The Alchemy of Modesty

Campania: Day Two, Part II

Many seek the Stone and know not what it is. The definitions which I know they give of it do furnish me with matter of laughter and compassion. To explain the effects of a thing is not to define it, one must declare the nature which produces those effects. That I may not leave you in this common error, I will let you know in what this essence does consist. The Philosophical Stone is a substance of the mineral kind, the most perfect that can be having in itself a most perfect mixture of the elements.

—Jean Albert Belin, The Adventures of an Unknown Philosopher, Paris, 1646.

It’s now a museum, with a ticket office built into the polished wood bussola set over the entrance.  But the Sansevero Chapel, the work of the strange and genial Raimondo Sangro, Prince Sansevero, one-time Mason, alchemist and polymath, was meant as a place of prayer and contemplation amid the sepulchers of his ancestors.  

It’s a nervous, hyperactive, baroque sort of concentration, suggesting a tumult of violins pressed to an impossible limit, a tiny space crowded with the twisting veins of amber-gold marble and undulating Corinthian capitals.  And ivory-white putti bobbing weightlessly around solemn medallions of the Prince’s family, stonework spiritualized and transfigured—but never bodiless.  

It’s transmuted, like one of the Prince’s strange and hidden alchemical experiments, gleaming polished marble incarnated as great splashes of angelic feathers, tangles of impossible and extraordinary netting, folds of flying cloth, taut heroic muscles and—and most extraordinary, the thinnest, most frail of veils.  The veil over the entombed Christ, capturing within its folds the last breath of God.  

They say the mysterious prince created his macchine anatomiche, his impossibly precise anatomical figures by a mysterious formula that petrified the living flesh of two unfortunate servants; it seems here that with the Veiled Christ of Giuseppe Sanmartino that the process has been thrown into reverse.  Like all things baroque, it is a glimpse of a very physical, very real, very sensual paradise.  

Et expecto ressurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi.

The great Canova said he would have given away ten years of his life if he could have been the sculptor of the Veiled Christ, and it seems worth giving up that time simply for the privilege of spending ten minutes gazing upon it in the swirl of tourists that crowd the tiny family chapel.  His head slumps back on a tasseled cushion, miraculously worked in stone, His heavy-lidded eyes lost amid the gathering, intricate folds of the cloth that drapes Him from head to toe, clinging, perhaps bloodily, to the brutal gashes of His stigmata that one can barely glimpse beneath the gauzy pall.  The tassels and the great sharp-spiked crown of thorns that coils like a dead serpent at one foot, shaded by impossibly deep shadows, are no less miraculous.

Beneath one nostril, both vague and perfectly-realized beneath the veil, the cloth momentarily leaps up, as if catching a tiny, incredibly tiny gust of air.  Consummatum est.

The body of Christ is real.  What we see before us as we lean over the rail—ignoring the signs not to lean over the rail—is the greatest argument against Docetism ever conceived, but not in words but stone.  Only appropriate as Christ was a Word in flesh.

A few days ago, back in Rome, Vera headed up the first session of a Theology of the Body study-group, covering the Pope’s teachings on God and sex. It drew quite a crowd, as we traded thoughts back and forth on the body of Christ and the body of man, love and lust and spirituality. It’s a shock to some people to hear that the Church glorifies the body of man and the body of woman just as She adores Christ’s own incarnation. It’s a good shock, though.

Inevitably, though, the question of American prudery and European prurience comes up and circles round the room. Living half-a-year among Rome’s self-proclaimed—and highly voyeuristic—ladykillers, where photographs of nudes in impossible geometric positions are used to advertise clothes—go figure—and where obscenity lurks on every newsstand, you’re left with quite a few thoughts on the subject. There’s the old chestnut that Europeans are simply more comfortable with their bodies. It’s just those suppressed Puritan monomaniacs, up to no goodas usual, are dirtying something beautiful and completely normal. Full stop, plus a Gallic shrug for good measure.

I have my doubts that it’s so chauvinistically cut-and-dried. Though I’m no disembodied gnostic either. I feel wonderfully at home amid the incredible physicality of the feminine baroque beauty of Rome’s myriad churches. One of the most meditative mornings I spent in Rome was doing a life-drawing session in charcoal for an art class, and I found myself scribbling elaborate Latin tags on the tops of my drawings, Venite exultemus Domino. The human body, when seen with the eyes God wishes us to see it with, is almost blindingly glorious.

Maybe it makes me sound like a sacred lecher, but it’s all true.

It was a startling change from the worst afternoon of my life two years before, trying to do some sketches for a watercoloring course with a nude model who bulged in the most inappropriate places. My Latin motto for the day was Vanitatis vanitatum, if you’re interested. Ironically, the priest who taught us was probably the most relaxed person in that tense room.

