual being acted out? Or does the top of the ramp simply lead to another exit from the building? If the latter, then why is no [283]one exiting from the ramp on its lower right, giving onto the piazza? Furthermore, even if the people on the ramp in the upper right are simply exiting the building, the fact they do so directly in the direction of the sun and not away from it (that is, onto the piazza below by means of the lower ramp) would seem to bear some significance.
Perhaps in configuring the details of his Black Hall and the flow of people within it, Sweerts is indeed suggesting something important about the nature of the ritual being enacted. It would seem that some sort of dramatic, soul-enlightening and life-transforming encounter with the sun was probably the intended culmination of the successive stages of the initiatory ritual of Mithraism. This is not surprising, given the fact that Mithraism, after all, was a cult of the sun god. And the secrecy surrounding their rites, as well as a more personal, visceral encounter with the divine and promise of ascent for the achievement of personal salvation were features shared by all the ancient mystery cults. It was this soteriological promise that rendered the cults distinct from and more popular than the impersonal traditional state religion of Rome.
This fact of the initiatory and soteriological features of the ancient mystery religions was fairly well known to early modern humanists, artists, and other learned contemporaries, as the classic study of Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (first published 1958), demonstrated long ago; echoes of such knowledge are frequently encountered in the art of those centuries. Although even today, information about Mithraic liturgy and creed is limited, a useful analogy can be made, as Manfred Clauss observes, with the initiatory rite of another contemporary mystery cult, that of Isis, which is described in a passage from Apuleius’s perennially popular (and to seventeenth-century readers, widely available) second-century Latin novel, the Golden Ass or Metamorphoses (11.23): “I came to the boundary of death and having trodden the threshold of Proserpina, I traveled through all the elements and returned. In the middle of the night I saw the sun flashing with bright light. I came face to face with the gods below and the gods above and paid reverence to them from close at hand.” Clauss further comments, “It is therefore intelligible that [Mithraic] initiation was understood as a kind of rebirth. An unknown person scratched a graffito into the sidewall of the cult-niche of the mithraeum beneath S. Prisca in Rome: ‘Born at first light when the Emperors (Septimius) Severus and Antoninus (Caracalla) were consuls’ . . . . By analogy with the Sun’s birth at sunrise, the initiand is also ‘born’ through initiation into the mysteries.”83
Given the popularity of The Golden Ass, Sweerts or his learned advisor is most likely to have had access in some form to Apuleius or commentaries on [284]his work. They would have, furthermore, come across reference to the Mithraic intiatory grades and tests not only in the Lange footnotes to Nicephorus, but also in the constantly cited apologetic works of Gregorios of Nazianzos and Tertullian, who wrote to defend Christianity against its enemies and distinguish it from other cults, like Mithraism, that shared common features.84 These scattered references in the Christian classics, together with the testimony of such a widely known work as Apuleius, may have been sufficient for the artist to compose his historia featuring a depiction of the rites of, if not Mithraism, then a generic pagan mystery cult. In short, although it cannot be proved beyond a doubt, the connection between the written descriptions of the Mithraic and other ancient mystery-cult rites and what is seen in Sweerts’s Black Hall remains suggestive.
Heliolatry: Mithras, Phoebus Apollo, and “Christ Our Phoebus”
Doubt may remain about whether one can read the multitiered disposition and movement of the crowd in Sweerts’s canvas as an allusion to the various grades of initiation of Mithraism or some other mystery cult, but the other piece of information supplied by the first Lange footnote to Nicephorus is, without doubt, directly relevant to this painting: the practice of heliolatry, sun worship, as a characteristic feature of Mithraism. Lange’s footnote accurately states that sun worship indeed represented one of the most conspicuous features, not only of Mithraism, but also of the official state religion of Rome in the later centuries of the empire. Moreover, in those centuries, the cult of the sun god “remained the chief imperial and official worship till Christianity displaced it.”85 The solar deity Mithras, imported from Persia to Rome in the late first century ad, came to be considered yet another manifestation of the universal sun god, already worshipped in Rome under the various guises of Apollo, Helios, and, especially, Deus Sol Invictus.86 The second-century Roman emperor Commodus was himself initiated into the Mithraic cult, as was, it seems, Emperor Julian. (Sweerts and his contemporaries, however, may not have been aware of Julian’s formal initiation into Mithraism since Nicephorus, Baronio, and Julian’s Jesuit editor, Petau, do not mention it.) One of the most literate and philosophical of Roman emperors, Julian, as already mentioned, composed a treatise dedicated to the sun god (Oratio in Regem Solem), which is included in the Paris 1630 edition of his collected works, in which the emperor openly declares himself as the god’s “follower and servant” and refers to the Roman veneration of Mithras. Before his conversion to Christianity, Julian’s predecessor (and [285]uncle), Constantine the Great was also an ardent devotee of the sun god: Constantine “hailed [Sol Invictus] as his tutelary god, and persistently portrayed the same deity on his coinage as his invincible companion.”87
As with many other features of Roman imperial religious praxis, Christianity absorbed this deeply engrained image of the godhead, casting Jesus Christ in a similar guise of solar divinity as deliberate counterforce to pagan usage. Christ is frequently celebrated as “Sol oriens” and “Sol iustitiae,” as, most notably, in the ancient Advent antiphon, “O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae et sol iustitiae.” This is seen in the famous mosaic of the late-third or early-fourth century depicting Christ as an Apollo-like figure in his quadriga, in the necropolis under Saint Peter’s basilica, a motif echoed in a seventeenth-century marble decoration above the inside north transept door of the basilica of Saint John Lateran.88 The same symbolic association also played a role in the decision of the early Christians to adopt Sunday, the day dedicated by the Romans to the solar divinity, as their own formal Sabbath day. The “Christ as rising sun” imagery was especially important during the celebration of the Easter vigil Mass of the Resurrection, properly held in the early morning, in eager anticipation of the new light of dawn. This connection between the rising sun and Christ, together with the knowledge that the ancient Romans worshipped the sun specifically at dawn and not sunset (as seen in this canvas), would thus lead to the conclusion that Sweerts’s White Temple, the Christian house of worship, is facing east, not west, the direction of the setting sun.
Given the popularity of the topos, it would have been difficult for Swe erts not to have been aware of the Christological symbolism of the rising sun. “Sol Oriens” is, to cite a further example of its omnipresence in seventeenth-century Catholic culture, one of the images discussed by that bestselling, frequently republished encyclopedia of ancient symbols and emblems, the Hieroglyphica by sixteenth-century humanist Pierio Valeriano (d. 1558), a work much consulted by artists. Elsewhere, in another, less famous work, Hieroglyphicorum collectanea ex veteribus et neotericis descripta, the same Valeriano discusses at length the image of Christ as “Sol Iustitiae,” Sun of Justice, and his comments are very pertinent to the message of Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City. In their “foolish senselessness” (stolida insania), Valeriano mockingly writes, the ancient Greeks and Latins turned to their sun god, Phoebus Apollo, when seeking the recovery of their health, but the true “author of life and health” (vitae et sanitatis . . . auctorem) is Christ, “our Phoebus” (Phoebum nostrum).89
[286]To return to the question of the orientation of Sweerts’s White Temple, Christian liturgical scholar Jaime Lara reports that “as early as the first century there is evidence that Christians faced east while praying. Numerous texts show that praying toward Jerusalem or toward the rising sun—as symbol of awaiting the second advent of Christ, the “Sun of Justice”—was prominent in the consciousness of the church, especially in the eastern Mediterranean world.”90 This meant that Christians generally oriented their churches so the apse (where prayer occurred), and not the entrance façade, faced east. However, in Rome the entrance façades of three of the oldest and most venerable of the patriarchal basilicas, Saint Peter’s, the Lateran, and San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, indeed face east, like the Basilica of the Resurrection in Jerusalem: Sweerts may be reflecting this fact in the orientation of his own White Temple. At the same time, the figures on the steps of Sweerts’s White Temple face and reverence the temple itself, as the house of God, and not the sun rising behind them; actual, direct, physical worship of the sun itself was condemned by the church as yet another superstitious trait of the pagans. This was true especially in Rome where “there was a conscious avoidance of practices which suggested the pagan sun cult.”91 This is presumably precisely what the many figures in Sweerts’s canvas facing and intently gazing at the sun are doing: worshipping, or at least reverencing, the sun at dawn, the auspicious moment of its daily rebirth—rebirth being the goal of the Mithraic rites.
Obelisks and Their Significance: From Ancient Egypt to Baroque Rome
If Sweerts and his contemporaries did not learn that sun worship was a major characteristic of ancient paganism through any other source, they would have certainly known of it and been constantly reminded by a readily available visual source: the Egyptian obelisk, one of the most prominent architectural features of the seventeenth-century Roman cityscape, present in Plague in an Ancient City as well. The obelisk in Sweerts’s canvas is no mere ornamental appendage to the city square, just as it was not for the citizens of seventeenth-century Rome. It was certainly not for the early modern popes who went to considerable expense to repair and re-erect these prized remnants of pagan civilization in the city’s most prominent public spaces. For Sweerts and his contemporaries, the obelisk represented a politically [287]and spiritually charged symbol, whose value as an instrument of self-aggrandizement and propaganda was much exploited by the Roman pontiffs after the Council of Trent. The key figure in this regard is Sixtus V, whose short but prodigiously productive reign (1585–90) was marked by (to use Erik Iversen’s term) a distinct “megalithomania”—a passion for Egyptian obelisks.
The papal passion for obelisks was not aesthetic: just as the Roman emperors, in transporting the awe-inspiring monoliths from Egypt to Rome, used the obelisk in part to celebrate their conquest of and hegemony over the proud and once powerful ancient Egyptian empire, so did Sixtus and other pontiffs after him use these monoliths as a means of publicity and celebration. What they were publicizing and celebrating was not only the victory of Christianity over paganism, but also the supposed triumph of a re-energized Catholicism over its “heretical” and “schismatic” Protestant enemies. The first of Sixtus’s obelisk projects involved the one in his very front yard, the Vatican obelisk, which in 1586 he had moved (through the genius of Domenico Fontana) to the center of Saint Peter’s Square, installed upon a new base, and surmounted by the cross of victory. Echoing the medieval exorcism rituals, one of the inscriptions that Sixtus ordered chiseled into the base was meant to serve as a warning—a pronouncement of “menacing aggressivity,” Giovanni Cipriani calls it—to the enemies of Catholicism and the papacy: “Ecce Crux Domini / Fugite Partes Adversae / Vicit Leo De Tribu Judae” (Behold the Cross of the Lord / Enemies, flee / The Lion of the Tribe of Juda has conquered).92
At the same time architects and engineers were busy moving and re-erecting these monoliths, historians were at work educating the public as to the history and meaning of these fascinating remnants of ancient civilization. Among the most important of this new stream of obelisk scholarship was Michele Mercati’s De gli obelischi di Roma (1589), a thorough, well-researched work covering all the obelisks then visible in the Roman cityscape. Texts such as these uncovered and publicized much ancient lore regarding these venerable structures, of historical, political, and, above all, spiritual nature. The essential points of this information were, in turn, transmitted in condensed form through the new inscriptions composed in elegant Latin for the new bases of the obelisks. Of this large body of data and interpretation, what is important here is the original purpose and meaning of the ancient Egyptian obelisk: for the Egyptians and Romans, the obelisk was a religious icon, a public structure erected in honor of the sun god, whose beneficent, omnipresent rays the monolith’s very physical form was meant to represent.
