Mosaics in the Eternal City (review)

Out of an almost overwhelming grandeur, opulence, solemnity, and piety, the city of Rome has forged an effective formula for instilling faith in its beloved fictions, and keeping doubt at bay, even if it also comes in the form of a beautiful fiction. This book by Michael G. Sundell covers the Middle Ages in Rome as embodied in the mosaic medium patronized by the popes for the ciy’s basilicas. To put mosaic on walls was expensive, partly because of the amount of gold used. But the expense was deemed worthwhile because of the extraordinary effects achieved with color and light. Thus mosaic became the preferred mode of decoration for the focal point and functional apex of the church interior, the apse, which is mainly what the author discusses.

This material is well known to specialists, including Richard Krautheimer, and much of the author’s treatment follows the lines of Krautheimer and others with nary a disagreement. But every so often the author breaks with the polite conversation of art history, which is so deferential to the ideology of Rome. One example is the author’s insistence that the ghostly symbols populating the Roman apses be read as real people. Ernst Kitzinger once made the interesting argument that medieval abstraction could be taken as a form of naturalism, and the author follows this line in his discussion of papal images that were prominently featured in Roman apses. One such pope was Paschal I (817–24), whose images have survived miraculously in a number of churches. To hear Paschal’s representations described as “quirky” or as an “innocent observer” is a little surprising to a reader inured to a literature on the Roman mosaics that concerns itself with dry prerogatives and cultural abstractions of renovatio and reform. The author also nudges the conventional historical sensibility by interweaving remarks of poets and writers such as Chaucer, Browning, and Stendhal into his text. The terms in which today’s historians speak of the liturgy seem positively bland beside the phrases of Browning’s bishop, who perorates on “the mutter of the mass” in St. Prassede, where “God [is] made and eaten all day long,” in the midst of “[g]ood strong thick stupefying incense-smoke.”¹ There is something salutary in this less reverent perspective on the Roman churches. It reminds us that these monuments were the product of real people, not bloodless abstractions, whose character and motives were complex. But it also serves to call attention to the fact that the discourse of scholarship in the academy is only one among many that can lay claim to the past, each of which has its own strengths as well as limitations.

In addition to the ninth-century churches of Ss. Prassede, Cecelia, and Maria in Domnica, there are discussions of early Christian St. Pudenziana, highmedieval Ss. Clemente and Maria in Trastevere, and late-medieval as well as early Christian St. Maria Maggiore, in that order. Clearly the aim was not to trace a historical development, but to make out of the city a kind of personal itinerary, with the implication that others do the same.