Soave Mestizia: Sweet Melancholy and the "ideal" Medieval cloister
All photographs taken at the complex of the Santi Quattro Coronati, unless otherwise specified
I love few things more than a quietly atmospheric medieval cloister, and I expect you‘re probably rather fond of them too. Cloisters were once the soft underbelly, protected deep within fortified monasteries, and are the heirs to the courtyards, or peristyles, of grand Roman houses. Today they offer refreshing shade in high summer and a calm enclave far from the swirling, relentless, activity of the city beyond. Dappled shadows offering glorious chiaroscuro on a sunny day, timelessness, and unruly greenery: what’s not to love?
Which brings me to an intriguing fellow I’ve only obliquely mentioned here before: Camillo Boito. Boito was, among other things, an architectural conservationist and theorist of great import. His was an alternative to the conflicting schools of thought posited by Ruskin and Viollet-Le-Duc and in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the nascent Italian kingdom—slowly; bloodily—came into being, Romanticism and Rationalism were blended in the service of the restoration of the ancient and medieval monuments of the new capital city. Conservation is, after all, anything but an exact science.
In his article “L’Architettura Cosmatesca” of 1860, Boito coined the term “Cosmatesque” to refer to the repurposing of stone from ancient buildings to create inlaid decorations of church floors, pulpits and the like. I love this “Cosmati” work more than I can say and I am also very fond of his article, you can find a pdf of the original here.
Boito writes elegantly florid Risorgimento Italian: his sentences are long and dense, and inestimably of their time. The translations are mine; I’ve broken the sentences up a bit where they are just too unwieldy in English, but have tried to keep the tone.
He begins his article thus:
Fra le miserie somme, che nel medio evo fecero di Roma la più sventurata delle città italiane; l’arte non perì compiutamente, nè tardò a risorgere sino al pontificare di Eugenio quarto; ma già incominciò a dar segni di volersi rialzare nella seconda metà del secolo dodicesimo.
Despite the miseries which made of medieval Rome the least fortunate of Italian cities, art did not die. Nor did it tarry until the pontificate of Eugene IV [1431-1447, traditionally considered the dawn of the Early Renaissance] in springing forth once again but rather began as early as the second half of the twelfth century to show signs of wanting to rise again.
A little further on Boito continues:
Per conoscere l’architettura romana del medio evo conviene entrare nelle chiese e nelle basiliche antiche; fermarsi dinanzi agli amboni, alle cattedre, ai cibori, ai monumenti sepolcrali, ai tabernacoli del secolo decimoterzo e della seconda metà del precedente; guardare a quell’armonia delle parti, a quella franchezza d’ ornamenti, a quel brillare degli smalti d’oro, combinati in mille guise co’ rossi, con gli azzurri e coi bianchi, e contornanti formelle circolari o rettangole di porfido, di verde antico, di graniti e di marmi diversi: — conviene andare ne’ chiostri, mesti di soave mestizia, abbelliti dalle rose olezzanti, e da un verde qua cupo, là gaio, qui contento di starsi a fior di terra, li altero di ergersi oltre lo stilobato e le basi delle svariate colonne.
To understand the architecture of medieval Rome one should go into ancient churches and basilicas; pause before the ambos [medieval stone pulpits], the thrones, the ciboria [canopies over the altar], funerary monuments, and the tabernacles of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries; look at the harmony of their parts, the frankness in their decoration, the glittering of gilded enamel, put together in a thousand ways with reds, with blues, and with whites, and surrounded with circular or rectangular tiles of porphyry, of verde antico, of granites and various marbles.
One should go into the cloisters, redolent of sweet melancholy, adorned with perfumed roses, and with greenery here gloomy, here joyous, here happy to stay low, there proud to rise above the stylobate and the bases of the columns.
Boito is here a man after my own heart, his soave mestizia exactly expresses the simultaneously fleeting and timeless sense of rich, delicious melancholy which I’ve spent the best part of three decades trying to grasp, and which is found in quiet medieval cloisters. Ideally the cloister will indeed have benevolently untamed greenery, and the air will be dense with close on a millennium of human thoughts of every stripe, from the erudite to the banal. The perfect cloister will give a momentary sense—heady and unnerving—of being quite out of time.