[288]This is the historical lesson conveyed by Mercati to the sixteenth-century public. It was later repeated and amplified by Athanasius Kircher’s Obeliscus Pamphilius, published in 1650 to commemorate the re-erection of an obelisk in Piazza Navona, incorporated by Bernini into his lavish and delightful Fountain of the Four Rivers.93 This project occurred not only while Sweerts was in Rome, but also during the years he was working for Prince Camillo Pamphilj, nephew of Innocent X, the pope who commissioned the Navona obelisk/fountain project for the same square that housed his family’s residence.94 This period also corresponds to the years during which Sweerts was conceiving and actively executing his Plague in an Ancient City. If for no other reason, this chronological coincidence would have assured that obelisks, their history and their significance, ancient and modern, would have been much present in Sweerts’s mind and imagination.
In the initial description of the complex scene presented in Plague in an Ancient City, it was noted that the apex of the obelisk was cut off at the top of the canvas, as if to suggest it was an object of great height. In fact, the tallest among the thirteen ancient obelisks currently standing in Rome is—and was in the seventeenth century—that which stands in front of the north transept façade of the basilica of Saint John Lateran.95 Could Sweerts have intended this specific reference? Confirming this suspicion is the fact that the two-storied, open-arched palazzo in front of which Sweerts placed his obelisk bears a distinct (albeit not exact) resemblance to the elegant late sixteenth-century façade of the north transept of the Lateran, which in Sweerts’s time was the principal entrance to the basilica (fig. 9.6). Furthermore, the history—ancient and early modern—of both the Lateran and the obelisk associated with it, suggests that their spiritual-political significance is entirely pertinent to the ultimate message of Sweerts’s canvas.
Designed by Domenico Fontana in 1588, the graceful new north transept façade was part of the lengthy, elaborate Counter-Reformation reconstruction and embellishment of the greatly deteriorated Lateran basilica. Begun under Pius IV (1559–65) and continuing under several successive pontificates, this restoration was complete in time for the Jubilee year of 1650, which was celebrated during the time Sweerts was most likely at work on Plague in an Ancient City. The Lateran holds the honor of being the oldest [290]and first in rank of the four great patriarchal basilicas of Rome, seat of the pope in his role as bishop of Rome and thus, for many centuries the administrative center of the church, “Mother and Head of all Churches in the City and World,” as its traditional honorific title proclaims (Mater et Caput Omnium Ecclesiarum Urbis et Orbis).96 The church and surrounding property were the gift of Constantine the Great, great hero of the early church, whose dramatic conversion to and subsequent championing of his new religion marked the decisive triumph of Christianity over paganism and the beginning of its long ascendancy in European civilization. It was because of this intimate association with Constantine—the antithesis of and a natural, dramatic foil to his impious and treacherous nephew and successor, Julian—that the post-Tridentine popes lavished great attention upon and poured floods of money into the complete rehabilitation and embellishment of the ancient basilica. One of the consistent aims and concrete results of the rebuilding of the Lateran was to highlight this Constantinian connection, this chapter of glorious ecclesiastical triumph, as a further volley of propagandistic history against the religious and political forces of Protestantism. The same renewal of and emphasis on the Constantinian memory took place in the new Saint Peter’s as well, most notably in the form of the great equestrian statue of the emperor by Bernini, who turned to Nicephorus’s Ecclesiastical History for what was then considered a most trustworthy source of information about Constantine.
Recalling and reinforcing the memory of Constantine and triumph at the Lateran was the Egyptian obelisk, recovered in fragments in 1586 from the Circus Maximus and re-erected in Piazza San Giovanni in 1588. Having survived the violence of warfare and other human and natural calamities, the Lateran obelisk was distinctive not only for its height, but also for its glorious and exceptionally well-documented history, which had begun in the second millennium bc. Much of the early story of the obelisk had been long known from late Roman historian, Ammianus Marcellinus97 with much more uncovered in the sixteenth century, thanks especially to the excellent archeological work of Michele Mercati. It was Mercati who painstakingly and accurately reconstructed the scattered fragments of the obelisk’s original ancient Roman base, piecing together the various inscriptions that summarized the extraordinary vicissitudes of this obelisk. These ancient inscriptions, however, were replaced by new ones (prepared by Silvio Antoniani [1540–1603], noted Oratorian historian and collaborator of the great Cesare Baronio), which likewise afforded to the public a compendium of the monolith’s history.98
[291]The obelisk’s long, involved history commences in the reign of Pharaoh Tuthmosis III (ca. 1504–1450 bc). But what is important for this discussion is that, as its ancient and early modern inscriptions proclaimed, the obelisk represented a further connection to Constantine the Great and also commemorated triumph over enemies. The obelisk had been taken from its original home in Thebes by Constantine who intended to ship it to his new capital, Constantinople; however, at the time of the emperor’s death it had made it only as far as Alexandria, as reported in one of Antoniani’s inscriptions:
Flavius Constantine the Great, Augustus, the protector and defender of the Christian faith, ordered this obelisk which by an impure vow had been dedicated to the Sun by the Egyptian king to be transported down the Nile to Alexandria, in order to decorate with this monument, the new Rome, recently founded by him.99
Constantine’s son, Constantius II, had the granite monument instead brought to Rome and placed in the Circus Maximus “as a memorial of his triumph in 351 over the tyrant Magnentius, who had murdered his brother Constans.” But, as one of the original fourth-century inscriptions reported, the obelisk was also meant to recall the earlier victory in 312 of Constantius’s father, Constantine, over his own enemy, Maxentius—a victory, as Constantine and all subsequent Christians believed, that was due to the transfer of the emperor’s religious allegiance to the Christian God. As Jack Freiberg notes, “By using the obelisk in this way Constantius documented the legitimacy of Constantinian imperial rule that had been established by God.”100 By using this obelisk and the other remnants of Constantinian history in their own architectural, urban-renewal projects, Counter-Reformation popes such as Sixtus sought to document and reinforce the legitimacy of their own imperial rule, as well as of their version of Christianity—Roman Catholicism—as the one true faith that had triumphed and would, they hoped, continue to triumph over its enemies.
PLAGUE AND THE “HERESY” OF PROTESTANTS AND “APOSTASY” OF CATHOLICS
The ultimate symbolism of the Constantinian obelisk would have likely been understood by contemporary viewers as the larger aim of Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City as well: to serve as a visual vindication and celebration of Roman Catholicism as the one true faith by recalling an episode of early Christian history, the reign of the “impious” emperor Julian, in which God responded to the persecution of his people by sending a castigating [292]plague and other natural calamities. True, the virtuous also suffered and died during the Julianic and other plagues (such as the biblical plague of King David, see fig. 9.7), but, as the apologists reminded the faithful, for the virtuous, such suffering and death represented welcome liberation from this evil world, a necessary testing of their faith and perseverance, as well as grounds for greater merit in the afterlife. This was the standard response to the question first supplied in eloquent, thorough fashion by Saint Cyprian, third-century bishop of Carthage, in his plague sermon, De mortalitate, a classic work of Christian spirituality often quoted in early modern plague literature.101
[293]This supposed pattern of the history of plague, announced already in the Bible, was in the eyes of apologists a further example of the special status—the divine favor and protection—enjoyed by their faith. The same apologetic message is also contained in the most famous plague painting of seventeenth-century Rome and a source of direct inspiration to Sweerts, Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod. This message is also heard in a Lenten sermon delivered to the papal court during the reign of Paul V by Capuchin preacher Girolamo Mautini (1563–1632), who comments explicitly on the punishment of the Philistines for their profanation of the ark at Ashdod. The biblical episode of the Plague of Ashdod, says Mautini, serves as a direct warning to contemporary leaders of “so many lands infected with heresy” that have become “horrendous monsters no longer recognized in the forum of heaven and of the church.”102 In this, papal preacher Mautini was simply drawing upon an ancient apologetic tradition. Although referring to a different plague of religious history, Eusebios of Kaisareia’s mocking concluding comment about the pestilential scourge sent by heaven during the reign of another imperial enemy of the faith, Maximinus (reproduced verbatim in Baronio’s Annales ecclesiastici) is relevant:
Such were the rewards [that is, war, pestilence, and famine] of the proud boasting of Maximinus and of the decrees in the cities against us . . . . The great and heavenly defender of the Christians, after displaying His threat of punishment and his anger against all men as we have shown, in return for the viciousness which they had displayed against us, again gave back to us the gracious and joyous radiance of his providence regarding us; . . . and he made it clear to all that God Himself had been watchful over our affairs.103
The same boastful note had been taken up by Gregorios of Nazianzos in his Second Invective Against Julian the Emperor. Although Gregorios does not specifically mention the Julianic plague, he does acknowledge plague as one common form of divine retribution in the introduction to his account of the emperor’s demise, wherein he reminds his readers of how God “repays iniquity” and “chastise[s] arrogance with disgrace and with plagues. . . . Diseases justly sent upon the impious, rendings that cannot be concealed, plagues [294]and scourges of divers kinds, corresponding to the atrocities they have committed, deaths that follow not the common course of nature.”104
Although nothing is known of the provenance of Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City, given the specific milieu in which it was conceived, it is certain that this apologetic message would have found ready resonance in the hearts of the artist’s original viewers and patrons, especially since the latter included those of highly educated and exalted ecclesiastical status such as the Pamphilj. During the years of Sweerts’s soggiorno in Rome, among the epidemic diseases and calamities, natural (famine) or human-made (war), that either struck the Eternal City itself or came terrifyingly close to it in striking nearby cities, towns, or countryside, was the bubonic plague. With every report or direct experience of yet another dreadful visitation of the plague (or what they called the plague), the inhabitants of Rome were obliged to ponder the nature and meaning of this indomitable invisible enemy that was as merciless in its destruction as it was mysterious in its medical origins and identity. In fact, the same was true for all God-fearing Catholics of Europe during Sweerts’s entire lifetime, for in the period between 1500 and 1700, the bubonic plague struck so often and in so many localities that when the people of Europe were not living through an actual outbreak of the plague, large or small, they were anxiously awaiting its all too certain return, since there were no truly effective means of self-protection except flight and isolation. Despite the impotence of the scientific establishment in providing adequate response to the questions of etiology and cure, there was no doubt in the ecclesiastical realm about the ultimate reason for this scourge. As the popular preachers and other spiritual authorities universally and insistently taught, that reason was sin: in his vengeful wrath, God sends plague (and famine and warfare) as punishment for the sins of humankind. This was the virtually unanimous belief of Christians in early modern Europe.105
Westphalia and “the Definitive Wreck of the Catholic Restoration”
Any form of sin could, in theory, provoke God’s wrath and consequently a visitation of the plague. However, in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one of the specific sins for which God especially sends this punishing scourge, according to contemporary Catholic preachers and spiritual writers, was that of heresy. And in the Counter-Reformation environment of Sweerts’s Rome, the heresy most detested and most feared was that of Protestantism. Even though by the mid-seventeenth century, the public virulence of the anti-Protestant rhetoric of the Roman Catholic Church may have been somewhat attenuated on the surface, fundamental Catholic convictions [295]remained unchanged from the preceding century: Protestantism could not be seen as anything but an execrable heresy, a demon-inspired departure from the one true faith. It was an irreconcilable enemy force, both religious and political, whose ultimate goal was the destruction of the Roman Catholic Church, beginning with that of the papacy.
