Art and Heresy in the City of the Sun

One theme running through much of what I’ve written for the art press over the last decade or more concerns culture’s response to the rise of the populist right in politics worldwide. Right now, a rather more pressing issue is the way the populist right is stamping on culture.

In late November, I left Argentina, which had just a day earlier elected the self-styled “anarcho-capitalist”, Javier Milei, as its new President. One of Milei’s first decisions was to cancel the government’s Ministry of Culture, including the organisations responsible for funding theatre and cinema, which are respected worldwide for their innovative and popular output. I returned briefly to the UK, where the problem hasn’t so much been the cancellation of the arts as their slow strangulation, due to cuts to ACE funding, cuts in arts education in favour of science and technology, and the impact of Brexit in preventing artists and musicians from working in Europe. Sometimes I wonder whether anyone in government ever reads a novel, goes to an art gallery, or sees a concert, a play or a film – although I bet they’ve all been having a good laugh at Nadine Dorris’s lamentable book, The Plot. Then I entered the EU to spend a few days with Alicia in Rome, where Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, fronting a political party descended from Mussolini’s fascists, has been tampering with the impartiality of state media, replacing the managing director of the television channel, Rai, with a gentleman called Giampaulo Rossi, who admires autocrats like Putin, Trump, and Victor Orban. Significantly, too, Meloni has also replaced the presidents of the Venice Biennale and Rome’s contemporary art gallery, MAXXI.

In Rome, however, I didn’t see any contemporary art. Nor did I go to the Vatican, to enquire, rhetorically, as I frequently do whenever anyone offers me a drink, “Is the Pope a Catholic?” It’s a phrase that has more resonance these days, when we recall the fact that Pope Francis was born in Argentina, making President Milei’s past statements about him, such as he is “a son of a bitch preaching communism” all the more horrific in a country that is mostly Roman Catholic. Recently, it has to be admitted that Milei has toned down his language in an effort to orchestrate a Papal visit to Buenos Aires. That’ll be interesting, if it happens.

Instead, I was impressed not just by the remains of the ancient city but also by those of the period we nowadays associate with the architectural and artistic style called “Baroque”, which began there in the early 1600s. Baroque art can be very grand and elaborate. But it has a dark heart. And we found some very odd examples of it, close to where we were staying. Our room was just a few minutes’ walk from the Piazza Vittorio, where a peculiar “Magic Doorway” stands, next to the ruins of an enormous Roman fountain, in a space echoing to the thwack of footballs hitting masonry and the screams of kids and enthusiastic dads. The doorway dates from 1680, installed by the Marquis Massimiliano Savelli Palombara, whose interest in alchemy led to the discovery of a secret formula that is inscribed on the door, guarded left and right by ancient Egyptian statues of the god Bes, who protected your house - possibly by frightening off any potential intruders just by the power of his sheer grotesque appearance. Unfortunately, the door leads nowhere, and nobody has ever decoded the formula. The monument sits there mysteriously, surrounded by feral cats, and warning signs not to abandon your own pet moggy there, lest it be killed by the much tougher local felines.

But then, in the opposite direction, at the far end of the same street, Gerusalemme, I discovered the Basilica of the Holy Cross, whose pale, swirling, mid-eighteenth-century exterior covers up a much older building, where, according to legend, Pope Sylvester II, aka Gerberto D’Aurillac, was attacked by the devil while reading mass, dying from his injuries soon afterwards, back in 1003 AD. This same pope, who it is claimed invented the world’s first mechanical clock, seems to have caused much consternation because of his interest in mathematics and sciences, about which Muslim-dominated Spain had much more knowledge at that time. Sylvester’s curiosity was perhaps not liked by the religious establishment. So the devil came to destroy him.

On another walk one day, we also discovered, half concealed by trees, the Palazzo Barberini, designed and built in the early 1630s for Maffeo Vincenzo Barberini, who became Pope Urban VIII. What was then a highly-fashionable building is now the home of the National Gallery of Antique Art, and contains one of Caravaggio’s most shocking works: Judith Beheading Holofernes. Painted – I nearly wrote “executed” - around 1600, the work is a combination of science and theatre: the extreme facial expressions of the life models, who include Caravaggio’s friend, the courtesan, Fillede Melandroni as Judith, having been lit up as luridly as possible by the artist, against a black interior background, using directional lighting. In the Barberini I also discovered a temporary exhibition, the City of the Sun, which currently explores the relationship between Urban VIII’s early 17th century Vatican and the scientific discoveries of the period, notably those of Galileo, who of course ended up being put on trial by the Inquisition in 1633 for arguing that the universe was heliocentric. He recanted, and escaped execution, but spent the rest of his life under lock and key. Various early telescopes and microscopes are on display, together with notes about the theories surrounding what they showed. Galileo caused many arguments, for instance, by insisting that the sunspots that he observed must be on the sun’s surface, and not revolving around it, as more extreme members of the God-squad would have preferred. Sunspots, they thought, suggested imperfections in the universe. And God couldn’t possibly have done anything imperfect – could he?

