Rome — It was not just to avoid the tourist crowds, whose numbers were already building at nine in the morning along the Via Nazionale, that I took the stairs down. There were thirty-three steps, one for each year of Jesus’s life.
With its simple peaked roof, single rectangular window, and low colonnade shading the front doors, the façade resembled a barn. The broad staircase leading down to it was built at the directive of Pius IX, whose reign of thirty years ranks as the longest of any pope across some two millennia. At the time of his election in 1846, Pius was considered a liberal, reform-minded pontiff, but he soon sold out the revolutionaries of 1848—nationalists seeking to unite Italy and also strip the Holy See of political influence and even control over the city of Rome itself.
Not surprisingly, given the threat of secularism and that most accursed of walls (the one between church and state), it was Pius who cooked up the recipe for Papal Infallibility in 1870.
I’ll give him this much: he was right about the stairs. They were needed to bring down pilgrims and other worshippers, and, now and then, an off-piste tourist to the church of San Vitale, tucked in its urban nest far below. The street level had been raised during the late 19th century, “disastrously” so, said the historical marker in front of the church.
Consecrated in 400 C.E., San Vitale is the oldest Christian church in Rome that is not built on the prior site of a Roman temple—a statement of the elevation of the cult by the late Imperial regime to the status of state religion. San Vitale presents an unassuming, even meek face, looking straight ahead to the bottom of Pius’s stairs, happy to be forgotten in the midst of the surrounding Baroque splendors and the sightseers and brutal Roman traffic streaming by without even a glance.
I made my way down toward the trio of burly pensioners in white tunics with large flared red crosses on the front and back as they paced in front of the entrance to the church. These Knights Templar appeared to be armed only with disapproving frowns.
I entered the light-streaked shadows of San Vitale and looked for the frescoes of Jos de Momper.
He spent the first half of the 1580s in the Eternal City. A prodigy draftsman, he had been accepted into the Painters’ Guild of St. Luke in Antwerp at the age of seventeen. A few years later, he headed to Rome with his friend Jan Bruegel. Some years after his return to Antwerp, de Momper was elected head of the guild. He was a hugely productive artist, with some 500 surviving paintings, almost all of them unsigned. His specialty was landscape, and recent research has credited him with the leafy, mountainous scenes in some of the frescoes in San Vitale, done during his Roman sojourn of the 1580s.
The interior was now ringed by scaffolding. The church’s interior walls and their frescoes were being restored. I looked for better angles and openings, but none were available. When I tried to peek my way behind one of the curtains, a Knight warned me to step back. The restorers were busy up on the scaffold, and I thought about trying to explain myself. But those Templar frowns cut like halberds.
De Momper’s Roman masterpiece would have to wait for another time.
I strolled toward the altar. A distant speaker sent a recording of J. S. Bach’s relentless, twisted Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor out through the ancient Catholic church. In these depths, the music sounded downright diabolical. It would have sent dozens of popes into a fury that a heretic was on the loose, unseen and unstoppable, in this sacred space. In the shallow transept, I regarded a fresco, not by de Momper, of a martyr being buried alive. He looked beatifically to heaven as Lutheran sonic backfill was added to the pictorial dirt shoveled down on him by his pagan murderers.
In the current millennium, the organs of Rome are mostly silent. No posters advertise concerts. Often, the antique pipes have been ripped out, leaving their ornate cases empty. Electronic organs from the 1970s are called on to do the work of the vanished masterpieces.
As the Bach Passacaglia writhed toward its visionary climax, I thought of the music de Momper might have heard during his time in Rome.
The devout Catholic musician Peter Philips fled Protestant England in August of 1582 and two months later was in Rome. Ten years later, he married de Momper’s sister Cornelia in Antwerp. The organist and the painter might have met during their time together in Rome, where Philips had taken up residence among a cadre of recusant refugees at the newly founded English College. A hotbed of anti-Protestant zeal, even rebellious machinations, the College received vital support from the powerful Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, whose vast and sumptuous family palace—now home to the French Embassy—was around the corner.
Philips was soon installed as the College chapel organist, and Farnese became his patron, impressed as he must have been not only by the erudition and complexity but also the intense sensuality and ardent faith expressed in Philips’s music. In the dedication of his collection of Cantiones sacrae, published in Antwerp in 1613, Philips proclaimed that the volume was intended “for the consolation and salvation of Christian people, the confirmation and amplification of the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman faith, and the extirpation and confusion of Heresy and Heretics.” These were different times, at least in some ways. The Knights Templar in St. Vitale that morning didn’t seem inclined to undertake any extirpating.
As Bach bounced off the unseen de Momper frescoes, I thought of the church of Santa Maria in Vallicella, called the Chiesa Nuova, also funded by Farnese. Being a millennium younger than the Church of St. Vitale counts as “new.”
The nave of the Chiesa Nuova, a showpiece of Counter-Reformation architecture, had been completed in 1580, and a sumptuous organ on the south transept was in place by the middle of 1581, when Philips arrived in Rome. The case housing that first organ survives, but the pipework is long gone. However, a pendant instrument on the north transept, based closely on the first, was completed thirty years later in 1612 by the Roman builder Giovanni Guglielmi. This tremendous-sounding trace of Philips’s Rome was meticulously restored in 2000. The instrument provides unparalleled access to the sound world Philips heard there in the 1580s.
Between the two organs in the Chiesa Nuova rises the monumental altarpiece—the Madonna della Vallicella, painted in the first decade of the 17th century by Peter Paul Rubens. This European luminary knew both Philips and de Momper, who may well have collaborated with Rubens and Jan Bruegel on The Sense of Hearing. At the center of the painting, the printed music for one of Peter Philips’s madrigals is arrayed on music stands. The musicians who have sung or played the piece with the many instruments lying around are gone. A landscape like that I was hoping to see in St. Vitale spreads to the horizon through the window beyond.
The Templars gave me a trio of stern looks as I left the low, dark church and climbed Pius’s stairs, headed for Rubens, Philips, and the next millennium.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
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