The apse enfolds the altar and its canopy. Its rounded, expanding hollowness provides an “endless” end to the wayfarers’ journey represented by the nave. In the mosaic covering the quarter-sphere above, Agnes and her two companions stand out against a field of plain, gleaming gold, signifying eternity and the Heavenly Jerusalem that is the world’s destiny.1 For each visitor to the church, this flood of gold is the lux perpetua that Christians hope all will enjoy beyond death: Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis, “Eternal rest give to them, O Lord; and let perpetual light shine upon them.”2 Beneath the altar lies the body of Agnes; her soul is depicted in the apse mosaic above, already with God. She stands tall and regal, an adult rather than a child.
In the century after Agnes’ death, details of her life were recalled, invented, elaborated upon, and finally written down as constituting her passio.3 A passio is an account of a martyr’s death or “passion,” recalling as it always does Christ’s Passion. (The word “passion” meant “suffering” before it came to mean “overpowering emotion.”) In early times the lives of saints were also known as gesta or acta (“doings”), but only martyrs’ stories are called passios. According to her fifth-century passio, Agnes had aroused a burning desire in the son of the Roman prefect, who had seen her coming home from school. Agnes was twelve or at most thirteen years old, the age at which Roman women could be engaged to be married. He begged her to marry him, offering her houses, riches, and luxury, as well as the power of being a member of the prefect’s family, if she would agree.
He did not stand a chance. Agnes replied that she was engaged already, to someone far better than he, and who loved her more. “He has dressed me in the robes of a princess, in cloth of gold with borders, and has adorned me with enormous necklaces [immensis monilibus].” “He has placed on my right hand a priceless ring, and circled my throat with precious stones. He has given me earrings of glorious pearls and covered me with glowing, shimmering gems. He has placed his sign [the sign of the cross] on my forehead, and I shall have no other lover.”4 She had chosen Christ over the son of the Roman prefect.
Of course, “this world” would have its revenge. The law gave Agnes a fiendish choice if she would not marry: either to be made a vestal virgin and spend the rest of her life sacrificing to Roman idols, or to be exposed naked (spite, and more than spite, for the “priceless jewels”) in a brothel. She chose the brothel, but was miraculously saved from rape. In the end she was stabbed in the throat—a merciful death, because of her age, and indeed stabbing is symbolic rape. The story also tells us that they tried to burn her alive because she would not change her mind, but the flames “divided” and went out. Throughout her ordeal, this fierce little twelve-year-old stood her ground.5
She stands now in the apse of the church, eternally with God, wearing the beauty with which Christ had decked her soul: Agnes is dressed in Byzantine costume, in jewels and robes of purple. Her head is crowned; her earrings and the jewels at her throat are magnificent. There is at present no ring, but from photographs and in viewing the mosaic from a distance, there seems to me to have once been a ring on the fourth finger of her right hand. In the passio of Agnes, she is said to have appeared to her parents among “a whole army of virgins,” exercitum virginum, a week after her death. The women were surrounded with light and wearing gorgeous robes; this heavenly apparition is doubtless also part of the inspiration for the mosaic in the apse.
She wears a tunic with narrow embroidered sleeves, and over it a long, soft gown of murrey (cloth dyed mulberry purple), with embroidered and jewelled stripes and borders. On top of this she has a magnificently jewelled garment, in cloth of gold with a white border embroidered with red flowers. This overgarment, a cross between a shawl and a scapular, hangs down in two panels at her front and back. It crosses over at her breast and descends to below her knees, and is held in place with a belt—apparently an unusual feature of her costume. Around her neck she wears a jewelled collar rather than a necklace. It was called a superhumeral, literally an “over-the-shoulders”; it is very like the jewelled collars worn by ancient Egyptian royalty. Her feet are shod in scarlet slippers.6
She stands with her weight resting slightly on the left leg, producing in spite of her robes an asymmetry, what the French call déhanchement. A swaying movement is introduced into her stance by the back panel of the heavy overgarment swinging out to her right, as though she has just taken a step; the strip of it that shows behind her is made artfully more distant than the brilliant panel in front, by means of duller mosaic cubes. Her whole body, and most delicately her right side from bent arm to ankle, is outlined with one row of dark tesserae (the tiny cubes that make up a mosaic). Her red-slippered left foot bears the weight of her body, while the right one points right, very unconcernedly close to the flames beside her. Agnes is standing on the instruments of her martyrdom: a long sword lies under her feet, and the fire “divides” into a ball of flame on either side of her. Hanging from her left arm is a broad white scarf with a beautiful embroidered motif on it, and in her long white fingers she holds a scroll sealed with a cross: the Scriptures.
