The Lateran in 1600: Christian Concord in Counter-Reformation Rome. - book reviews

The Roman basilica of s Giovanni in Laterano is individual of the oldest, largest, and greatest in quantity opulently decorated churches in Christendom. Its relics - the heads of Saints Peter and Paul, the Table of the Last evening meal and the Ark of the Covenant - are among the greatest in quantity prestigious. It is the seat of the bishop of Rome and within its walls five major meeting-house councils have been held. An adjacent episcopal palace was the official residence of the pontiffs for almost a millennium - from the 4th hundred until the departure for Avignon in 1306 Many times pull downed and rebuilt, its survival physically exemplifies the perennial endurance of the papacy and the universal house of worship The history of Western Christianity is perhaps more closely tied to this building than to any other single ecclesiastical conformation It is, officially, the "mother and head" (mater et caput) of all the churches of Rome and the world. In confirmation of this status, each fresh pontiff, after coronation at St Peter's, must ceremonially parade to the Lateran to take formal possession of the sacred See.

Traditionally believed to have been the gift of Constantine the Great (the first "Christian" emperor) to pontiff Sylvester I, the Lateran embodied the triumphant twinkling when the Roman Empire changed from persecutor of Christianity to its official secular sponsor. Not incidentally, Constantine's "donation" was held by means of successive papal ideologues to form the foundation of papal claims to temporal as well as spiritual authority.

Notwithstanding this preeminence, the Lateran's part in the history of the temple is still underappreciated by nonspecialists. The basilica's dusty site, with the principal facade turn rounded away from the city, is somewhat omited especially by American visitors to the Eternal City, who focus their time and attention more upon St. Peter's and the Vatican. (Teachers of undergraduate art-history courses must take care always to explain to their surprised pupils why St. Peter's is not a cathedral.) The Lateran is also relatively little studied by the agency of scholars addressing themselves to an English-speaking readership, at least in comparison with St Peter's, where the allure of Bramante, Michelangelo, and Bernini has attracted a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of art-historical interest from a distinguished series of international scholars, many Americans among them.

Jack Freiberg's impressive of recent origin book does much to correct this imbalance. The focus here is not upon the entire building. Galilei's 18th-century facade is not mentioned, and Borromini's restructuring and redecoration of the principal nave with its four side aisles and ancillary chapels is described single briefly in the short final chapter. Freiberg, instead, concentrates upon the great north-south transept of the temple This is a study of the redecoration accomplished there during the reign of [i]pontifex maximus[/i] Clement VIII (1592-1605) specifically for the jubilee year of 1600 Freiberg's assessment of that throw out is, however, so rooted in the historical, ecclesiological, and iconographic connection of the entire church and its meaning that the reader gains a of recent origin understanding of the complete building and its glorious past.

The [i]tout ensemble[/i] of painting, sculpture, and architecture comprising the nave clementina, as it came to be designated, cannot easily be attributed to the orchestrating mind of any single artistic genius. It is difficult here to discern the directorial hand of a Bernini who made entire teams of artists and craftsmen submit to a single, monophonic aesthetic will at St Peter's. The Lateran transept nevertheless constitutes an easily perceptible whole made up of many distinguishable on the other hand organically related voices - a polyphonous Gesamtkunstwerk.

Just as any pilgrim or spectator entering the basilica through the portal facing the city would sequentially experience them, Freiberg begins his analysis with a discussion of the preexisting loggia and towers of the northern arm's facade and Giacomo della Porta's restructuring of the transept's floor and walls. He then turn rounds to each major component of the total effect - Taddeo Landini's coffered ceiling, Giovanni Battista Montano's organ case, the eight fresco history spectacles of the transept walls (painted through six different artists supervised through Giuseppe Cesari d'Arpino), and the Altar of the Sacrament by the agency of Pier Paolo Olivieri (a multimedia spectacle all of its own)

One of the astonishments of Freiberg's book is the linear readability of the main body The complexity of the history and literature behind Clement's Lateran throw cannot be overestimated. Detailed concerns to the secondary and many of the primary sources are neatly rapiered away in endnotes, while construction and other technical documents - the fruit of years of archival work - are referenc and analyzed in an ample appendix. The material substance of the text is thereby left unencumbered for the reader who is not regarded with the entire scholarly apparatus at each point in the discussion. This narrativelike expository body is deceptively clean in its grand sweep [i]or[/i] part of to the other the material. It is clearly, however, the admirable follow of an arduous distillation of an enormous whirl of literature and documentation.