As for the connection between plague and heresy, this is proclaimed in no uncertain terms, for example, in Possevino’s plague treatise, Cause et rimedii. In his enumeration of the six “specific causes” (cause particolari) of the plague, the Jesuit includes prominently (number two on the list), the sin of heresy. Where there is contagion of heresy and false prophets, Possevino warns, there will also be plague, “Divine Justice responding to this internal guilt of souls with the external castigation of their bodies.” And as in print, so too in painting: in Jesuit art of early modern Europe, one encounters the same connection between heresy and plague; in that art, this physical disease was employed as a visual metaphor for that religious malady, as, for example, in Rubens’s altarpiece of 1617, The Miracles of Saint Francis Xavier, commissioned for the Jesuit church of Antwerp.106 However, the association between the two—heresy and plague—was not merely a Jesuit topos: in his 1577 plague sermon to the people of Bologna, famed Franciscan preacher Francesco Panigarola repeats the heresy-as-plague image, explaining that the rapid, widespread dissemination of the “heretical doctrines” of Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and the other Protestant reformers represents yet another recent pestilential scourge sent by an angry God to punish the sinful world. This flagello began, the friar says, in 1517 when “the wicked Luther mounted his cathedra of pestilence” and promulgated his “ninety-five false axioms,” which “immediately persuaded” the masses.107 In a later (1614) sermon preached before the pope and the papal court, Jeronimo de Cordoba sounds the same note in denouncing the same long-dead but still despised Martin Luther: “Learn, O Luther, plague of Germany, that you turned out worse for the human race than Domitian. He raged like a lion, you lurk like a viper. He forced people to deny the faith, you teach them to deny the Vicar of Christ.”108
In fact, all three priests, Possevino, Panigarola, and de Cordoba, were making use of a common topos—the image of heresy as plague—found in many other printed sources, including two of the most widely consulted and influential documents of early modern Christian history, the inquisitorial manual on witchcraft (then classified as a form of heresy), the Malleus maleficarum (first published 1486), part 3, question 29, and, of greater importance in Sweerts’s Rome, the Catechism of the Council of Trent (first [296]published 1566), “Commentary on the Apostles Creed,” article 9 entitled: “I believe in the Holy Catholic Church.”109 But of even more immediate importance to Sweerts’s Rome was Pope Innocent X Pamphilj’s bull of proclamation (13 May 1649) of the Holy Year of 1650, which, translated into Italian and printed in broadside form, was affixed to the doors of all the major basilicas of the city. In what is traditionally a completely joyous evocation of the coming Jubilee year, Innocent inserted this most untraditional expression of grief: “But this memory of such happy times [when the leaders of a religiously united Europe used to come to Rome to venerate the tomb of Peter] torments Our heart with a sentiment of great pain whenever We consider how distant is the present generation from the piety of the ancients. How many provinces and nations has the plague of heresy separated from the consortium of the Catholic religion, and how much has it severed them from the joy of this Jubilee and from the celestial wealth granted [to the faithful during this year].”110{~?~IQ: PAGE \# "'Page: '#''" Editorial: inline quotation may be long.}
Why such gloom in the papal heart? In these years—the same period in which Sweerts would have begun his plague canvas—Innocent X and with him the entire Catholic world was living through the painful aftermath of the monumentally disastrous defeat of the Peace of Westphalia (1648). Encompassing various separate treaties signed at Osnabrück and Münster, the Westphalian peace put an end to the Thirty Years’ War between Catholic and Protestant Europe, thus concluding one of the most devastating military struggles in the history of the European continent. Like many wars of the early modern period, this protracted conflict inflicted upon innocent populations horrendous ravages in many forms, including the dread bubonic plague: this is dramatized in what Jacob Burckhardt called that “immortal and unforgettable frontispiece to the Thirty Years’ War,” Peter Paul Rubens’s allegorical The Horrors of War, completed in 1637 for the Grand Duke of Tuscany and now at the Pitti Palace (fig. 9.8). Sweerts himself took up Rubens’s theme (minus the plague, however, and with focus on the destruction of culture and civilization), in his own Mars Destroying the Arts, executed in Rome circa 1650 to 1652, that is, during the same period when he produced Plague in an Ancient City.111
[298]However, even more relevant to this discussion is the response of the papacy to the Peace of Westphalia. Although relieved to hear of the war’s end, Innocent had no reason to rejoice over the political and economic terms of its settlement. Ratifying in universal and perpetual fashion the principle of “cuius regio eius religio” (the religion of the ruler determines that of his dominions), the Peace of Westphalia was “the most decisive [event]” of Innocent’s reign, which confirmed Protestant control over extensive German lands that the papacy had long struggled to return to the Catholic fold—and treasury.112 The same treaties represented a humiliating defeat for the papacy—“no pope had suffered such humiliation in many centuries”—inasmuch as the increasingly politically irrelevant pope, his interests, and his demands had been completely excluded from all negotiations.113 Westphalia “signaled the end of the Church’s claims to temporal authority and just as importantly, was perceived by contemporaries as doing so.”114 It was, in short, in the words of Pastor, “the definitive wreck of the Catholic restoration” and marks the beginning, as most historians agree, of a dramatically new, more secular, “modern Europe.”115 All hopes of turning back the clock to 1516 seemed completely destroyed. Beginning with the Peace of Augsburg (1555), the papacy had stubbornly refused to endorse or acknowledge any diplomatic compromise that even recognized the mere existence of Protestants, but now had finally to surrender to the new reality of Europe, in face of the Westphalian treaties. The latter treaties had, after all, been signed by the major Catholic powers of Europe: France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire.116 Furthermore, no less catastrophic than the religious and political defeat was the irrevocable economic setback to the papacy: as Pastor reports in detailed fashion, the Catholic Church suffered “gigantic losses” to the Protestants in the form of entire dioceses and archdioceses, bishoprics and archbishoprics, numerous wealthy monasteries, abbeys, canonries, and many other types of ecclesiastical benefices and property, together with their immense annual revenues.
Helplessly, Innocent had witnessed this disaster slowly developing over four years of protracted negotiations in Osnabrück and Münster, receiving regular reports from papal nuncio Fabio Chigi (the future Pope Alexander VII). With full papal consent, Chigi (who had refused any contact with the [299]Protestants at the negotiations) published three formal protests against the terms of peace, but to no avail. Westphalia, in Chigi’s words, was “a deep wound . . . . inflicted on the Catholic religion.”117 Ultimately formal public condemnation came from Innocent himself, the brief Zelo domus Dei (Out of Zeal for the House of God), published in the form of a broadside to be displayed in public forums of Rome and Catholic Europe. In his brief, Innocent “with a deep sense of grief” acknowledges the signing of the treaties but vehemently declares the concessions granted “for all time” to “the heretics and their successors” (the Protestants) to be “utterly null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, condemnable, reprobate, inane, and without legal force or effect.”118 However, the pope’s protest fell upon deaf ears among the political powers of Europe and the terms were applied as stipulated in the treaties. It was a most bitter pill for Innocent and those around him to swallow. Among those around the pope was Michael Sweerts, who had received the knighthood of Christ from Pope Innocent, whose nephew, Camillo, employed Sweerts.
It is therefore not surprising that Sweerts, whether commissioned to do so or of his own volition, would have then taken to the annals of apologetic ecclesiastical history in search of some much-needed consoling reminder of the inexorable punishment by God of the enemies of “the one, true faith,” which he then set to canvas in the form of Plague in an Ancient City. Indeed, one wonders, was it Innocent or his nephew Camillo who commissioned this canvas, perhaps intending to send it as a warning, not to the Protestant leaders, but to one of the Catholic signatories at Westphalia? An example of such a political-artistic gesture on the part of the papacy could be found in relatively recent history: Urban VIII made use of Poussin’s two moral-historical canvases bearing a similar message about divine vengeance—The Destruction and Sack of the Temple of Jerusalem (1625–26, Israel Museum, Jerusalem) and Emperor Titus Destroys the Temple in Jerusalem (fig. 9.9). Both had been commissioned by Cardinal Francesco Barberini on behalf of his uncle Pope Urban and sent in presumably monitory or otherwise advisory fashion to, respectively, King Louis XIII of France and Emperor Ferdinand III. Another, well-documented (albeit failed) case of papal utilization of paintings as “visual exempla” (to use Fumaroli’s term) [301]aimed at Catholic political leaders is Guido Reni’s exquisite Abduction of Helen (1630–31, Louvre).119
Returning to Sweerts’s canvas, one wonders why this particular fourth-century plague, and why this particular emperor, Julian “the Apostate”? The choice was not casual: Julian had been baptized at birth into the Catholic faith, but later abandoned his faith to pursue the paganism of his ancestors and the mysteries of the East, all the while giving external pretense of remaining a pious Christian. Once full imperial power was his, he dropped any mask of pretense and began to betray his former faith and coreligionists in a series of oppressive legal measures. However, in the end, divine retribution prevailed: the Virgin Mary ordered the assassination of the emperor in Persia at the hands of two Christian soldiers, Mercurius and Artemius, and the church was released from persecution and restored to her primacy. The polemical relevance and usefulness of Julian’s memory did not escape Counter-Reformation Rome. Commenting on the fresco depicting Julian’s death in Santa Maria Maggiore’s Pauline Chapel, Steven Ostrow explains, “this image of the Virgin’s unrestrained punishment of apostasy functions as a pointed warning to all who stray from the faith, foremost among them the Protestant Reformers, whom the Church viewed as apostates.” In the first decade of the seventeenth century, when the chapel was being decorated, as Ostrow further observes, “this warning may well have been intended especially for King James I, who, it will be remembered, issued his Oath of Allegiance in 1606, demanding all of his subjects to reject papal authority.”120
At the time of Westphalia, there was an even stronger, more painful reason for the papacy to recall the treasonous emperor Julian, for it had just been the victim, in effect, of the treason of two of the Catholic leaders of Europe.121 That disastrous (for the papacy) defeat was clearly only possible because of the behavior of the principal Catholic players at the negotiations: the Holy Roman Empire and France. The two powers had made [302]major concessions to the Protestants at a direct and disastrous cost to the papacy, doing so not only for the sake of peace but of their own national interests as well. Innocent would have had abundant reason to be infuriated at the Catholics leaders, Emperor Ferdinand III and King Louis XIV, both of whom are mentioned by name at the beginning of Zelo domus Dei. And of the two, Innocent’s rage would have been even greater towards France, long since no friend of the papacy’s: the enmity between Innocent and Cardinal Mazarin is well known and well documented.122 At Westphalia, together with the Protestant Sweden, it was France who in the end derived the “lion’s share of the treaties’ benefit.” In fact, Mazarin so little identified with papal interests that France had entered the war on the side of the Protestants (against their common enemy, the Catholic Hapsburgs) and, thus during the peace process, “assembled with the Swedes and their Protestant allies in Osnabrück—rather than at Münster with the Catholic powers.”123
Even though in 1648 King Louis XIV was only a boy of ten and the country was still governed by Mazarin, Louis was, nonetheless, the universally recognized legal head of the French state, having assumed the throne at the death of his father in 1643. It was in Louis XIV’s name that France signed the Westphalian treaties and, hence, it was his name that Innocent specifically cited (together with Ferdinand III’s) in Zelo domus Dei as being responsible for the instruments of peace. However, there is another fact of Louis’ biography that may well be relevant to Sweerts’s canvas. The birth of Louis—the first and long awaited fruit of the marriage of Anne of Austria and the sickly, melancholy Louis XIII—had been deemed nothing short of miraculous and celebrated with great rejoicing by the French. Louis XIV was born on a Sunday (5 September 1638), the day well known as being devoted in antiquity to the sun god. When a commemorative medal was struck in the newborn’s honor, it bore prominently an image of the sun, Louis’ zodiacal sign (the “heretical” friar-philosopher, Tommaso Campanella, had prepared the royal babe’s horoscope at the queen’s request). Adorning this celebratory medal was the inscription, “Ortus Solis Gallici” (the Rising of the Sun of France). From that moment and increasingly throughout his reign, Louis would be associated with the sun and solar imagery, and was referred to, then as in posterity, as “le Roi Soleil” (The Sun King).124
Examining once again Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City, can one read its references to sun worship as a polemical allusion to France and its Sun King who had so betrayed the pope and their own faith by their political [303]machinations, not only during the peace process but also during the conduct of the entire war itself? This is yet another unprovable but compelling possibility.125 Consider however Antonio Possevino’s description, quoted above, of the circumstances in which God decides to castigate nations with pestilence: “whenever governments had to be changed in the world or when the Catholic religion had to separate itself from people who had rendered themselves unworthy of her, either because of their sins or their embracing of false doctrines and heresies, or when in the governments of the Christian republic, there were those who commingled worldly judgment with the ways of God.” These are certainly words that could easily be interpreted by the pope and papal loyalists as fully applicable to France in the mid-seventeenth century.