Her face is extraordinary. It has been made in stone, whereas the rest of the mosaic is in glass. The tesserae of her face are also somewhat smaller than those used anywhere else in the work. The faces of the two popes, one on either side of her, have been created of tesserae like those everywhere else in the mosaic. Agnes’ face stands out, therefore, white and intense. She has huge eyes which she raises slightly; her head is lowered by the apse curve, and from this position her eyes return the viewer’s gaze with calm but piercing directness, as though she is looking up from a slightly bowed head. Her cheeks are reddened in two patches,7 making her face look rather like her embroidered white scarf. It is a solemn, ghostly face, softened by its oval regularity, with a straight nose, level brows, and a small, sensitive mouth. There is a careful distinction made between the flesh of her beautiful, gently modelled neck, and the stiff, massively jewelled collar clasped around it.
Embroidered on her purple robe is a red-encircled gold roundel known as a segmenta, inset below the knee of her relaxed right leg. Inside the circle appears an exotic bird, which early Christians loved to borrow from classical mythology: the phoenix, here depicted in blue with a white tail and red legs. The Greeks themselves had learned of the phoenix from the Egyptians. Its name is a corruption of Bennu, the name of the god of the sun that dies every night and rises again every morning. The phoenix, as an aspect of the sun, lived for the span of a Great Year, which the sources variously report as lasting 500 years, or 540 years, or 1,461 years.
When this long age was over and the phoenix was about to die, it returned to the Temple of the Sun in Heliopolis (“Sun City”), Egypt. It arrived accompanied by thousands of ordinary birds, following out of sheer curiosity because they had never seen anything like the phoenix before. Herodotus says that paintings of the phoenix showed it to be gold and red in colour, and like an eagle in appearance and size. On the altar at Heliopolis the great bird proceeded to make itself a nest out of twigs of cassia and frankincense. It had brought with it a great ball of myrrh, which it shaped like an egg, then hollowed out; it buried its “parent” inside. The nest completed, the phoenix became hotter and hotter and redder and redder until it turned to ashes; a new phoenix then emerged from the egg of myrrh. The process took three days.8
This fabulous bird lived alone in the universe. Like the sun, there was none like it; it was monos, singularis, unicus. There was no way it could generate offspring, because it had no mate; it had therefore to renew itself out of itself. The tale recounted by Herodotus and Tacitus, of the “parent” enclosed in the egg, indicates that the myth included in some way the idea of new life breaking out of the “tomb” that is an egg’s shell. But the phoenix had no parent; it was its own parent. In a more complete version than has come down to us, the story must have involved the ashen phoenix returning to the egg—an egg of myrrh, the scented gum resin with which dead bodies were anointed and embalmed.9 From the death-egg it re-emerged into life, as the Great Year began its new cycle.
