Travelogue 1136 – 27 June
The Price of Vocation

Rome was a city of summonses. Rome was God’s city, and this God was a micro-manager. In Caravaggio’s day, in Michelangelo’s day, in Fra Angelico’s day, popes were summoned by God, and artists were summoned by popes. One could call it a game of thrones. Maybe a game of mitres and laurels.

Seeing all the monuments in Rome, all the silent stone, a tourist may form the impression that the Eternal City was never born and never suffered an awkward adolescence. Watching the measured irrelevance of the modern papacy, one may be forgiven for imagining papal history as a long chain of murmuring gravitas, academic theology, and the medieval version of photo opps. It’s easy to forget that, as the Renaissance budded in Florence, Rome was in shambles. It was in its worst state since the barbarian invasions a thousand years before.

In 1309, Pope Clement V had moved the papal court to Avignon, and the court had stayed away for nearly seventy years. Even after it returned, the papacy wandered for several generations, seeming only to intermittently settle in Rome. This was a period of schism – during which rival popes conspired in Avignon – and of warfare – during which Italian city states skirmished over territory and the popes endeavoured to reassert their own dominance over Rome itself and then over adjacent lands in Central Italy.

History being what it often is, the kindly pope who first determined to move the papacy back to Rome died soon after accomplishing it, and he was succeeded by two rather brutish men who helped plunged the church and the city into new rounds of chaos. One was grouchy, one was greedy, and for both Rome was often too dangerous – threatened both by the mobs and by the patrician families that had run the city while the popes were absent.

In their defence, Grouchy and Greedy each pursued a Rome-first policy, setting the foundations for a revived city and papacy, even at the expense of its integrity. Papal income had dwindled: schismatic popes drew funding away, and proceeds had diminished from diminished papal lands and from Rome itself. Meanwhile, expenses increased: wars and urban renewal are not cheap. These renewal popes were not shy about “monetizing” their spiritual powers, selling off positions in the church, selling the same positions as futures, selling indulgences, announcing jubilee years in which pilgrims could dump their sins and their cash in Rome. These were tricks that both rebuilt the Renaissance church and sowed the seeds of Luther’s rebellion a hundred years later.

Travelogue 1135 – 17 June
La Nostra Vocazione

The spotty rains continue. If you are outside as much as I am on an average day, you witness all the phases of our weather, the gathering clouds, the showers, the clearing and the sun between the waves of clouds, like rings above us, the vestiges of a god stirring his finger in the atmosphere. It means I never leave the house without rain gear, for myself and for the girls. Everyone shakes their head now when you mention the weather. Where is summer? Every day we wake to temperatures like 11 or 12˚C.

It is easy to forget how prone we are still to the tricks of a god’s idle finger, our colds and our hots, our wet hair, and the joints in our knees still subject to the finest variations among Nature’s complex moods. Every day, in very mundane ways, we are like Matthew Levi, caught counting his coins. We look up from our tabletop, one thumb still pressed against the greasy surface of a silver florin, and we see one of our lords beckoning. Me?

When we are young, the concept of summons is grandiose. Why would one be summoned at all, if not to greatness? But Nature’s tide will wash that away. That will feel like a death of sorts, but when one’s eyes adapt to the darkness of ignominy, one sees the many small ways people are called and every day. To inconsequential things. If we are not called by Gandalf or by Christ, we are called by Nature itself; and if we are not called to bear the one true ring, we are called to step in a new puddle on Marconiplein, one formed in the tram tracks by the last rain shower.

Little Ren has received her summons of the season. She has been enjoying lessons in gymnastics every Thursday evening for a year and a half. Last month, the coach of “A-Team” came to watch the little girls at practice, and a week or so later, we heard that Little Ren had been chosen. Now she attends practices on Mondays in the big high school gym at Wolfert Tweetalig by the zoo. The mood is quite different. The head coach is tall and fit man, cheerful and encouraging, but also very serious. He directs the girls in setting up the considerable amount of equipment involved in gymnastics. They do this every week, and it is undertaken with sober self-discipline. Once the mats (and bars and trampolines, etc) are out, the teens are tumbling straightaway, executing long sets of harrowing flips and turns. One teen takes charge of Ren and begins drilling her.

Here I have the answer to a question I have entertained for years now: how do serious athletes and artists and scholars emerge from the system that I had experienced as the parent of small children? Young hockey girls are trained by teens; ballet lessons are determinedly focused on fun over craft; music teachers keep things light; school teachers don’t drill or assign homework. Now I understand. The change in tone is dramatic.

For the rest of the summer session, we will attend both levels of gymnastics. The teens running the B-Team congratulate shy Ren and show her some new attention. The parents of the old group now eye us with something that looks like suspicion. They animate Caravaggio’s “Vocation” scene for us, acting out the moment after the summons, when the other men at the table have realised what happened.

Travelogue 1134 – 15 June

He Saw a Man

One of my favourite paintings from Caravaggio’s time in Rome is the “Vocazione di San Matteo”, which can still be seen in its original site. It was commissioned for a chapel endowed by a French cardinal in the (then) recently built church for the French congregation, San Luigi dei Francesi. The painting still hangs there today, part of a trio of paintings by Caravaggio about the life of St Matthew.

It’s a lovely painting, dramatic and endlessly engaging. Caravaggio is known for the expressiveness of his compositions. His Bible stories and mythological scenes are theatrically portrayed: the emotions are raw, characters are emotive; the action is often gory. We follow the artist into any scene at the height of its drama. This isn’t Renaissance serenity or Mannerist grace. We aren’t contemplating a hushed Annunciation scene or a mournful Pietà. No, we are confronted by John the Baptist on the ground getting his head sawed off or we are staring at a wild Medusa at the moment of death.

The “Vocazione” should be a chance for Caravaggio to indulge in a quiet moment, or at least a happy one. “And as Jesus passed forth from thence, he saw a man ….” But somehow it becomes challenging, mysterious, and tense. Five men sit at a table counting up their coins when a pair of men in the garb of ancient Palestine step up to the table. If it weren’t titled, if it weren’t part of a biographical trio of paintings, we might struggle to understand what’s going on.

We understand by the body language that someone is being called. That the summoner at the head of the table is Christ seems clear, even though his figure is almost entirely covered by his companion, a grey-haired saint whose back is to us. The setting as it is portrayed is largely empty, the high spaces of the room almost equal to the space occupied by the men seated at the table. The room is dark. One window offstage allows a spreading shaft of light to fall on the table. But there seems to be a second source of light, illuminating the back of the saint and the faces of the men looking up.

The painting is a question. Who is being summoned? Christ points, with a gesture self-consciously modelled on that of Adam in Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel, hand held vaguely over the small assembly of tax collectors. The object of his attention is uncertain. The man who we might presume to be Matthew also points, but it is left unclear whether he points to himself or to the man next to him, whose head is still bowed in the act of counting coins. This bearded man who might be Matthew is humble, almost nondescript. The expression on his face reflects only his uncertainty. It delivers no hint of his piety or his intellect or his mission. Here he is a man at the moment of summons, and nothing more. “He saw a man.”