When the Bishop of Vercelli visited Como in 1578 its cathedral was still unfinished. The foundations of the building had been laid in 1396, and the magnificent Gothic nave and aisles, designed by Lorenzo degli Spazi, one of the architects of the cathedral at Milan, had since been erected behind its stark facade. The cathedral honoured the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and sculptures of the Madonna and Child, St John the Baptist, and the patron saints of Como peered down over the bishop as he approached. Far larger and more noticeable than these, however, were the sculptural niches to either side of the main portal. Each contained a statue, almost two metres tall, of a man seated and grasping a book. Both were wide-eyed, long-necked, bony-kneed, and spectacularly hirsute. One had slightly longer hair than the other, but they both wore it in tight ringlets – the older man’s falling around his ears, the younger’s piled up on top of his head, like a plate of snails. Around their shoulders were sober robes and mozzetta-style capes. Bishop Bonomio might have assumed they were holy men, but then he drew nearer and realised that they were not Christian at all. On the left sat Pliny the Elder, on the right, Pliny the Younger. They were more prominent than any of the other figures on the cathedral.1
They sat, solemn and contemplative, their eyes raised to Heaven, pagans disguised as good Christian men.2 Why erect these, wondered Bonomio, when there are so many ‘other saints’? A local sculptor named Giovanni Rodari had completed the two sculptures and, with the assistance of his two sons, mounted them in their elaborate niches.3 Decades had passed since the Verona grievance but, faced with a choice between obeying the local bishop’s pleas to remove the sculptures as unworthy of their place on a Christian building, and yielding to the supremacy of the Veronese claim on the two Plinys, the people of Como elected to keep them where they were.
Pliny, one-time persecutor of Christians, now rested like an icon over a Christian place of worship. Had his letters to Trajan been misplaced? Had his trials and the punishments he exacted in Bithynia been forgotten? Not by everyone. Benedetto Giovio, the sixteenth-century scholar who had done so much to perpetuate the connections of Pliny and his uncle with Como against the misplaced assertions of the Veronese, had even quoted from Pliny’s letter on the Christians in his Historiae Patriae. Benedetto was still alive when two large plaques were added to the cathedral to commemorate each man’s scholarship, offices, imperial ties and, in Pliny’s case, his ‘immense generosity to his homeland’. In a further display of affection, a small ancient plaque that was discovered beneath a step in an ‘unremarkable home’ in Como was built into the south wall of the building so that everyone could remember Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, their great patron.4
In honouring Pliny so extravagantly on their cathedral, the people of Como had made a choice. After all the time that had passed since his death, they preferred to remember him for the good he had done for his people rather than the pain he had inflicted upon their Christian forefathers. To gloss over his final years in Bithynia was to show him forgiveness. For all his advantages in life, Pliny had proven himself capable of ‘Christian’ qualities, empathising with the unfortunate and maligned philosophers, if not with the Christians themselves. The Como people’s rivalry and one-upmanship with the Veronese had steadily been supplanted by an appreciation of the role Pliny had played in transforming their city. He had left Como far more illustrious than he had found it. His library, his baths, the provisions he made for the education of children – his own name – had made Comum a respectable town, and these buildings and the extensive letters that described them became the very seeds of humanist learning in the Renaissance city. They fuelled the Giovio brothers’ quest to re-establish the role that both Plinys had played in their history.5
Pliny survived a potential backlash from the Christians. His uncle survived the attempts of humanists to discredit him. In 1492, a short time after the people of Como commissioned the Pliny statues, a physician named Niccolò Leoniceno tore into the dubious science of the Natural History in a tract entitled De Plinii et aliorum medicorum in medicina erroribus. Not only had Pliny the Elder confused Greek plant names, Leoniceno complained, he had even described the moon as larger than the earth on the basis that: ‘If the earth were bigger than the moon, it would not be possible for the entire sun to be eclipsed when the moon passed between it and the earth.’6 As if it was not serious enough that the Natural History had been disseminated by a modern press, its errors had crept into other scholars’ books. The passage on the relative size of the earth and moon had found its way into the works of the Venerable Bede, who drew heavily on the Natural History in his own De Natura Rerum (On the Nature of Things) and De Temporibus (On Times).7
Pliny the Elder’s more fanciful passages may have irritated some readers but they enchanted far more. Even scholars were eager to leap to his defence. At the same time as Leoniceno was fulminating against his methods, a Venetian humanist named Ermolao Barbaro was preparing his Castigationes Plinianae, in which he claimed to correct thousands of errors made, not by Pliny the Elder, but by the copyists of his manuscripts: ‘I have cured almost five thousand wounds inflicted on that work by the scribes, or at the very least shown how they might be cured.’8 The same year, 1493, saw the publication of Pandolfo Collenuccio’s Pliniana defensio adversus Nicolai Leoniceni accusationem, a riposte to Leoniceno’s assault on the Natural History. Leoniceno might have prompted some readers to think more carefully before relying on what was handed down to them in ancient textbooks, but his publication did little to diminish Pliny the Elder’s appeal to Renaissance men: Francis Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgio Vasari, the great patrons of the Italian courts.
Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger were Renaissance men in their own time. Beneath their statues on Como Cathedral their rich lives are precised in four small panels. Pliny the Elder is in his study surrounded by books, reading, oblivious to the citizens who are massing outside his doorway. In the next frame he turns away from the volcano, aloof and untroubled as Vesuvius erupts and envelops panicking Campanians in flame. His nephew is absorbed in his reading in a study of his own. When Pliny has finished with his research he makes his way to the senate house, mounts a podium, and prepares to deliver his speech to Trajan. He takes a deep breath and begins . . .