For Christians the phoenix was a symbol of the resurrection of Christ from the dead on the third day.10 (Christians were often to picture the Resurrection as like the hatching of a bird from an egg, an “Easter egg.”) In Christ’s Resurrection they see the dawning of a new era of consciousness on the earth; the former “Great Year” has passed. It means, too, the promise that human beings will also rise from the dead and live in a reality outside the limits of space and time. The risen Christ, wrote Saint Paul, is “the first-fruits” of the resurrection of all humanity.11 “First-fruits” are a part of the whole crop, offered to God before the rest is shared out to human beings. The phoenix embroidered on Agnes’ robe means that she, like Christ, is risen and is now with God forever. It means too that Agnes, like the phoenix, did not know sex; she died a virgin. And also that she “consumed herself” in the fire of her love for God.
The word “phoenix,” apart from the bird and its origin in the name of the Egyptian god Bennu, means three things in Greek: the colour red, a Phoenician, and a palm tree. Phoenicians are thought to have derived their name from a Western Semitic term for the red dye we call madder. “Phoenicians” would be “those who work with and sell cloth dyed red.”12 The bird’s redness suggested blood—the blood of martyrdom. The fiery nature of the phoenix reminded Christians of love and intensity, and of the Holy Spirit, who inspires and strengthens, as on the day of Pentecost, when there was a sound “like that of a strong driving wind, which filled the whole house where they [the disciples of Jesus] were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues like flames of fire, dispersed among them and resting on each one.”13
Phoinix, the Greek word for “palm tree,” only accidentally resembles the name of the bird, but for people who understood Greek the similarity was poignant. A phoenix is traditionally included in Christian mosaics showing the coming of Christ at the end of the world, and the eternal epiphany of the Heavenly Jerusalem. In such compositions14 the sacred bird, symbol of the Resurrection, sits in a palm tree, an ancient symbol of the abundance of life. Perched on a shoot of its namesake, the phoenix signifies “life eternal.”
Furthermore, a palm branch was widely understood in the ancient world as a symbol of victory and of explosions of communal joy. (Modern fireworks often resemble rapidly growing palm trees.) The citizens of Jerusalem waved palm branches when Jesus entered the city in triumph; the event is remembered in the feast called Palm Sunday.15 But Christians had learned to differ from ancient Romans in what they meant by “victory.” For them the symbol of the palm most especially belonged to men and women who died for their beliefs, in those days most often at the hands of the Roman state. The phoenix on Agnes’ dress in the mosaic is a symbol of her victory in death, her virginity, her love of God, and her life with God forever.
The head of Agnes in the mosaic is surrounded by a huge gold halo, descending to her shoulders and outlined in white and then dark blue. (The popes on either side of her have no such distinction.) Her clothing, and this type of halo, are sufficient to mark this mosaic as a distinctively Byzantine work. A halo (from Greek halos, a “round threshing floor,” therefore a circle) or nimbus (from Latin nebula, “cloud”) is like an aura radiating from a person’s head. From an artist’s practical, compositional point of view a halo makes that head remarkable, partly by isolating it from its background and partly by making it bigger. Like a canopy or a ceremonial umbrella, a halo points out a figure in a work of art. “This,” it says, “is someone special.” And then the picture asks, “Who do you think it is?”
Sometimes people have been depicted as wrapped entirely in a nimbus, but it is far more common for a halo to encircle only the head. For millennia people in the cultures of the Mediterranean and in Europe generally have believed that the head contained a person’s soul, life force, or genius. Even before people caught on that we think with our brains (Homeric heroes, for instance, think and feel and rage with their chests), they knew that the head—the exclusive seat of four of the five senses and carried at the summit of the human body—was pre-eminent. Cut off the head, and the body dies. The brain, it was suspected, must be the seat of the life force, and in men was probably the source of semen.16
Ancient Romans and Hellenistic Greeks used halos in art to mark out people filled with power, such as gods and divine emperors. In very early Christian art, the meaning of a nimbus was still simply “power,” so a demon, an emperor, or a Greco-Roman mythical hero could be shown haloed. Later, in keeping with Christianity’s favouring of the saintly, it was Christ and the saints who alone could wear the halo; Christ was distinguished from saints by a nimbus quartered by a cross. Symbols could be haloed to make their meaning clear: the Lamb of God, for instance, or the symbols standing for the four Evangelists, or the dove representing the Holy Spirit. The dove that hovers over the altar at Sant’Agnese’s is nimbed with a sunburst.
