Sunday Reflection: A Cloister Walk

On Friday afternoon, I found my way back to the Basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels and Martyrs to locate a cloister garden housed in the northeast part of the complex. As I mentioned in Tuesday’s post, the basilica was built on the ruins of the baths of Diocletian that date to 305 AD. Part of Pope Pius IV’s plans to renovate the ruins in the 16th century included the addition of a charterhouse for a community of Carthusian monks, who held the basilica from 1581 until 1873. It was their cloister I was going to see.

Aerial view of the cloister (Google Maps)

Known today as the “Michelangelo cloister” for the fact that the artist was responsible for conceiving of its original layout along with the rest of the basilica, the space covers nearly two and a half acres, making it one of the largest cloisters in Italy. Each of the four covered walkways creating the square perimeter stretches 328 feet. The walkways are supported by 100 travertine columns, and the interior quadrangle is divided into eight sections by two sets of perpendicular paths.

The cloister is managed by the Museo Nazionale Romano, which was the reason for my return trip. I had assumed, incorrectly, that the site could be accessed through the basilica itself when I first visited. After circling the complex on Friday and failing to find an entrance, I was about to give up hope until I dipped into a small garden strewn with antiquities. This turned out to be the entrance to the National Museum, and a map tucked beside a pergola identified the location of the cloister. I happily paid the admission fee, and after piecing together the attendant’s directions (“Andare dritto e a destra”) made my way inside.

The first thing one notices upon entering the cloister is a trompe l’oeil painted door on the left. It depicts a Carthusian monk, Fra Fercoldo, who was the father of the 13th-century pope Clement IV and who made his monastic profession after the death of his wife. The door was done by the Neapolitan painter Filippo Balbi in 1885—curiously, one year after the charterhouse itself was abandoned and turned into a hospice.

Turning to the right and the open space of the cloister, the walkway of the southeast side stretches ahead in perfect proportion. At the time of day I was there, around 5:30 in the afternoon, sunlight filtering in from the west fell across the burnished white and brick-red floors and pooled into the vanishing point at the end of the arcade.

I made my first pass around the perimeter of the cloister slowly, pausing to watch the play of the light or study one of the numerous statues and sarcophagi arranged against the walls. I’ve long been attracted to claustral architecture—I love the spatial rhythms established by the columns, like so many evenly stressed syllables of a poem, and the way the arches frame new views with every turn. Looking through them onto the green quadrangle was the ideal blend of nature and culture: the harmony and proportion of stone shaped by human hands set against the cypresses, palms, shrubberies, and sky.

On a second pass, I turned in on each of the perpendicular paths to explore the interior sections of the quadrangle. There was a beauty in the way architectural fragments, broken statuary, pediments, and steles were left scattered across the grass or positioned atop sarcophagi and blocks of weathered stone. Just as the framings of the cloister archways brought together nature and culture, so the seemingly random placement of objects throughout the defined spaces of the quadrangle brought together order and chance. I admired the small salvaged fragments as much as the seven massive stone animal heads discovered by Trajan’s Column and placed on pedestals, the overgrown grass and dandelions as much as the cypress at the center said to be centuries old and held up by iron girding.

On my last turn around the cloister, a small marble bust drew my eye. I have seen marble busts in museums before, but had never really registered an aesthetic sensation one way or the other; they have always seemed to me functional, transactional, a way for a wealthy patron to memorialize himself rather than something inspired.

Perhaps because this bust had no identification—or if it did, I couldn’t find it—my imagination was allowed a wider margin to dream, and the bust came alive for me in a way that other ones hadn’t. I saw the subject as the typical Roman “man on the street,” and the care with which the artist took to carve the delicate curve of the jawline and notch of the neck invested it with a special dignity. Something about this reminded me of the special vocation of homo faber—“man the maker”—and that what differentiates us from nonhuman animals is precisely that we are moved to emulate the work of creation, and are given the tools to do so.

There was another way the artwork spoke to me, tied more deeply to my faith. Had the subject of the bust been explicitly “religious”—a head of a saint, say, or the grave profile of a cleric—I’m not sure it would have made quite such an impression; I would have come to it with too many preconceptions, with a backlog of what sorts of devotional feelings I was supposed to feel, rather than allowing it to express itself naturally. But here was a man, an anonymous man, and in that very pared-back, plain anonymity—so much like the spirit of the Carthusians who are buried beneath plain white crosses in unmarked graves—the divine had the greatest freedom to shine through. ♦

Michael Centore
Editor, Today’s American Catholic

1 reply
  1. Sarita Melkon Maldjian
    Sarita Melkon Maldjian says:

    This was such a moving reflection, Michael.
    Thank you for keeping us up to date on the daily events of the Synod as well.
    God bless you and may you return home safely.

    Reply

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