HEDGEHOGS AND FOXES AMONG THE RUINS
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first in a series
I. THE APOTHEOSIS OF QUIRINUS:
© David Mayernik 2003
a working paper
The connections between things are as tenuous or compelling as the beauty of the argument makes them. As John Shearman’s masterful collection of essays Only Connect... illustrates, the connections made by artists in the Renaissance were both between works of art and between the artwork and the viewer. Much has been made about Baroque art’s appeal to the spectator, but its connections with other works of art, especially those of antiquity, are somewhat more rarely made. The assumption among historians, it seems, is that Renaissance Humanism’s evocation of antiquity evaporated with the Counter Reformation, making the idea of Baroque Humanism a virtual impossibility intellectually. This brief article will begin to attempt to question that mistaken assumption.
17 February
The next day is nothing special, but the following one is Quirinus’. He got this name (it used to be Romulus) Because the ancient Sabines called a spear a “curis” (the warlike god got to heaven by this weapon),... There’s a clap of thunder and lightning bolts split the sky. The people take flight; the king [Romulus] ascended in his father’s chariot.... Handsome and larger than life in fine royal robes, Romulus [later] appeared in the middle of the road and seemed to say, “Forbid my Quirites to grieve. They shouldn’t spoil my godhead with tears....” A temple was built for the god, and a hill was named after him. Our fathers’ cult is renewed every year.
—Ovid, Fasti, trans. Betty Rose Nagle, Indiana Univ. Press, Book II, 475-512When he [Andrew] had finished praying, a brilliant light came down from heaven and encircled him for a full half-hour, so that no one could even see him. Then, as the light faded, Andrew gave up the ghost.
—Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. Christopher Stace, Penguin Books, p. 9
The Quirinal Hill in Rome, dedicated to Romulus in his guise of Quirinus (the name he assumed after his apotheosis), is also home today to Bernini’s church of Sant’ Andrea al Quirinale, originally the chapel for Jesuit novitiates. The fact of Sant’ Andrea’s name being linked specifically to its site on the hill dedicated to Quirinus has not been recognized for any particular significance, but that association in fact evokes iconographic connections too strong to be coincidental. Briefly recounted, the coincidences are these:
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- Romulus/Quirinus had a (twin) brother, Remus, who rivaled him for the right to found a new city
- Andrew was the brother of Peter, the first pope, who was martyred in Rome and whom Renaissance humanists considered a second Romulus
- The bringing of the relic of Andrew’s head to Rome (reunited with Peter) after the fall of Constantinople was one more reason Renaissance Rome saw herself as heir to both ancient Rome and its Byzantine successor
- Romulus’ apotheosis as Quirinus was thought, in some stories, to have occurred on the Quirinal; in any event, that hill was dedicated to him in his deified (post-apotheosis) form
- Bernini, on the high altar of Sant’ Andrea, shows the saint in the altar painting at the moment just before his death, with a vision of angels and brilliant light; those angels are re-presented in gilt stucco immediately above the painting, and on the dome a stucco Andrew is shown in triumphant ascent into heaven; the linked scenes are therefore of a kind of Christian apotheosis
- the form Sant’ Andrea presents to the street has been recognized as perhaps inspired by the so-called Temple of Romulus in the Roman Forum--where two curved wings also frame a portico grafted onto a round drum; now, the Romulus of the temple is not the founder of Rome, but a late antique namesake (the son of the Emperor Maxentius, whose pre-mature death was memorialized by a temple and his deification); the temple was linked to the archives occupying the old library of the Forum of Vespasian, and converted to a church dedicated to Cosmas and Damian.
Bernini may have thought the dedication enough of a connection to warrant the deliberate allusion the founder of Rome --se non č vero č ben trovato, as Giordano Bruno had said. He would have known the building in part because his earlier patron Pope Urban VIII (Barberini) was responsible for redoing and raising the pavement of the church, and creating a crypt. Until the 16th century an inscription with a dedication by Constantine was visible in the area (he was known to have rededicated many of Maxentius’ works); the archives, incidentally, were the site of the famous marble map of Rome, the Forma Vrbis. Bernini could have also known the building from coins, which seem to have shown the temple with various numbers of columns in front; the similarity between these images and the so-called Tomb of Romulus on the via Appia is partly responsible for the association of this Temple with Romulus.
I would like therefore to propose that, when Bernini went scavenging for ideas in the Roman Forum, the spoglie he acquired there were absorbed with all their layers of allegorical meaning that Renaissance artists like Bramante or Raphael would have recognized. He would not have appreciated antique remains merely formally as a connoisseur, but also for their narrative and allegorical allusions. Indeed, antique forms for Bernini were just as charged as they were for any Renaissance humanist, and it is only his seamless synthesis of sources (I think of Wittkower’s recognition of the Laocöon source in Bernini’s sculpture of Daniel for the Chigi Chapel) into a dynamic baroque gesamtkunstwerk that masks his poetic scholarship. Romulus, or even Remus, as an antetype of Andrew and Peter, was a humanist trope dating back at least to the late fifteenth century; interestingly, Remus’ supposed twin sons themselves were mythically associated with the foundation of Siena, birthplace of Sant’ Andrea’s patron Pope Alexander VII (Chigi).
No archival sources may ever be found to document these sorts of connections, but the question is better posed that, if compelling enough, would Bernini and his patron have missed them themselves? In other words, are we confronting compelling coincidences, or an underlying concetto? One would like to think, freed of art-historical prejudices against the Baroque era’s humanism, that it might be the latter.
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HEDGEHOGS & FOXES INTRODUCTION
** 1. Images Sourced from: The Sibelius Academy (Vedute di Roma)