There are examples of halos for Christ and the saints in art from the Roman catacombs, but they are unusual and late. It was Greek Christians who loved halos first, and the introduction into Western Christian art of the halo as a widely received convention seems to have begun under Greek influence during the sixth century, less than a hundred years before the mosaic at Sant’Agnese’s was made. Only by the ninth century did halos become de rigueur; but after that they remained so for a thousand years. Whenever art subsequently became realistic, however—in the Gothic period, for instance—use of the halo died down. It disappeared almost completely in modern religious art, in the new distrust for designating anyone as self-evidently admirable in the opinion of everybody. We are far more interested in feet of clay than in aureoled heads.
The newly awakened taste for Eastern icons, however, is reintroducing the common depiction of halos to Western religious art. The modern mosaic in the church of Sant’Emerenziana, for example, includes small halos for the dove of the Spirit, the angels, the Virgin Mary, Saint Emerentiana, and the symbols of the four Evangelists. Christ himself has a mandorla surrounding his entire body.
Saint Agnes’ halo “says” that she is in heaven with God. She is immortal now: the halo’s ring is that “unending” line we have noted before (the circle is assumed to be completed behind her). The whole nimbus, area and line, is light emanating from her soul and honour bestowed upon her by God for her courageous faithfulness. At the top of the apse the “hand” of God appears, holding out to Saint Agnes a crown, the crown of martyrdom. The meaning of a crown—a circle that surrounds the head—is similar to that of a halo, except that it tends to lack volume; royal crowns are often made tall to overcome this disadvantage. A crown is something “extra,” a finishing touch of glory: honour for the honourable, triumph “crowning” success. Ancient Greek and Roman champions at the games were rewarded by being crowned in the sight of the admiring crowds. This moment of glory was for them a religious epiphany, and often depicted as such: the Greek goddess Nike (“Victory,” the embodiment of winning) is shown flying down from heaven to bestow the crown. A crown could also symbolize a life now complete. The road is over, the race complete, the finishing line crossed, the victory won.
In the mosaic, the hand of God—symbol of God the Father, whose “hand” created the universe—reaches out of the white empyrean holding the wreath that is Agnes’ crown. Only a segment of this circle of whiteness appears because the apse is only half a dome.17 As suits the empyrean (the word means “fiery”), little burning red clouds spin in the light like flames—the flames, perhaps, of God’s Spirit. Enclosing this uppermost region (although from earth’s point of view the empyrean encloses the air) is a blue band, and then a dark blue one, presumably denoting air by day and air by night. Both zones are sprinkled with huge white stars, like lacy frost-flakes.18 And above the saint’s head, between her halo and heaven’s vault, is her name, called aloud perhaps by God himself: “Sancta Agnes,” abbreviated as SCA AGNES.
Photographs cannot express the beauty of this apse, and in particular of the figures depicted in it. To begin with, a photograph’s flat surface cannot show the bend forward that is given to the body of Agnes by the curving hollow of the apse. (Photographs taken at the wrong angle often make her look dumpy, which she most emphatically is not.) The three tall figures stand on a green strip stretching around the bottom of the cupped space, a dark green band and then a light green one, parallel to the zones of blue above. The whole hollow in between is covered in gold, with the figures isolated against it, and well apart. The people who stood in the gallery of the church would have beheld the mosaic at close to eye-level. It twinkled in the light of votive lamps that were kept burning at the grave. At ground level the aspect of the apse changes as the spectator moves, especially as he or she moves forward: the totality of the concave half-dome gradually discloses itself, and the glitter shifts across the encrusted surface. Mosaic art plays with texture and with light.