I’m reminded by all this that it’s the perfectionists, whether religious, political, or both, who frequently adopt a rhetoric focusing on fear. Suella Braverman’s description of refugees risking their lives to reach the south coast of England as an “invasion”, or Donald Trump talking about illegal migrants to the U.S. as “poisoning the blood of our country”, are only two recent examples. Increasingly, xenophobic right-wing populists ply a trade selling a fear of outsiders, aliens, refugees, and the political left - all of whom signify not just difference but also, somehow, impurity. Something to be got rid of and expunged. It seemed appropriate in the circumstances, therefore, that the day before leaving Rome, I should make my way on foot, through seemingly endless traffic-clogged streets, to Campo de’ Fiori - which may once have been a field of flowers but is now a rather trashy market. My aim was to pay respects to the philosopher and poet, Giordano Bruno, whose statue sticks up above the stalls selling tourist tat, marking the spot he was executed for heresy, by being burned at the stake, upside down, on February 17th, 1600.

Giordano Bruno was a Dominican friar, and lived itinerantly. Fleeing Naples for reading the wrong kind of literature as a young man, he made his way to France, where he tutored the king, and then stayed in England, befriending powerful figures like the poet, Sir Philip Sydney. He later worked in Wittenburg, Zurich, Frankfurt and Venice, before trouble caught up with him, in the form of the Inquisition. Bruno’s theories about the universe, published in books like The Ash Wednesday Supper, published in London in 1584, were the cause of this trouble, because his ideas were anything but conventional. Not only did Bruno believe that the Earth revolved around the Sun, for instance, but he also thought the universe had no centre and was infinite, that life could well exist on other planets, and that souls could reincarnate, thus making differences between Catholics and Protestants ultimately irrelevant. Bruno was also an expert in mnemotechnics, or the art of memory: summoning information by linking it, item by item, to mental images of palaces, temples, or theatres. And he had a fascinating taste for “coincidental contraries” – the idea that opposite forces occur simultaneously – which prefigures what we now call dialectics. We do not know which of these ideas was most offensive to the Vatican at the time because the details of Bruno’s trial were afterwards lost. Heliocentrism, for instance, was not officially made heretical until Galileo’s trial, over thirty years after Bruno died. But Bruno went to prison for eight years before he was handed over to the civil authorities and executed.

On February 17th, 1907, the 24-year-old James Joyce left the cheap flat he was renting nearby and went to Campo de’ Fiori to mark the anniversary of Bruno’s death. Joyce had a young family to support, was not getting far as a writer, and was scraping a living locally as a bank clerk. He didn’t like Rome very much, complaining of nightmares when he slept. But he was fiercely anti-clerical and identified with Bruno’s enigmatic, poetic writing. He refers to Bruno’s ideas, including mnemotechnics and “coincidental contraries”, in his novels, Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. That day, Joyce was distinctly underwhelmed by the public commemoration he saw. But he did notice a woman repeatedly kissing an object on a chain she had around her neck. Looking more closely at what he expected to be a crucifix, he realised she was in fact kissing a miniature revolver.

There were no admirers kissing miniature revolvers at the memorial to Bruno on the dark December afternoon I visited. But someone had left flowers at the base of the statue. So, even on a day that wasn’t the anniversary of his burning, Bruno is obviously still remembered by some. At the same time there was some echo of meaning left in the placename, Campo de’ Fiori. And suddenly several “coincidental contraries” came to mind. For instance, the contrast between the art of memory and the fact that this philosopher has frequently been forgotten, his ideas still remaining obscure. Then there’s the rising tension everywhere between autocracy and heresy (hello, Alexei Navalny, Russian opposition activist, who, after recently disappearing, has been tracked down in an Arctic prison camp). Everywhere, ideology is threatening freedom of expression, as well as art. Then there are the contrasts between searching and discovery. Between wandering and coming home. Happy New Year.