SWEERTS THE PAINTER-EVANGELIST
“My lord, see the path of salvation [shown to you] by the hand of Sweerts”
As contemporary preachers uniformly and constantly reminded their audiences, the only true, effective remedy for plagues of any sort or dimension was repentance for their sin, emendation of their ways, true conversion, and a return to the “one true faith.”126 This is the message as well of Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City, as the viewer is reminded by the solemn Blue Prophet, who gestures in deliberate and monitory fashion in the direction of [304]the White Temple, symbol of that one true faith. For Sweerts and his coreligionists the one true faith was Roman Catholicism. At the time Swe erts executed his painting, as far as the Protestant powers of Europe who had just achieved a great victory at Westphalia were concerned, a return to the Roman faith was highly unlikely. However, at that point, the situation in Europe was still volatile enough that there may have been those in Rome who believed it could reverse itself in the future. Encouraged by the miraculous tales of divine intervention publicized by apologetic ecclesiastical histories like that of Nicephorus, they may have harbored the pious belief that just as God so unexpectedly and so quickly overthrew Julian and his pagan restoration (by causing the untimely and ignominious death of the emperor in Persia), something similar was being prepared by heaven on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy: somehow, at some future date, it would miraculously be restored to its former primacy.
Of course, the call to repentance and the practice of the true faith applied not only to Protestant “heretics,” but to lapsed and lukewarm Catholics as well, including the leaders of France. However, apart from all learned historical reference and contemporary political allusions, the fundamental message of Sweerts’s canvas was a most general one, familiar and applicable to everyone, and thus often repeated in the religious art of seventeenth-century Rome: “Repent and be saved.” Through his Blue Prophet in Plague in an Ancient City Sweerts is saying to the viewer what he will later explicitly say in the inscription of another and likewise enigmatic painting of his, Double Portrait (also known as Two Men in Oriental Costume) of circa 1660/61 (fig. 9.5). Painted (it is currently believed) after the religiously zealous Sweerts had joined the Catholic Foreign Missions (Société des Missions Étrangères) and was about to set off on a long voyage to evangelize the Far East, Double Portrait features an older, bearded male figure of evident moral authority who gestures pointedly in the unseen distance for the benefit of the young man at his side. The young man, in turn, holds a card with the gentle admonition: “Signor mio, videte la strada di salute per la mano di Sweerts” (My lord, see the path of salvation [shown to you] by the hand of Sweerts). Although little is known about Sweerts’s faith life at the time he painted Plague in an Ancient City,127 given what is seen in this ambitiously conceived historical scene, he may have already, ten years before his ill-fated missionary journey, begun to feel the stirrings of a moralizing, evangelical religious zeal.
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1 For the most current research and complete bibliography on Sweerts, see Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts. For Plague in an Ancient City, see ibid., 113–17, cat. 13. For Sweerts’s biography, including a discussion of the dates of his Roman period, see Bikker, “Sweerts’s Life and Career,” which provides significant additions to and corrections of previous scholarship. I am grateful for the most helpful, generous feedback received from Sheila C. Barker, who read an earlier version of this essay, as well as for the extensive response received from the many scholars to whom I have presented the ideas of this essay in presentations at the Annual New England Renaissance Conference, “Piety and Plague in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe,” Holy Cross College, April 2005; the Fifteenth Biennial New College Conference on Medieval-Renaissance Studies, Sarasota, March 2006; the “Icons and Iconoclasts: 1603–1714” conference at the Centre for Early Modern Studies, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, July 2006; and the Renaissance Society of America, Annual Meeting, Miami, March 2007.
2 For the popularity of this Morbetto-inspired theme in seventeenth-century art (featuring a dramatic array of plague victims and other protagonists placed within a theatrical architectural setting), see the exhibition catalogue, L’idea del bello, esp. 2:440–41, cat. 49 on François Perrier’s The Plague of Athens (Dijon, Musée des Beaux-Arts) by Arnauld Brejon de Lavergnée. In addition to the plague scenes by Poussin (with its contemporary copy by Angelo Caroselli, now in the National Gallery, London) and Pierre Mignard (presumably his engraving, The Plague in Epirus) cited by Brejon de Lavergnée, from the same period come also the three canvases, Thomas Blanchet’s Plague Scene, also known as A Classical Architectural Capriccio with a Scene of the Plague, private collection (see Galactéros-de Boissier, Thomas Blanchet, 364, fig. 286; and Christie’s, Old Master Pictures, sale #6979, lot. 70); A Plague Scene by Guglielmo Cortese (Il Borgognone) in the Duke of Wellington’s collection (according to photographic record in the Artist File at the Frick Art Reference Library, New York); and Mattia Preti’s Scene of Pestilence, Rome, Accademia San Luca (see Spike, Mattia Preti, 248, cat. 176). For Raimondi’s Morbetto, see Hope and Healing, 186–87, esp. cat. 5. For Caroselli’s copy of Poussin, see ibid., 178–79, cat. 1.
3 Sweerts is believed to have executed Plague in an Ancient City towards the end of his residence in Rome. He arrived in the city in the mid-1640s and was there until at least 1652; by 19 July 1655 he had returned to Brussels (Bikker, “Sweerts’s Life and Career,” 25, 31). The earliest documented notice of the painting is news of its sale in 1804 at Christie’s London (Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, 117; and Kultzen, Michael Sweerts, 106). For Poussin’s The Plague at Ashdod as “Sweerts’ primary visual source,” see Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, 113, citing Roberto Longhi (see note 15 below). For enlightening new research and analysis of Poussin’s plague masterpiece, see Elisabeth Hipp’s essay in this volume.
4 Pierre Rosenberg recently paid special tribute to Sweerts’s canvas, including it in his Only in America: One Hundred Painings in American Museums Unmatched in European Collections, 104. Until Longhi’s 1934 essay (see note 15 below), the canvas had been attributed to the French artist himself. According to Longhi’s now generally accepted thesis, the architectural setting of the painting comes from the hand of Viviano Codazzi, a specialist in the genre (Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, 116). For the flaws in Sweerts’s composition, see Kultzen, Michael Sweerts, 40, 41.
5 See Pade, “La fortuna della traduzione.”
6 Many early modern treatises on the plague, whether medical or theological in nature, have extensive listings of or references to epidemics throughout history. Frequently, plague treatise writers will append chronological lists of all known plagues in recorded history (with primary sources specified). For examples, see Bumaldi, Il pestifugo esculapio, 28–32; Andrea Gratiolo (Grazioli), Discorso di peste, 97–132; Kircher, Scrutinium medico-physicum, 132–48; and Rondinelli, Relazione del contagio, 219–30. For detailed statistical compilations and abundant bibliographical references to the ancient sources, see Corradi, Annali delle epidemie; and Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence.
7 For the febbre maligna that struck Rome, see Gigli, Diario di Roma, 2:558–59. Corradi (Annali delle epidemie, 1:658) lists no occurrence of bubonic plague or even “plague” during or shortly before Sweerts’ stay in Rome; however, he does include discussions and contemporary descriptions of the same “evil fever” that hit Rome and other parts of the peninsula in 1648/49; ibid., 2:166–76, 4:767. This mortality is reported in an avviso sent from Rome to the Medici court in 1649 (ASF, Vol. Mediceo del Principato 4027a, c. 190r–191v): “In Rome, since last November all the way through the month of June have died—as attested to me by those in charge of parishes—22,000 people. . . . ” (In Roma dal mese di Novembre passato fino tutto il mese di Giugno sono morti, e così mi attestano quelli che han’ cura delle Parrochie, ventidui mila Persone . . . [190v]; my thanks to Sheila Barker for bringing this document to my attention). The great pandemic of bubonic plague of 1630 to 1633 that worked its way across most of Italy spared Rome in the end, although the city lived in acute terror for more than a year while watching her neighbors on the peninsula succumb to the apocalyptically destructive disease. Rome was not as fortunate during the next pandemic of plague in 1656/57, which struck, however, after Sweerts’s departure from the city. For the plague in Rome, see Corradi as cited above; and especially Barker, “Art in a Time of Danger.” For the 1656/57 plague in Rome, see the indispensable documentation (with abundant illustrations) compiled by Geronimo Gastaldi, the commissioner of health of the city of Rome during the epidemic, in Tractatus de avertenda et profligandis peste politico-legalis.
8 Two examples of such paintings are Poussin’s Arcadian Shepherds (1638, Louvre) and Dance to the Music of Time (ca. 1640, Wallace Collection, London); see Fumaroli, Nicolas Poussin, 8–10. For the opinion that in his Plague canvas, Sweerts “was clothing in antique garb reference to the contemporary plague that raged in Rome from 1649 to 1650,” see Dutch and Flemish Paintings, cat. 49.
9 Puglisi, “Guido Reni’s Pallione del Voto,” 403.
10 Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, 116. In the brief commentary on James Fittler’s engraving of Sweerts’s painting Edward Forster (British Gallery of Engravings, cat. #31) had already advanced the same thesis that “perhaps . . . it was the intention of the artist merely to give a general idea of the horror of pestilence, without confining himself to historical record,” recognizing that the composition “has little, or rather no, resemblance to the celebrated description of that event [the plague of Athens] as related by Thucydides.” He further adds that the “buildings are more characteristic of ancient Rome, but the figures are not dressed like the inhabitants of that city, nor can it be traced with any appearance of truth to Egypt or Judea.” Although acknowledging the drawing and composition not to be of Poussin’s usual quality, Forster, like all of his contemporaries, still attributed Sweerts’s work to the French master, and entitled it simply, The Plague. At the time Forster was writing, the painting was in the possession of the famous English art collector, Henry Hope.
11 Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, 114.
12 Dempsey, “Nicolas Poussin between Italy and France,” 322. Although containing no reference to Sweerts, a useful discussion of history painting conveying a moral message in seventeenth-century Italy is Warwick, “Poussin and the Arts of History.” For general hermeneutical insights on deciphering the enigmatic, didactic canvases of “painter philosopher” Poussin, of much relevance to Sweerts’s Plague in an Ancient City, see Stanic, “Le mode énigmatique.”
13 Pamela M. Jones, University of Massachusetts, Boston, personal communication, April 2005.
14 Whenever the third-century plague of Alexandria is mentioned or discussed in early modern Christian sources (for example, Roscio, Icones operum misericordiae, 41; Marchini, Belli divini, 268–70; and Kircher, Scrutinium physico-medicum, 241), it is always with specific reference to the heroic charity of the Christians of that community who tended the sick and buried the dead with no concern for their own safety. There is no evidence of such charitable activity in Sweerts’s canvas. Nor do the same sources contain any discussion of the sixth-century Alexandrian plague (part of the wider Justinianic Plague that began in 541 and did not end until the eighth century). Three of the figures in the right half of the scene (as is clearer in Fittler’s engraving) are dressed in clothing made of rather ornate, striped fabric not typical of Roman garb and evocative, instead, of exotic Eastern realms. This was not necessarily the artist’s way of situating the scene geographically in a non-Roman setting; Rome, as he would have known, was a cosmopolitan city.