Or perhaps not ironically. After all, isn’t one of the Papacy’s greatest treasures the Sistine Chapel, emblazoned heraldically with the heroic nudity of Michelangelo? In the Last Judgment, it is Christ, as gloriously embodied as a pagan Apollo, who is the hero, and Satan the villain, Satan the pure spirit. Spiritual things are sometimes dangerous things, vicious things. Powers and principalities, not mere flesh.

But yet, once we stand on this threshhold, imagining ourselves at the marble altar-step of Prince Raimondo’s fairyland sepulchre, we must pause and kneel as in the old rite of Trent. Does God want us to be comfortable with our bodies? Has prudish-Protestant America been beaten out by worldly-wise Europe once again?

No. God does not want us to be comfortable with our bodies. He desires something far better and beautiful: for us to be reverent with our bodies. And, more crucially, truthful.

There’s an unbridgeable gap between the chaste Christ enshrouded behind us and the vulgar pornography of the European newsstand. The body is a temple of the Holy Ghost, not a cocktail lounge. Sacred things are wonderful things, are beautiful things, are holy things. But when Christ asks if we can drink of the chalice that He drinketh from, He doesn’t expect us to take it home and sip our morning coffee out of it. The marital embrace is holy; parodying it is a blasphemy that endangers the primordial sacrament of Adam and Eve.

Raimondo is a strange figure to stand by as you contemplate this mystical web of theology. Prince Sansevero was educated by the Jesuit Fathers at the Clementine College and excelled in a thousand fields, from literature to law, heraldry to pyrotechnics, mathematics to philosophy.

And alchemy, of course. He delved into secret paths, into the anatomy of the body and into the ground beneath his feet as he compiled a Dictionary of the Earth. He even was granted permission to read books placed on the Index. In between all this, he invented an amphibious carriage and wrote a strange work entitled The Letter of Apology which reeked of the brimstone of heresy. His acession to the position of Grand Master of the Masonic Temple of Naples led to his excommunication by Benedict XIV. He somehow had his dread punishment revoked and returned to the Church’s maternal embrace.

A curious man to raise such a monument, but truth sometimes comes from strange quarters, from men who don’t even know they speak it. Perhaps.

Professor D. spoke up as we roamed around the chapel, full of noise and wonder, and pointed our gaze towards an ineffably beautiful figure of richly-shadowed white marble, shrouded and mysterious with the same aura of gauze draped from head to toe over an achingly graceful pose. Her head is tilted to one side, ever so slightly back, eyes almost pensive almonds glimpsed with precise vagueness through the shroud that clings humidly to the curves and hollows of her perfect classical figure.

She is the image of Modesty. The figure stands atop the cenotaph of Prince Sansevero’s mother, Cecilia Gaetani dell’Aquila d’Aragona, sciulpted with a relief of Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene, confident, distant and upright, the gardener’s shovel in his hand carried as triumphantly as a scepter. Noli me tangere.

Modesty. Hm.

Professor D. was skeptical, asking us with grand rhetoric whether perhaps this was merely a libidinous display of masked voluptuousness, but there was more here than mere baroque voyeurism. After all, wasn’t one of the chapel’s most delighted visitors the grotesque Marquis de Sade?

Modesty. She is the most fleshly of beings, but yet it would be a sacrilage to look upon her with unchaste eyes. There is the untouchable modesty of death and resurrection, the transfigured body of Christ more real than corruptable earthly flesh, of Platonic solidity and Thomistic aeviternity. Here, the resurrected body has become more solid than stone, enduring beyond time itself. Prince Sansevero may have only recalled the distant specter of his mother, beyond him in a youthful death that left her beauty untouched in his mind’s eye; but here, in this chapel, standing beside the turbulent altar-relief of the Entombment and beyond the effigy of the dead Christ, her image becomes something more, a sign pointing both to itself and outside of itself.

Sansevero, legend has it, created an ever-burning lamp in the true immortality-obsessed spirit of the alchemists. But it seems here, this irregular Catholic and part-time Mason might have just stumbled across the shadow of the true Philosopher’s stone. It’s not so farfetched. The Veiled Christ, while now displayed in the chapel, was originally meant to lie in the crypt, the heart of the earth which represents the alchemical mystery. Now the creepy macchine anatomiche stand there instead. Perhaps even Raimondo thought of it as he danced amid his steaming alembics, his sal armoniack and idolatrous azoth. For, in one of those antique alchemical texts that he might have read, the Adventures of an Unknown Philosopher, the last lines run thus:

See here, sirs, all my adventures in the search of the great work; you may if you please make your benefit of them, without its being necessary to write you any more. Farewell then, and permit me to go into my solitude, to think of nothing more but to die, to live in eternal day, and there to find another Stone, infinitely more rich, and more fortunate. Petra Autem Erat Christus.

Which means:

But the Stone was Christ.