In the catacomb of Pamphilus, beneath the via Salaria to the west of Sant’Agnese’s, it is possible to see, still imbedded in the tufa, a round image, only a few inches wide, of Saint Agnes. She wears a halo and beautiful robes, and stands with arms stretched out, palms up, in the ancient attitude of prayer. There are stars in the background, and doves on pillars on either side of her. The symbolism of doves (prolific birds) on pillars is similar to that of palm trees with their feathery leaves. In addition, white doves represent innocence, purity, and souls (which are often depicted as birds) alive in heavenly bliss. Agnes is standing in heaven, accompanied by the souls of the blessed, just as, in her passio, she was seen after her death in a vision accompanied by a whole procession of saintly women. Her name, AGN-NES, is divided about her head at the top. The image is in gold leaf. If you look closely, you can see that this roundel is in fact the bottom of a glass vessel, whose sides have been deliberately broken off to leave intact the base containing the gold picture imprisoned within it.
More than five hundred of these “goldglasses,” with wide-ranging iconography, have been found in the catacombs, rifled though the cemeteries had been even before an archaeological interest in them began. Pagan examples of the type are also known, but they are much rarer—and often of a much higher quality. Most examples of goldglass that have come down to us show Christian subjects. Either Christians were especially fond of such glasses (perhaps some of their number were involved in the making of them), or the simple fact that they stuck them into catacomb walls caused proportionately many more Christian examples to survive. The glasses could have been wedding gifts, or anniversary or New Year’s presents, treasured thereafter by their owners. It is conjectured that at a Christian funeral a glass, perhaps a favourite possession of the deceased, may have been used as part of the ritual feast, and then deliberately broken as an initiatory act to mark the passing of the dead person to eternal life. (Smashing something is a common ritual in initiations, where the old has “died” to give way to the new.) The decorative and still solid part of the vessel was then used to mark the simple grave.19
The technique of making goldglass bottoms began with a thick glass disk, often coloured. Onto this disk a cut-out in gold leaf was affixed and then engraved. A thin layer of colourless glass was then poured over the top, and the whole heated in a kiln. The resulting fusion of the glass held the gold leaf securely in place, and also greatly enhanced its brilliance.
It was exactly in this manner, but using plain gold leaf on thin sheets of coloured glass base, that the components of gold mosaics were prepared. Once the glass imprisoning the gold was cold, the sheet was cut with a hot iron tool into tiny cubes or tesserae, varying in size and sometimes less than a quarter of an inch per side. For the ordinary colours in a mosaic like the one at Sant’Agnese’s, opaque coloured glass was cut into tesserae.
The pieces were stuck onto the surface of a wall prepared with layers of mortar: first a coarse layer keyed into the wall by means of large broad-headed nails, then one or two layers of fine mortar. The little cubes were pressed into the top layer of mortar while it was still wet; the mortar had therefore to be prepared in patches just about the size that could be finished in a day’s work. (It is often possible to see from the layout of the tesserae just how large a patch was done on one particular day.) An underdrawing or a rough painting was sketched onto the wall to guide the artists in the placing of their tesserae. Irregular tesserae were made as well, for details and special effects. The iron tool often tore the gold leaf in cutting the tesserae. This was entirely desirable, as was the frequently spare use of gold: modern mosaics often look flat and loud just because they are too regular and too rich.
The earliest mosaics were made not of glass but of stone, even of uncut pebbles, such as the magnificent designs at Pella, the childhood home of Alexander the Great. Marble, in all the variety of its colouring, was a stone easily adapted for mosaic work, for cutting first in sheets and then in cubes for reassembly. In the classical period, mosaic work was often thought of as a form of painting in stone. The virtuosity implicit in such an endeavour was part of its appeal, as was the durability and preciousness of stone as compared with paint. The cut marbles were set as closely as possible together to form a picture, then polished and buffed: the best mosaic was one in which it was hardest to detect that the design had been made in stone at all. There was also a glass technique, where fine rods of coloured glass were packed tightly together to form the design, rather as in a modern glass paperweight. Their ends were then ground down to a perfectly flush surface. Greek and Roman floors were of rougher mosaic work. (Roman floors are what have survived, we must remember, rather than walls and ceilings.) The pieces that made up the design were visibly tesserae, but again the point was to create a smooth floor surface.