15 Longhi, “Per Michiel Sweerts,” 179.
16 The reference to the Vecchia Capitolina (Longhi, “Per Michiel Sweerts,” 179) calls for some comment. Longhi is presumably referring to the Roman copy of an original Hellenistic head seen in two of Sweerts’s Roman paintings (Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, cat. 7, fig. 7–1, and cat. 15). The head was at some later point attached to a standing statue, currently located in the Capitoline Museum, Salone, Primo Piano, Braccio Nuovo, and bearing the simple identification “Vaticano #20. Da Anzio, Età Adriana.” For this statue, see Jones, Catalogue of the Ancient Sculptures: Sculptures of the Museo Capitolino, 1:288–89, cat. 22; 2:pl. 70. However, as this catalogue points out, there is yet another Vecchia Capitolina with similar facial features, that of the famous seated Drunken Old Woman (Anus Ebria), rediscovered in 1620 during the restoration of Sant’Agnese on the Via Nomentana; ibid., 89–90, cat. 8, pl. 18.
17 {~?~IQ: Editorial: Selected paragraph may have unmatched curly quotation marks.}For the Dacia sculpture, see Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 193–94, cat. 28, fig. 100; and Jones, Catalogue of Ancient Sculptures: Sculptures of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, 1:17–18, cat. 6; 2:pl. 8. For its symbolic value for the early modern Roman chuch, see Aikin, “Romae de Dacia Triumphantis, esp. 589. For the Cesi collection, see Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, 472.
18 Among the ancient statuary in Rome at the time, Sweerts may have found his model for the Blue Prophet in one of the two red porphyry and white marble Barbarian Captives (specifically, the older, bearded one of the pair), then in the Scipione Borghese collection and now at the Louvre (Collection Borghèse, inv. MR 331); whereas his model for the bare-breasted blond woman may have been the well-known statue known as Vetturia (also called Thusnelda, Germania, or Medea) now in the Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence, but then at the Villa Medici, Rome, having been formerly in the Della Valle collection. For Vetturia, see Avon, “Su alcuni esempi di scultura,” 115, fig. 7; and Montague, Roman Baroque Sculpture, 169, fig. 233. (My thanks to Sheila Barker for pointing out the Vetturia similarity.)
19 The commentary accompanying the engraving (Forster, British Gallery of Engravings, cat. 31) reports that the painting is in “perfect” condition.
20 For the temple, see Platner, Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome, s.v. “Nymphaeum” (2). The Minerva Medica shows up in other seventeenth-century paintings in more recognizable fashion, as in, for example, Willem van Nieuwlandt the Younger’s Laban Searching for His Idols (1630, Worcester Museum of Art); see Welu, “Willem van Nieuwlandt the Younger.” Some readers of earlier versions of my essay suggested that Sweerts may have modeled his Black Hall after the Baths of Caracalla or the Basilica of Maxentius, but I do not find either of these two models more compelling than the Minerva Medica either in terms of their architectural configuration or their historical or symbolic associations.
21 There were conflicting reports about the true site of the rediscovery of the Minerva Giustiniani; one tradition (which traces back to Pirro Ligorio) located the site of the statue’s rediscovery in the temple of Minerva Medica; according to the other and now generally accepted account, the statue was found during excavations near the Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. See I Giustiniani e l’antico, 183; Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, 269–71, cat. 63; and L’idea del bello, 2:193–94, cat. 9.
22 Marder, Bernini and the Art of Architecture, 47–48. There was already a church dedicated to Bibiana on the same site by the fifth century. See also Fedini, Vita di Santa Bibiana, discussed below. The same suburban area of Rome surrounding the church of Saint Bibiana and the Minerva Medica was also used as burial ground by the ancient Romans, as was discovered during early modern excavations, including those undertaken during the pontificate of Urban VIII; see Lanciani, Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome, 400. For the relevance of Bibiana’s memory to Sweerts’s painting, see further discussion below, 262–63.
23 See Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Rowland, 22, and Howe’s commentary, ibid., 135–37. For Barbaro’s commentary and illustrations, see Vitruvius, I dieci libri dell’architettura tradotti . . . Barbaro, 15–17. For the caryatid in antiquity and early modern Rome, see D’Evelyn, “Varietà and the Caryatid Portico,” 157–74, with abundant bibliographical references. For Hadrian’s Villa, see Macdonald and Pinto, Hadrian’s Villa and Its Legacy, esp. 139–44 (caryatids) and 205–28 (early modern explorations). For the rustic grottoes and nymphaea of early modern Italy, see Alvarez, “Renaissance Nymphaeum”; and Coffin, Gardens and Gardening in Papal Rome, esp. 28–57. For the nymphaeum at the Villa Giulia, see Coffin, Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome, 163–65.
24 Bosio, Roma sotterranea, 414.
25 Palladio, Four Books on Architecture, trans. Tavernor and Schofield, 215.
26 {~?~IQ: Editorial: Selected paragraph may have unmatched curly quotation marks.}Fred S. Kleiner, Boston University, personal communication, March 2006, whom I thank for discussing with me the architecture and functioning of ancient Roman temples. The Black Hall cannot be Christian catacombs, for the physical appearance (structure and interior decoration) of the latter were extremely well known by the mid-seventeenth century, thanks to Antonio Bosio’s copiously illustrated Roma sotterranea. If Sweerts had wanted to identify this structure as the catacombs, presumably he would have chosen one or more unambiguous details from the visual evidence available in Bosio’s 1632 tome. Another factor contributing to the conclusion that the Black Hall is pagan in nature is what appears to be its rotund form: the latter tended in the early modern imagination to be associated with pagan, rather than Christian, places of worship. In his famous treatise on church design, Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae (1577), Cardinal Carlo Borromeo argues in favor of the cruciform plan as being far more appropriate for the design of a Catholic church, for, as he states at the opening of chapter 2, “as far as round edifices are concerned, this type of plan was used for pagan temples and is less customary among Christian people”; translation from Voelker, “Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones fabricae, 51.
27 Boissard, “De funeribus et modo sepeliendi usitato apud antiquos,” preface to Romanae urbis topographia, 4:8 (volume titled IIII Pars Romanae urbis topographiae et antiquitatum sive II Tomus inscriptionum et monumentorum quae Romae in saxis et marmoribus visuntur).
28 Palladio, “De l’essequie antiche, e sue ceremonie,” in L’antichità di Roma, 28–29. For Boissard’s work on the subject, see note 27; see also Giraldi, De sepulchris; Guichard, Funerailles; Kirchmann, De funeribus romanorum; and Panvinio, De ritu sepeliendi. Panvinio says in De ritu sepeliendi (1) that he discusses pagan burial practices more fully in his LX libri antiquitatum romanarum, a work I have not been able to consult. There is also a summary discussion of ancient funerary practices in Panciroli, Raccolta di alcune cose, 1.4.20.
29 Kirchmann cites Pliny on cremation as the “mos Romanus” in De funeribus, 15. As Panvinio (De ritu sepeliendi, 13) explains, the early Christians, from the start, rejected cremation because it was associated with pagan praxis and was symbolically antithetical to their theological beliefs about the resurrection of the body. As Kirchmann (De funeribus, 1–15), Giraldi (De sepulchris, 21–22), Boissard (“De funeribus,” in Romanae urbis topographia, 4:7–8), and Guichard (Funerailles, 26–33) all report, in the earliest phase of their recorded history, the Romans practiced inhumation of the uncremated remains of the dead, but this very soon gave way, due to pressures of warfare, to cremation. Cremation, in turn, remained essentially the sole practice for centuries until the time of the Antonines in the second century ad (according to Giraldi, De sepulchris, 21–22) when there was a return by some to inhumation. Most of the examples of burial praxis in ancient Rome cited in our sources either refer directly to or imply cremation.
30 See Giraldi (De sepulchris, 5) for the conditoria, which, he specifies, are for the cremated remains of the deceased. Boissard (“De funeribus,” in Romanae urbis topographiae, 4:9) also mentions, with no further explanatory detail, underground “temples and cemeteries” as burial places for the “bodies” of the deceased: “Crypta et hypogea sunt subterranea loca, in quibus corpora defunctorum sepeliuntur in templis vel coemiteriis . . . .” My thanks to Prof. Scott Bradbury, Smith College, for discussing this aspect of Sweerts’ painting with me, in particular for his observation regarding the unlikelihood, in normal Roman custom, of a funeral procession descending into an underground crypt. For Sweerts’s relationship with the Pamphilj, see below note 44. For the ancient Roman burial sites on the Villa Pamphilj property, see Ambrogi, “Il territorio della Villa Doria Pamphilj.”
31 Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, 113. For the question of the rising sun and sun-worshippers in Sweerts’s canvas, see the further discussion below, 284–86.
32 For an early modern discussion of the placement of the “nobler” figures or elements on the right side of pictorial composition, see, for example, Comanini, The Figino, trans. Doyle-Anderson and Maiorino, 74–76, where he cites Aristotle and Averroës as his authorities.
33 For the Sweerts self-portraits, see Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, cats. 30 and 31.
34 Alberti, On Painting, trans. Spencer, 78.
35 What little is seen of the actual fabric of the building includes a Doric column. In both antiquity and early modern Europe, each of the architectural orders had specific symbolic associations and meanings. Sweerts may have meant the Doric order to further communicate a sense of the virile, combative robustness and solidity of the Catholic Church, given what Serlio (1475–1554) states about that order: “The ancients dedicated this Doric work to Jupiter, Mars, Hercules and to a few other robust gods. However, after the incarnation of man’s salvation, we Christians must proceed in a different way. When we have to build a temple consecrated to Jesus Christ our Saviour, or to Saint Paul, Saint Peter, Saint George or other similar saints, since they not only professed to be soldiers, but were also manly and strong in leading out their lives in the faith of Christ, the Doric type is suitable for saints of this sort.” {~?~IQ: Editorial: inline quotation may be long.}Serlio, On Architecture, trans. Hart and Hicks, 1:281. Palladio similarly writes (Four Books on Architecture, 216) of the association of Doric temples in antiquity with the patron deities of the soldier class such as Mars and Hercules.
36 The expectation goes back to Alberti’s De pictura; Alberti, On Painting, 89, 90, 91. See also Hand, Viewer as Poet, 18, where he cites Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo della pittura (1558). One does not want to be accused of reading too much into a painting or text, but the existence of the tradition of the doctus artifex behooves us to be diligent in our investigation, especially since the early modern mind, as is well known, took great delight in both creating and deciphering complex, didactic compositions, be they artistic or literary. For the doctus artifex, see Bialostocki, “Doctus Artifex and the Library of the Artist.”
37 Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 1:497–98 (annus 58, cap. 111), citing Tertullian’s De oratione (Prayer), chaps. 14 and 17 (Baronio’s footnote mistakenly gives the chapters as 11 and 12). For the orans pose, see also Tertullian Apology 24:5; 30:4, 7; and New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., s.v. “Orans”; and Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, s.v. “Orant, orante.”
