St. Paul’s Outside the Walls

St. Paul’s outside the Walls is a magnificent edifice whose life has been scarred many times over. The most recent disaster in this slowly unfolding tragedy was a fire started by a careless carpenter repairing the roof — “In doing so, he ironically consigned his repairs to be the last in a long line and unwittingly he wiped away 1500 years of history.” That is the point of departure for art history Professor Nicola Camerlenghi’s latest book, the monograph St. Paul’s Outside the Walls: A Roman Basilica, from Antiquity to the Modern Era (CUP, 2018).

The early 19^th century was a bad time for the Papacy. Pope Pius VII had to bear the brunt of Napoleon, who had the Pope sit behind him during his coronation and do absolutely nothing but sulk. When the bedridden Pius VII thought that he was finally going to the Kingdom of God, he found out that St. Paul’s, where he received his first major assignment as Abbot in 1775, had burned down to the ground on the night of July 15, 1823. A month and five days later, Pius VII was dead.

Soon after, work started on securing donations for the new basilica, which was to be an exact copy of the old one. But which version of the old basilica was to be used? The first building on the site commemorating the apostle Paul had been built on the orders of the 4^th century Roman emperor Constantine in 324. 60 years later, the emperors Theodosius, Arcadius, and Valentinian II ordered the old basilica torn down and a basilica larger than St. Peter’s to be built on the site. Camerlenghi traces these evolutions in form of the basilica, weaving it into what was happening two kilometres away, inside the Aurelian walls that demarcated Rome. Eventually, the new basilica was consecrated in 1855, 40 years after the incident.

Camerlenghi’s approach to the problem is unlike any other taken to the study of St. Paul’s. The unique challenge of studying a building that is no longer extant is compounded in many ways by the ‘new’ basilica. Instead of circumventing this issue, as many scholars in the past have done, Camerlenghi forces himself to engage with the issue — and exploit modern technology as much as he can to further the study of the basilica. Examining the basilica as a living entity whose life began once in 324, and once again in 1855, Camerlenghi pushes the reader to examine the relationship between these two buildings more critically — and ultimately questions what the word ‘replica’ itself denotes.

While Freud may be much derided, the one thing he got right was Rome. He proudly proclaims in Civilisation and its Discontents that Rome is “not a human dwelling-place, but a mental entity with just as long and varied a past history: that is, in which nothing once constructed had perished, and all the earlier stages of development had survived alongside the latest.” Camerlenghi’s book picks up this notion — and in what is probably the best work in a long time on a building of this vintage — tells a story bound by it. 

The story of St. Paul’s, in many ways, is also the story of Rome. Constantine’s church, albeit small, signalled the acceptance of Christianity by the Roman Empire. Theodosius’ basilica was made 60 years later in an attempt to confer upon Paul a similar status to that of Peter, who had the largest basilica in Rome before this. Over the years, popes, monks, and emperors conspire to shape St. Paul’s outside the Walls into what it was. Due to its position as an apostolic papal basilica, St. Paul’s and its dependent communities find themselves able to skirt the neglect (at least, to the extent to which) the rest of Rome suffered from, but, it was truly the Sistine restoration heralded by Pope Sixtus V that pushed the basilica into the centre-stage, almost a century after the return of the Papacy from Avignon, France.

The scope of the journey on which Camerlenghi embarks upon is no less arduous than the voyage of Aeneas. He collated, in an interview, “sculptures, frescos, mosaics, columns, capitals, and inscriptions that are scattered about the church site, around Rome and in museums across the world” and “combed through archives to collect and catalogue over 1,500 historical images, sketches, prints and photographs and to compile the disparate archaeological excavations conducted at the site over 180 years.” The reconstruction that the book partially rests on is remarkable in its scope, and creates an understanding of evolution over almost two millennia of radical flux.  

The building’s long history and spiritual connotations evidently lead to the creation of myths surrounding it that were tacked onto its true historical identity. The Grand Tour resulted in the painter Giovanni Paolo Panini and etcher Giovanni Battista Piranesi creating highly detailed views of the interiors — with some added drama and a good sprinkling of figments of their imagination. Each favoured a particular vision of what the space was like and therefore privileged that in their representations. By separating its historical identity from the reality of the building’s history and clearly defining the two, Camerlenghi understands and reconciles the role of hearsay and myth in the histories that surround a remarkably long-lasting edifice.

One of the other things that Camerlenghi addresses extremely well is the acceptance of loss. The basilica, while considered widely to be a repository of important objects of both spiritual and historical interest, also exerts its own identity. Its inopportune destruction — which one conspiracy theory attributed to the Rothschild family, which had arrived in Rome only five days before the fire — grants the book the power of postulating while being authoritative, an accomplishment that is hard to find in contemporary art history. Art historians, as a group, tend to be overly sensitive to the loss of the very objects that they study (and, if I may say so, almost venerate). The pinning for the old does exist, but it refuses to overpower and overwhelm the ability to prioritise and present information in a critical manner.

While Camerlenghi’s monograph is singularly centred around a single edifice and its supporting elements, the approach he takes to the digital humanities and to the historiography of such a creation is innovative and inherently valuable to art historians interested in studying buildings with long lives that may or may not be extant in their ‘original’ state. A building that could do with similar attention is the Great Library of Alexandria, which too was confined to the fate of flames, albeit by Julius Caesar in 49 BC. In a way, the comparison is certainly apt, for the book seems predicated on unravelling the palimpsest that both Rome and the building represent in their own ways. This complex unpacking is, at its heart, a process that Camerlenghi once proclaimed on the top of the Janiculum Hill as “reading the stones.”