A Rose By Any Other Name..

I sat around the table with people at least ten years older than me, and at least thirty years wiser. But that did not stop me from sharing each and every opinion I had, it honestly never does. It’s on the list of things I’m working on. Earlier that morning I had the pleasure of wandering through the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere, which contains stunningly powerful wall and ceiling art. The conversation casually led to Catholicism and the architecture of churches in Rome, something I have been paying a lot of attention to recently. I started to talk kindly of the buildings I had seen and express my interest in them from an academic perspective but the deeper we fell into the rabbit hole the more I thought about the church in Trastevere.

 Walking around Trastevere you acquire a sense of light hearted fun that is being had by the locals and the many tourists. Sitting upon the sets of the fountain right outside the church you can people watch for hours, looking directly at the church itself, never imagining what is inside. The exterior is faded, dark and does not remind one of a church. The inside however, has painted walls, various reused columns and gold leaf designed ceilings. The stimulation felt by my eyes during the first five minutes after sitting down was overwhelming. That’s the point though. While the outside blends in with the surrounding atmosphere, the interior is something other worldly, something heavenly. The columns lining the main cella were a combination of Corinthian, Ionic, and Doric, suggesting that throughout the church’s creation, other temples were used in the building process. Outside of the cella, the walls were painted with various iconic religious scenes. 

I sat in my chair, listening to my usual peanut gallery, letting my eyes glide around the large space. It was a lot for me, but at the same time it reminded me of every other Catholic church I had encountered. There is a certain beauty within each church that cannot be ignored, seeing the detail and knowing that someone spent hours or days working on a single fresco, forces you to appreciate it. There’s something else there too though. The gold tone ceilings, the columns, the universal scenes of madonna and child are just examples of the strength and persistence of the Catholic church.    

A rose by any other name is still a rose, imperialism by any other name is still imperialism. The grandiose interior of this church, along with several other churches that we came across on this trip are meant to symbolize the power of the Catholic church, that seeps into various aspects of peoples lives. Thomas Mann wrote a short story about a man who stayed utterly within himself until a new, more erotic painting of the madonna and child. The main scene, where he confronts the store owner, demonstrates just how intensely imerpialist the Catholic church is, not just in what words were written or the behavior of the characters, but also in the fact that this took place in Germany during the early 1900s.  

(S. Maria in Trastevere)