38 Tertullian, Prayer (De oratione), trans. Daly, 170.
39 See Bosio, Roma sotterranea, 631–32; and Arringhi, Roma subterranea novissima, 2:139. For the 1578 discovery of the catacombs and subsequent explorations, see De Rossi, La Roma sotterranea cristiana, 1:9, 12–39. For Bosio and Christian archeology in early modern Rome, see also Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 13:257–59; Bertelli, Ribelli, libertini, e ortodossi, 77–80; and Ghilardi, “Le catacombe di Roma.”
40 “Ricordisi che quando la iniquità è venuta al colmo, o quando Iddio ha poi voluto empire il Cielo de’ poveri et patienti, overo all’hora che si hanno havuto a cangiare governi nel mondo, o che la religione Cattolica ha havuto a dispartirsi da’ popoli, i quali se ne rendevano indegni, sì per i loro peccati, sì anco per abbracciare false dottrine, et heresie, o quando ne’ governi della Republica Christiana si ha voluto mescolar la prudenza terrena colle strade di Dio; all’hora sono venuti cotali araldi a denunciarci dalla parte di Dio una spaventolissima guerra. Così prima che seguisse quella gran ruina, la quale Giuliano Apostata procurò contra la Chiesa Christiana, quell’honorato Filosofo Ecclesiastico, chiamato Didimo, mentre faceva oratione in Alessandria, previde il Terremoto, e’l Diluvio, il quale sommerse quasi tutta Alessandria, la Siccità, la Peste, la Fame, le quali l’una all’altra seguirono per svegliare il mondo che dormiva, et per dar corona a’ buoni, i quali furono nella fede, et amor di Dio costanti.” Possevino, Cause et rimedii della peste, 6r–6v (author’s translation). For Dydimus, see Nicephorus [Nikephoros Kallistos], Historia Ecclesiastica, 10:35. Cause et rimedii was published anonymously; Possevino’s authorship has only been recently established; Martin, Plague? 89n1. For more on the treatise, see Mormando, “Response to the Plague,” 18. It is clearer in Possevino’s source, Nicephorus’s Historica ecclesiastica, that only Alexandria experienced terrible flooding, while the other disasters (plague included) mentioned in the text struck the Roman Empire in multiple locations, not just the Egyptian port city.
41 For the Virgin’s role in Julian’s assassination, see, for example, Bozio, De signis ecclesiae, 368 (9.10, sig. 36). Bozio’s massive work is a classic of Catholic Counter-Reformation apology against Protestant challenges to the legitimacy of the Roman Church; Julian’s appearance in it is another indication of the revived importance of the Apostate’s memory in the religious polemics of early modern Rome. The same detail regarding the Virgin and Julian is reported in Andrea Vittorelli, Gloriose memorie della B.ma Vergine Madre di Dio; Gran parte delle quali sono accennate, con pitture, statue, ed altro nella maravigliosa Capella Borghesia dalla Santità di N.S. Paolo V. edificata nel Colle Esquilino (Rome, 1616), cited in Ostrow, Art and Spirituality, 229–30.
42 For the fresco, see Ostrow, Art and Spirituality, 229–30.
43 See Marder, Bernini and the Art of Architecture, 47–55. As the Martyrologium romanum (Antwerp, 1613, Dec. 2) reminds the faithful, “for the sake of Christ, the holy virgin Bibiana” was scourged under orders of “the sacrilegious emperor Julian, until she gave up her spirit.”
44 For Effetti, see Bikker, “Sweerts’s Life and Career,” 27, 28, 29; and Bonnefoit, “‘Amor omnia vincit,’” 30–32. For Holstenius, see Rietbergen, “Lucas Holste”; Del Pesco, “Luca Holstenio, ” 172–73; and Bignami Odier, La Bibliothèque Vaticane, 138–39. Sweerts was in the employ of the Pamphilj family, specifically Prince Camillo (1622–66), whose uncle, Pope Innocent X, bestowed upon the artist the title of Cavaliere di Cristo, as well as other honors; Bikker, “Sweerts’s Life and Career,” 30. An inventory, dated circa 1652, of the Pamphilj art collection includes three works by Sweerts, though none of them are historical scenes; see Capitelli, “Una testimonianza documentaria,” inv. nn. 13, 226, 316.
45 Neither Baronio nor any of the many early modern plague treatises (except for Possevino) I consulted mentions the Julian plague; neither does late fourth-century Roman historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, principal Latin source for the life of Julian, nor Socrates Scholasticus (ca. 380–450), another eminent Greek historian who covers the Julian years. The only texts to mention it, as far as I have been able to determine, are the two Byzantine ecclesiastical histories of Nicephorus and of his own widely plagiarized source, the fifth-century Sozomen (Sozomenos). Although Sozomen’s text also went through many editions in sixteenth-century Europe, there is much greater ground for conjecturing that Nicephorus was the ultimate source of Sweerts’s historical information. For the early modern editions of Sozomen’s Ecclesiastical History, see Schaff and Wace, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2:227–28. For Sozomen’s reference to the Julianic plague, see Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence, 196–97.
46 On the page quoted, Possevino does not cite any source for the Julian reference; however, on the following page (7r), just two short paragraphs later, still speaking about plagues in early Christian history as punishment for persecution of the church or of specific Christians, the Jesuit explicitly notes (in the margin) his source as “Niceforo lib. 12, cap. 36.” It is thus safe to assume that Nicephorus was also the origin of the preceding information about the Julian plague.
47 “Toto sane imperii eius tempore iratus Deus, varias calamitates et innumera mala Romanorum immisit ditioni. Siquidem terra ingenti motu concussa effecit, ut neque in domibus tuto homines manerent, neque sub dio etiam recte versarentur. Sub ipsius quoque imperio decantatissima illa urbi Alexandrinae calamitas accidit, cum mare vehementi aestu concitum . . . . Siccitates etiam intensae eo imperante cum fruges exstinxerunt, tum aerem quoque pestiferum reddidere . . . . Famem vero istam pestilentia est consecuta, quae corpora infestavit, et varios progenuit morbos, unde plurimi mortales interiere.” As mentioned in note 40 above and as is clear from a careful reading of Nicephorus’s text, the plague struck all parts of the Roman Empire, not just Alexandria.
48 For Maximinus’s punishment, see Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 3:531–32 (an. 312, capp. 1–4), quote at 3:532. See also Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, trans. Deferrari, 9:8 (222–23).
49 See for example, the important role played by Nicephorus’s history in the clash (ca. 1582) between humanist historian Carlo Sigonio and the Roman ecclesiastical censors of his De occidentali imperio and De regno Italiae; McCuaig, Carlo Sigonio, 269–70. In his much-consulted handbook for preachers, Orator christianus (3.13, p. 122), Jesuit Carolus Regius (Carlo Reggio) includes Nicephorus among the most eminent ecclesiastical historians to be included in the preacher’s reference library.
50 For Nicephorus, his Historia Ecclesiastica, and other works, see the entries (s.v. “Nicephorus”) in Dictionnaire de spiritualité; Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed.; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium; New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed.; and New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed.
51 For Lange and the destiny of his Nicephorus translation, see Hieronymus, Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen, cat. GG415. For Lange, see also Nouvelle Biographie Générale, s.v. “Lange, Jean.” For the early modern editions of Nicephorus, see the relevant pages from Johann Albert Fabricius, Bibliotheca graeca (1707), reprinted by Migne as preface to his edition of Nicephorus’s history (PG, 145:549–52). I have supplemented Hieronymus’s and Fabricius’s lists with the results of my own search of library catalogues. The 1553 edition of Nicephorus declares it to be the first translation (“nuncque primum in lucem editi”), but in fact, the Byzantine historian’s work had previously been published in an anonymous Latin translation in the anthology, Autores Historiae Ecclesiasticae (Basel, 1535); Hieronymus, Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen, cat. GG410.
52 For the editorial history of the Nicephorus text, see the dedication (to Richelieu) of the 1630 Paris editions by its publishers, the Cramoisy brothers; and Hieronymus, Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen, cat. GG415. Migne’s Patrologia graeca, vols.145–47, reproduces the Paris 1630 edition with all of its introductory material and notes and represents the last published edition of Nicephorus. For Fronton Du Duc, see the entries under his name in Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus; and Dictionnaire de biographie française.
53 The fate of the great Palatine Library during the Thirty Years’ War is here relevant. As Manfred P. Fleischer (“Melanchthon as Praeceptor,” 580n83) observes, “After the army of the Catholic League had conquered Heidelberg, the headquarters of the Protestant Union, Pope Gregory XV requested the Bibliotheca Palatina as prize of victory, and sent the Greek scholar Leone Allacci . . . to supervise the transportation involving fifty wagons (1623). This indicates the importance Rome attached to the battle of books with Reformation Germany.” The bookplate inserted in the Heidelberg books by the Vatican Library at the time proclaims openly the nature of this translatio: “I am from that library which Maximilian, duke of Bavaria, took as a prize of war from captured Heidelberg and sent as a trophy to Gregory XV”; Metzger, “Bibliotheca Palatina/Vatican Library,” 59.
54 See Bertelli, Ribelli, libertini, esp. 81.
55 {~?~IQ: Editorial: Selected paragraph may have unmatched curly quotation marks.}For the Magdeburg Centuries, see Diener, ” Magdeburg Centuries”; New Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v., “Magdeburg Centuries”; and Oxford Dictionary of Christian Church, 3rd ed., s.v. “Centuriators of Magdeburg” and “Flacius, Matthias.”
56 See Bertelli, Ribelli, libertini, 64–69; and Pullapilly, Caesar Baronius.
57 For material relating to the Nicephorus manuscript, see Lambeck, Commentatorium, 1:101–3, 108–9, 152–65. For Du Duc’s letter, see ibid., 162. For the “pretiosissimus codex,” see ibid., 152. For the description, “eximium istud antiquitatis ecclesiasticae monumentum,” see ibid., 165. For Du Perron and Du Plessis-Mornay, see entries under their names in the Dictionnaire de biographie française. For other works describing the vicissitudes of the Nicephorus manuscript, see note 52 above.
58 For the letter, see Lambeck, Commentatorium, 1:103–4. For Holstenius, see note 44 above. Lambeck was Holstenius’s nephew, whereas Denis Petau, the Jesuit responsible for the 1630 Paris edition of Julian’s opera omnia, had been spiritual father to Holstenius at the time of his conversion to Catholicism in Paris in 1624; Rietbergen, “Lucas Holste,” 260, 292.
59 Rudolf Wittkower (Art and Architecture, 110) is referring to the handwritten extract about Constantine taken from Nicephorus’s Historia Ecclesiastica (8:55) included among the Bernini papers, now at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. While the extract seems to have served Bernini in some way in the preparation of his statue of Constantine, it was not copied out by Bernini himself, according to T. A. Marder (Bernini’s Scala Regia, 171). To cite another example of Nicephorus’s status among seventeenth-century artists, his was one of only two works of ecclesiastical history in the inventory of the library of Louis Le Vau; Ballon, Louis Le Vau, 152. Nicephorus was also consulted by other French artists of the early modern period, as discovered from a survey of “Books on Religious Subjects in Artists’ Libraries,” compiled from inventories left by artists or their heirs in the period 1630 to 1715 and published in Il Dio Nascosto, 267–70, #117. For a discussion of early modern artists’ access to historical information and other forms of humanistic culture, see Bialostocki, “Doctus Artifex,” 150–65, 267–70.
60 Paleotti, Explicatione del lenzuolo, 3:18, 19; and Grossman, Caravaggio, 22.
61 Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 1:599 (an. 69, chap. 14). For the question of Peter’s true likeness in Baroque art, see Mormando, “Teaching the Faithful to Fly,” 120–21.
