The Catacombs of Rome

The new Italian people, the new civilization, the new Italian art, the new Italian literature, begin in the catacombs of Rome. It is there that the origin of all that afterward became great is found. It is there that the new people—the poor, the weak, children and women, the aged and the suffering, all whom the Roman patrician and the ancient historians despised in their judges and poets—are assembled. It is there that the stranger, the oppressed, the persecuted, the converts, the threatened victims of the circus, or the tortures of the Emperors, found a shelter and a home.

There is a whole cycle of art and poetry in these catacombs. It is not poetry as yet perfect in form, precise in language, elegant in style; but there is in everything an effort to convey a sentiment under an image, to show the ideal in the reality, to give a symbol to architecture, to painting, to sculpture, and to the inscriptions. The way in which these innumerable galleries have been cut under the old Campagna Romana, these intricate and confusing passages, diverging in every direction—the work of terror and necessity, and yet eloquent in their mysterious teachings—proclaiming separation from the world and the world's pleasure, speaking of hope in an immortal life, which alone could make such an abode endurable. From this mystery, from this ideality, arose the architecture of the new religion.

The paintings which cover these walls often show the inexperience of the artist and the ignorance of the people; sometimes the traditions of antiquity reveal themselves in the images; yet through those traditions you perceive the new idea, the faith, destined to animate and transform art; faith is in the face, in the look, in the attitude of those figures, which with eyes upturned and hands pointing to heaven are types of the new Christians, and no other than the Christian. You recognize the novelty of the Christian painting at every step by the intensity of feeling, by the inspiration which animates these rude figures, and which determines their arrangement, and suggests their forms.

No picture of distress, despair, or desolation is there, where desolation must have assumed its most fearful aspects. In those dark vaults you may see now the Good Shepherd gently bearing the young lamb in His arms, showing His protection to the weak and innocent; now four compartments in which are drawn subjects from the Old and New Testaments, surrounded by garlands of flowers and fruit; now it is Noah in his ark; now Moses striking the rock, or Job on the dung-hill, or the miracle of Cana, the multiplication of loaves, or Lazarus rising from the tomb. More frequently it is Daniel in the Lions' den, a symbol of martyrdom by wild beasts, or Jonas ejected by the whale, a symbol of martyrdom by water; or the three children in the furnace, a symbol of martyrdom by fire. These scenes of triump[...]