The Deathless Ones

TOURISTS from the U.S., swarming through Italy this summer in greater numbers than ever, keep coming across ancient deities in Renaissance dress. Because U.S. culture has little indigenous pagan art--largely confined to Indian reservations and museums--Americans are often somewhat shocked to find pagan gods at ease in Christian churches and palaces. But the shock soon turns to delight, for Renaissance artists could make the gods seem as at home in church as children at a party, and use them for the greater glory of Christianity (see color pages).

Actually, the pagan gods died, as gods, long before the collapse of the ancient world. Cicero's De Natura Deorum treats them as 1) historical personages. 2) cosmic symbols, and 3) allegories. Thus translated from the realm of blind faith to that of reason, they became deathless elements in the heritage of Western man. Yet in medieval times they led a shadowy life indeed. The church treated them as peasant superstitions (the Roman pagus was a country district), or turned them into demons. Satan, for example, inherited hooves and horns from the great god Pan. It remained for the Renaissance to bring the gods back into the sunlight.

Up from Underground. One way was by digging. In 1345 the citizens of Siena found a buried Roman statue of Venus, carried it in triumph through the streets and installed it in the city square. Venus smiled on the square for twelve years, during which Siena was visited by plague, civil war and invasion. At last, blaming her for the flood of troubles, the people superstitiously destroyed Venus and dumped her fragments on Florentine soil. Still, all over Italy the ice of ignorance was beginning to break up. Scholars were studying ancient manuscripts; artists found inspiration in classical art, with its emphasis on the human form; architects began to see that Rome's awesome ruins showed the work not of sorcerers but of men like themselves.

Recognizing the beauty of Assisi's Temple of Minerva, the citizens turned it into a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Correggio, commissioned to paint edifying decorations for a convent, included a Punishment of Juno to point up the perils of false pride. Taddeo di Bartolo decorated the chapel in Siena's Public Palace with a procession of Roman virtues--Prudence, Force, Magnanimity, Justice--plus Jupiter in his sun-god aspect, Mars thundering by in a boxlike chariot. Minerva. Apollo, Aristotle, Caesar, and the Roman general Manius Curius Dentatus.

Parnassus in the Vatican. Agostino Chigi, the Rockefeller to 16th century Rome, was a firm believer in astrology (a pagan holdover), yet pious too. The meaning of the decorations he ordered for his burial chapel in Rome's Church of Santa Maria del Popolo is obviously that the lives of men are subject to the planets, which are in turn subject to God. Raphael, who painted the pagan divinity Galatea for Chigi's palace, also made the Vatican shine with Christian and pagan subjects, depicting the company of the saints and a synod of ancient sages opposite one another, making companion pictures of the fall of Adam and Eve and the flaying of Marsyas, and facing an allegorical fresco of the three chief Christian virtues with one of Parnassus.

Raphael is too sweetly radiant for modern taste, which prefers the mystery of Leonardo or the power of Michelangelo. But he, more than either of them, blends pagan joy in life with the loving-kindness of Christianity. Through Raphael's genius the old gods were reborn into a gentler, better world than the classical--an achievement that marked the apogee of Renaissance art.

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