62 Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed., s.v. “Nicephorus Callistus”; and New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., s.v. “Nicephorus Callistus Xanthopoulos.”
63 {~?~IQ: Editorial: Selected paragraph may have unmatched parentheses.}Nicephorus, Historia Ecclesiastica, 10:1; Sozomen, Historia Ecclesiastica, 5:2; and Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 4:490–91 (an. 351, capp. 8–14, “Julianus magicarum rerum studiosissimus”; 4:525 (an. 354, cap. 24, “Julianus Athenis”), and 4:617 (an. 358, cap. 29, “Julianus in Galliis magiae studet”).
64 Nicephorus, Historia Ecclesiastica, 10:2.
65 Nicephorus, Historia Ecclesiastica, 10:2: “Julianus porro imperio potius, tam impudenter et aperte dicitur religionem abjurasse, ut ipsum etiam pernegaverit Christum, et sacrificiis quibusdam daemonumque detestandis invocationibus et victimarum sanguine sacrum abluerit lavacrum, atque seipsum amysteriis Ecclesiae exauctoratum excluserit.” See Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 5:31–32 (an. 361, cap. 4), where he cites Prudentius’s Peristephanon Liber (Crowns of Martyrdom), 10, vv. 1011–50. As Rowland Smith (Julian’s Gods, 138) reports, “A passage in Gregory Nazianzen’s First Invective against Julian implies that he participated at a taurobolium.” It is known for certain that Julian was an initiate of the Cybele cult and dedicated one of his treatises to her, the Oration upon the Mother of the Gods, published with the rest of his opera omnia. For an English translation of the treatise, see King, Julian the Emperor, 254–80.
66 Another such source is John Chrysostom’s Discourse on Blessed Babylas and Against the Greeks (in Saint John Chrysostom: Apologist, trans. Schatkin and Harkins, 120, 121–22), chaps. 76, 77, 79, cited by Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 5:43 (an. 362, capp. 18, 19), concerning Julian’s “turpitude” and his support of “magicians, sorcerers, soothsayers, augurs, mendicant priests, and entire workshops of the occult.”
67 I assume the footnotes were inserted by Lange and not by the editor of the 1630 edition, since they are present verbatim in the earlier 1567 French-language edition based upon the same Lange translation.
68 “Mithram Persae solem esse putant, cui hostias multas sacrificant. Hujus sacris non initiabatur, nisi qui per gradus quosdam tormentorum ad ea pervenisset, et sanctum se perpessionisque expertem esse declarasset. Suid. Mithrion, Solis templum: Mithrica, Solis sacra. Lamprid. de commodo: Sacra Mithriaca homicidio vero polluit.” Nicephorus, Historia Ecclesiastica, 10:6n1. “Suid.” is Suidas (also known as Suida or Souda), the name given both to the Greek lexicon of circa 1000 and its anonymous compiler; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Souda.” Gregorios of Nazianzos’s First Invective Against Julian the Emperor (in King, Julian the Emperor, 57) also makes passing reference to people “tortured in the rites of Mithras.” Lilio Gregorio Giraldi (De deis gentium, 320–21) repeats the same information, citing Suidas and Nazianzen.
69 {~?~IQ: Editorial: Selected paragraph may have unmatched curly quotation marks.}In quo olim Graeci, Mithrae sacrificantes, homines mactabant (Soc. lib. III, cap. 2).” The following quotation from Socrates Ecclesiastical History 3:2 is taken from the anonymous London 1914 translation (p. 173).
70 For Mithraism, see Clauss, Roman Cult of Mithras; Geden, Mithraic Sources; and Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, 2nd ed., s.v. “Mithraism.” We now know that ritual human slaughter was not a feature of Mithraism, but was one of the many calumnies spread by the Christians.
71 Clauss, Roman Cult of Mithras, 44. For Christian and non-Christian references to Mithraism in the literature of the early centuries ad, see Geden, Mithraic Sources.
72 The quotation from Tertullian is cited in Clauss, Roman Cult of Mithras, 44. For the quotations from Firmicus Maternus, see his Error of the Pagan Religions, trans. Forbes, 52 (5.2) and 84 (19.1). As Forbes explains in his introduction (38–39), the first two early modern editions of The Error of the Pagan Religions were published in 1562 and 1603 by, respectively, Matthias Flacius and another Protestant scholar, Ioannis a Wower; however, the text was also republished several times in the following century, included, for example, in the 1643, 1645, and 1652 editions of Marcus Minucius Felix’s Octavius. For Tertullian and Firmicus Maternus on Mithraism, see also Geden, Mithraic Sources, 42–44, 56–57.
73 Cyprian, Treatise V, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, 5:465. Cyprian’s purpose in writing this address was to refute pagan slander against Christianity and prove that the cause of the wars, famine, and pestilence then ravaging the world was the idolatry and devil-worship of the pagans, not the Christian faith.
74 Giraldi, De deis gentium, Syntagma VII (concerning Apollo and associated deities), 319–21; and Cartari, Le vere e nove imagini, 505–6. The quotation about “every cultivated man’s library” comes from Seznec, “Myth in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” 293. The third of the most consulted Italian Renaissance mythological compilations, the less scholarly Mythologiae by Natale Conti, does not mention Mithras. For these Renaissance handbooks, see Seznec, Survival of the Pagan Gods.
75 For early modern Roman collections of antiquities and, especially, their increasing accessibility to the public, see Stenhouse, “Visitors, Display, and Reception.” For inventories and discussions of antiquities uncovered by Sweerts’s lifetime, see the relevant portions of Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists; Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique; and L’idea del bello. See also Barkan, Unearthing the Past; and Burke, “Images as Evidence.” In addition there were the popular contemporary guidebooks such as Ulisse Aldrovandi, Delle statue antiche che per tutta Roma in diversi luoghi e case si veggono (published in same volume with Lucio Mauro, Le antichità de la città di Roma, Venice, 1562) and Bartolomeo Marliani, Urbis Romae topographia (Venice, 1588).
76 Boissard (Romanae urbis topographia, 47) lists in the “horti Cardinalis Carpensis,” a “tabula marmorea in qua sculptus est Mithras Deus Persarum mactans taurum”; see also Aldrovandi (Delle statue antiche, 301) for the same item in the Cardinal Rodolfo Pio da Carpi garden. For the Giustiniani Mithraic artifacts, see Whitehouse, Paper Museum of Cassiano Dal Pozzo, 284. For the Capitoline Mithras relief (now in the Louvre, #569) and mithraeum, see Cumont, Textes et monuments figurés, 2:193–95, monument 6; and Barkan, Unearthing the Past, 169–71, citing the more extensive discussions of Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. The Capitoline mithraeum was destroyed sometime between 1550 and 1594 and, as far as I can determine, no descriptions of it have survived from the late medieval and early modern periods; however, the surviving relief was seen on the Capitoline in the early seventeenth century by Pignoria who describes it in detailed fashion and supplies an illustration; Pignoria in Cartari, Vere e nove imagini, 505–6. The relief later became part of the Borghese collection. Although not perceiving the connection to Mithras and interpreting the Mithraic relief as an allegory of Agriculture, Marliani (Urbis Romae topographia, bk. 7, 152–53) reports that there are many such works to be seen in Rome, mostly in fragmented condition. He illustrates the intact one to be found “affixed to the wall of the palace of Saint Mark under the tower of that square,” but mentions others, including one in the Cesi collection. It was only in 1606 that the ancient remains depicting the Mithraic myth, copied by Renaissance artists since the fifteenth century, were correctly identified as such by Pignoria who published his commentary in his 1615 revised edition of Cartari’s Vere e nove imagini; see Bober and Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists, 84–85. A fully accurate interpretation would not come until Filippo della Torre’s Monumenta veteris Antii (Rome, 1700); Cumont, Textes et monuments figurés, 2:71.
77 “Etenim regis ego sum Solis assectator et famulus,” “colere nos Mithram,” Julian, Oratio IV, in Juliani imp. opera, ed. Petavius, 254 (i.e., 244) and 289–90. Julian’s treatise on the sun had wide reverberations in early modern Europe; as Eugenio Garin (Studi sul platonismo medievale, 190–215) has shown, Julian’s treatise was much studied by and had a decided influence upon Marsilio Ficino, Ficino’s solar philosophy influencing, in turn, both Copernicus and Galileo. For Julian’s initiation into Mithraism (a fact probably unknown to the seventeenth century), see Baus, Imperial Church, 55; and Hinson, Church Triumphant, 162. For an English translation of Julian’s complete sun treatise, see King, Julian the Emperor, 219–53.
78 Firmicus, Error of the Pagan Religions, 87 (20.1).
79 Pignoria, Magnae Deum, 1, citing Macrobius and Arnobius as his authorities. For Cybele and Attis in our period, see also Cartari, Vere e nove imagini, “La Gran Madre,” 186–91; and Giraldi, De deis gentium, Syntagma IV. For a modern study, see Vermaseren, Legend of Attis, 6. Sweerts worked for the Pamphilj and one of the prized possessions of that family’s collection of antiquities was a large statue of Cybele seated upon a lion. The Cybele statue appears to have been an early acquisition by Prince Camillo, although the earliest documentation of its presence in the family holdings dates only to 1666; see Antichità di Villa Doria Pamphilj, cat. 117; and Documenti per servire allo studio delle collezioni Doria Pamphilj, 28.
80 English translation from King, Julian the Emperor, 262–63.
81 Firmicus, Error of the Pagan Religions, 48 (3.1).
82 Giraldi, De deis gentium, Syntagma VII, 319–21: “in antro colebatur”; “antrum floridus . . . prope fontes”; “antrum vel specus”; “naturalem speluncam et fontibus scatentem.” In these same pages, Giraldi mentions that “there was a temple dedicated to Mithras also in Alexandria where his rites were performed with great display, as we note in the book of the Historia Tripartita” (an anthology assembled by Cassiodorus from the ecclesiastical histories of Sozomen, Socrates, and Theodoret).
83 Clauss, Roman Cult of Mithras, 103, 104–5. Apuleius and his works were (and are still) considered important sources of information on ancient religion and philosophy, cited and discussed, to mention only two examples, by Augustine City of God 8:12, 14, 16; and Pignoria, Magnae Deum, 4–6.
84 Clauss, Roman Cult of Mithras, 102. The cult of Mithraism was restricted only to men, but Sweerts and his contemporaries would not have known this, for it is not mentioned in any early modern source.
85 Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. “Sol.”
86 In addition to the already cited sources on Mithraism and Sol, see also the relevant entries in Adkins and Adkins, Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome.
87 Grant, Constantine the Great, 134.
88 For the necropolis mosaic, see Jensen, “Two Faces of Jesus,” 50. For the Lateran solar Christological decorative detail, see Zuccari, “Borromini tra religiosità borromaica,” 64, and pl. 16.
89 Valeriano, Hieroglyphicorum (1626), 176, s.v. “Sol Iustitiae.” For Valeriano’s discussion of Christ as the Sol Oriens, see his Hieroglyphica (1602), 470. Nicephorus was one of the sources of the Hieroglyphica, as noted in the list of “Authores quorum testimoniis in his commentariis usus est Pierius.”
90 Lara, “Versum Populum Revisited,” 213–14; Catholic Encyclopedia (1907), s.v., “Orientation of Churches”; and New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., s.v. “Basilica.” For the importance of sun symbolism in early Christianity, see also Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, s.vv. “Soleil” and “Dimanche”; and New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd. ed, s.v. “Sunday.”
91 Lara, “Versum Populum Revisited,” 214. However, there were Christians who continued to emulate the pagan practice of paying homage to the sun itself, doing so in the early morning in the forecourt of Saint Peter’s, as seen a Christmas sermon of Pope Leo the Great; I sermoni del ciclo natalizio, 175, 367–68. See also Clauss, Roman Cult of Mithras, 172; and Lançon, Rome in Late Antiquity, 137.
92 Cipriani, Gli obelischi egizi, 44–45. For the inscription see also Iversen, Obelisks in Exile, 1:38.
93 Mercati, De gli obelischi di Roma, esp. 68–69; Kircher, Obeliscus Pamphilius, esp. 156–60 (and passim); Iversen, Obelisks in Exile, 1:11–18; Cipriani, Obelischi egizi, esp. 27, 38–39, 55–57. Nicephorus is among the authors Mercati used in compiling his work, as acknowledged in his alphabetical list of sources, while Kircher (Obeliscus Pamphilius, 59) cites the writings of Emperor Julian in his own treatise; these are but two further examples of the continuing presence of Nicephorus and Julian in the consciousness of early modern Rome.
94 Bikker, “Sweerts’s Life and Career,” 28–31. See note 44 above for the Sweerts paintings inventoried in the Pamphilj collection; and Capitelli, “Una testimonianza documentaria,” 63, for the “legame di protezione” between Sweerts and Camillo Pamphilj.
95 For the Lateran obelisk, see Mercati, De gli obelischi di Roma, 267–311, 377–87; Cipriani, Obelischi egizi, 46–51; Iversen, Obelisks in Exile, 1:55–64; and Freiberg, Lateran in 1600, 32–34.
96 For the history of the Lateran basilica, especially in this period, see Freiberg, Lateran in 1600; and Luciani, “Il complesso episcopale.”
97 Ammianus Marcellinus, Later Roman Empire, trans. Hamilton, 17:4.
98 For Antoniani, see Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 3:511–15; and Roma di Sisto V, 469–70.
99 Translation from Iversen, Obelisks in Exile, 1:64n2. One of the Sistine inscriptions (facing the baptistery) on the new base of the obelisk recalls the conversion of Constantine: “Constantine, victor through the Cross and here baptized by S. Silvester, propagated the glory of the Cross”; ibid., 1:63n7.
100 Freiberg, Lateran in 1600, 33.
101 For Cyprian’s De mortalitate in early modern plague sources, see, for example, Possevino, Cause et rimedii, 34v; and Marchini, preface to Belli divini. See also Mormando, “Response to the Plague,” 26. As for the death-by-plague of the innocent faithful, as narrated in 1 Chronicles 21 and 2 Samuel 24, seventy thousand Hebrew subjects of King David died as a consequence of their ruler’s disobedience of God’s will (by taking a census of the people), thus calling down on all their heads a deadly plague; Mormando, “Response to the Plague,” 19–20.
102 Mautini, “Nel Venderdi della Domenica I di Quaresima,” 347–48. This is not to say that the artist himself necessarily conceived his painting with such an apologetic message in mind; however, there was nothing to stop pious viewers from reading this rather conventional moral lesson from the Frenchman’s depiction of the biblical plague scene. For further discussion of viewer response to Poussin’s Plague at Ashdod, see Hipp’s essay in this volume.
103 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 9:8.
104 Published in King, Julian the Emperor, 86–86.
105 For confirmation of this belief as repeatedly encountered in the primary sources, popular and elite, of the age, see the various essays in Hope and Healing.
106 For heresy and the plague, see Boeckl, “Plague Imagery as Metaphor”; Possevino, Cause et rimedii, 13v–14r; and Martin, Plague? 95.
107 Panigarola, “Predica intitolata La Peste,” 272–74.
108 Quoted in McGinness, Right Thinking and Sacred Oratory, 130–31.
109 The denunciation of the religion of one’s enemy as “pestilential” is of ancient vintage in Christian polemical literature; Firmicus Maternus repeatedly makes use of plague imagery in his Error of the Pagan Religions, wherein Mithraism is referred to that as “horrid contagion of idolatry” (20.7), while paganism in general is called that “pestilential disease” (28.1). Elsewhere Firmicus counsels the pagans, “Flee unhappy men, flee and abandon that pesthouse [their pagan temple] with all the speed you can” (26.2).
110 Quoted in D’Onofrio, Le fontane di Rome, 395 (author’s translation, emphasis added). This is D’Onofrio’s historical preface to his discussion of Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers commissioned by Innocent X. The author sees the latter fountain in part as a form of somewhat delusional assertion of papal dominion over the “four corners of the earth,” in reaction to the vast territorial and financial losses caused by “the humiliation of Munster,” that is, the Peace of Westphalia.
111 For the Rubens canvas (and the artist’s letter explaining the allegory), see Scribner, Peter Paul Rubens, 122, from which the Burckhardt quotation is taken. For Sweerts’s Mars Destroying the Arts, now in a private collection, see Jansen and Sutton, Michael Sweerts, 118. For the impact of the Thirty Years’ War on art and artists, see Raab, “Artists and Warfare”; and 1648: Paix de Westphalie. For outbreak of plague during that war, see Benecke, Germany in the Thirty Years’ War, 36, 55.
112 Quotation from Papacy, 2:801. The secondary literature on the Peace of Westphalia is vast and figures into any account of the reign of Innocent X; in the discussion that follows, among the many studies of the Thirty Years’ War and Westphalia consulted for this study, I cite only those quoted directly.
113 Chiomenti Vassalli, Donna Olimpia, 143 (author’s translation).
114 Rodén, Church Politics, 100. See also Sella, Italy in the Seventeenth Century, 10–11.
115 Pastor, History of the Popes, 30:122.
116 Croxton and Tischer, Peace of Westphalia, 242.
117 As Pastor reports, “Chigi had seen to it that neither his own name nor that of the Pope appeared in the instrument of peace by which, he lamented, a deep wound was inflicted on the Catholic religion every time it was mentioned”; History of the Popes, 30:120–21. For Chigi’s protests, see ibid., 30:125–26. The full text of Chigi’s protest of 26 October 1648 can be found in Pallavicino, Della vita di Alessandro VII, 1:138–40.
118 “ipso iure nulla, irrita, invalida, iniqua, damnata, reprobata, inania, viribusque et effectu vacua omnino” (author’s translation). The brief, officially dated 26 November 1648, was not published until August 1650, its publication delayed for diplomatic reasons until the Swedish troops had left German soil. For the Latin text of the brief, see Feldkamp, “Das Breve ‘Zelo Domus Dei,’” 293–305, quote at 302. See also Poncet, “Innocenzo X,” in Enciclopedia dei Papi, 3:321–35, 329–30 for “Zelo domus Dei”; and Kemper, “Fabio Chigi,” 54, for a photograph of the papal brief in its broadside edition.
119 For the Poussin Titus paintings and their political intent, see Lavin, “Bernini at St. Peter’s,” 163–66, with further bibliography. For Reni’s canvas and papal “diplomacy through the arts,” see Fumaroli, “Richelieu, Patron of the Arts,” 17–19 (citing Colantuono, Guido Reni’s Abduction of Helen). For further discussion of Poussin’s Sack and Destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem (1625/26), see Richelieu: Art and Power, cat. #116.
120 Ostrow, Art and Spirituality, 230. Julian’s death is also the subject of one of the frescoes (dating to the late 1650s) by Guglielmo Cortese (Il Borgognone) in the Oratorio della Congregazione Prima Primaria at the Collegio Romano; Salvagnini, I pittori borgognoni Cortese, 126, pl. 48.
121 Another example of the revival of Julian’s memory in Counter-Reformation Rome came in the form of the refurbished church of Santa Bibiana and the new biography of the saint by Domenico Fedini; this revived cult is also related to the Thirty Years’ War by Alessandro Angelini (Gian Lorenzo Bernini e i Chigi tra Rome e Siena, 310); however, referring to the historical context of decades earlier, Angelini sees the Julian reference as pointing instead to the Protestants: “In Fedini’s brief volume, behind the figures of the ‘evil’ emperor Julian the Apostate and the ‘heretics’ who sent Bibiana and her family to their deaths, it is difficult not to see an allusion to the modern enemies of the Catholicism of Rome, Gustavus Adolphus and the Lutherans of the North” (author’s translation).
122 For a most thorough and well-documented account of the conflict between Mazarin and Innocent, see Coville, Étude sur Mazarin. For Mazarin and Westphalia, see Croxton, Peacemaking in Early Modern Europe, esp. 259–81. As Croxton (Peacemaking, 274) remarks, “although Mazarin may well have been a religious man, Christianity impinged little upon his political decisions.”
123 The last two quotations come from Buckley, Christina, Queen of Sweden, 83, 87.
124 For Louis’ birth and immediate association with the sun, see Meyer, La naissance de Louis XIV; and Wolf, Louis XIV, 269.
125 The Barberini, the family of Pope Innocent’s immediate and much unloved predecessor, Urban VIII, had also expressively associated itself with the imagery of the sun, in particular, Urban, the self-styled “Sun Pope,” who was actively interested in the realm of astrology. The solar association is seen most prominently illustrated and celebrated in the decoration of the Palazzo Barberini, in particular in Andrea Sacchi’s allegorical Divine Wisdom ceiling fresco; Scott, Images of Nepotism. As Scott (ibid., 88–94) persuasively argues, it was probably the same friar astrologer Tommaso Campanella, author of the horoscope of the neonascent Louis XIV, who served as Sacchi’s advisor in the conception of that complex fresco. Scott also points out (ibid., 70) that “in his book of imprese, dedicated to the then cardinal Maffeo Barberini, Giovanni Ferro lists five different solar imprese of the future pope. The most important of these is the rising sun.” Given the stormy history between Innocent X and the Barberini family especially in the first years of Innocent’s reign—Innocent’s investigation into the financial misdoings of the Barberini sent them fleeing to Paris after Urban’s death—one might be tempted to see in the heliolatry of Plague in an Ancient City a reference to Urban or the Barberini. However, by 1648 matters had been patched up between Innocent and the Barberini, if only out of political expediency and not true affection. Moreover, in the aftermath of Westphalia, the pope had much larger concerns and bigger enemies on his mind; see Pastor, History of the Popes, 30:62–65. Pastor notes (30:64) that, in February 1648, Cardinal Francesco Barberini returned to Rome from exile in France and “met with a kindly welcome from the Pope” (“maxima cum benignitate,” reports a contemporary diary), as did Cardinal Antonio. For the “full honors” with which the Barberini returned to Rome, see also Rendina, The Popes, 498–99.
126 With respect to the narrative structure of this complex historical scene, Sweerts may have chosen, in emulation of Poussin’s “emplotment” of his epic canvases, the dramatic moment of Aristotelian peripeteia: thanks to the instruction of the Blue Prophet, the population of this town (represented by his blonde interlocutor) finally begins to understand the true cause of the plague (their relapse into paganism, represented by the ritual in the Black Hall and the references to heliolatry) and its true remedy (return to the worship of the Christian God, represented by the White Temple). For Poussin’s techniques of emplotment, see Unglaub, Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, esp. chap. 6. Unglaub’s description (Poussin and the Poetics of Painting, 175) of the French master’s typical compositional strategy is thus pertinent to Sweerts’s canvas as well: “In order to construct a unified plot complete with a beginning, middle, and end, Poussin distills the action to its climactic moment, or dramatic reversal, while subordinate elements in the composition allude to causes and consequences.” This is illustrated in Poussin’s Plague at Ashdod as well, the latter painting being of great inspiration to Sweerts here.
127 For the question of Sweerts’s faith during his Roman period, see Bikker, “Sweerts’s Life and Career,” 26–27.