The creators of Christian mosaic work, as it developed in the centuries before Sant’Agnese’s was built, saw the technique very differently. Mosaic for decorating walls was enjoyed as such, for its crustiness and glitter. It lent itself to pointilliste effects, where pure points of colour merge into pictorial form when seen from a distance; the viewer’s eye and mind “complete” the work, the coming together of colours to create vibrant form. We have quite recently relearned how to enjoy this technique through the art of the Impressionists, and especially through the work of Seurat and his followers.
Mosaic patterns in Christian art became sheaths, flexibly covering architecturally created surfaces such as arches, walls, domes, and apses. Once mosaics were accepted and admired as such, artists could relax into accepting the given surface, no longer creating figures in volume or pictorial compositions in depth, but preferring the flat, the decorative, the linear. They began to choose subjects that worked well in mosaic (jewelled dresses are a good example), and to love broad, simple areas of colour. Expanses of gold mosaic in particular became a stunning enhancement of pure architectural form. Shining gold worked especially well on curving surfaces. Furthermore, gold enhanced by a glass covering reminds us of Saint John’s vision in the Apocalypse: the Heavenly Jerusalem, he wrote, was a city of “pure gold, like translucent (katharō, which is spotless or clear) glass.”20
Although it was more costly than fresco decoration, mosaic was apparently not considered a particularly expensive medium, despite the gold. Contemporary accounts of Constantine’s churches describe with wonder the gifts of gold and silver vessels that he made to these basilicas, and stress the richness of the marble slabs covering some of the walls—but they never mention the mosaics. The gold and silver disappeared during the many invasions of Rome, and the marble panels have almost all been stolen over the centuries. The mosaics, however, survive, unless the very walls under them have fallen. Even the gold, when gold backgrounds became important in later centuries, was of little monetary value to looters, being thin and glass-coated and in tiny cubes.
Finally, mosaic can be extremely practical: it is very durable and easily repaired because it is made of small pieces. (The principle holds good for street pavements in cities like Lisbon or Barcelona. The pavements are made of small pieces so they can be repaired exactly where and when necessary; there is no need to tear everything up in order to fix a damaged section.) Provided attention is paid to maintaining a mosaic, it can last for centuries—indeed, indefinitely. In fact, of course, many mosaics have been neglected, and repaired only when great patches had come away from the wall and needed replacing; the restored result may have seriously altered the intentions of the original artists. Often patches were painted in as a temporary measure before they could be repaired in mosaic. We know that after the seventeenth-century restoration of Sant’Agnese’s church, patches filled in with painted plaster were left in the apse mosaic. These spaces, and new weak spots in the fabric, were repaired in 1842. Areas of restoration are visible, especially in the gold background.
The setting of mosaic cubes, especially over the curving surfaces of arches and vaults, has sometimes achieved great mastery. Artists have been able to set the pieces turned slightly outward and downward, at precisely the right angle to catch and reflect light: tesserae were set quite far apart from one another, exactly at a distance and an obliquity that melded them into a seamless but twinkling surface when seen by a viewer standing on the floor below. Artists in mosaic had to know exactly how much plaster should fill the interstices, and how to colour it correctly. This technique could save as many as half of the mosaic pieces that would have been needed had the surface been completely covered—and at the same time it actually increased the brilliance of the total effect. (Saving on the gold involved could mean a lot. The great church of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, subsequently a mosque and now a museum, was once decorated throughout with mosaics; the area covered is estimated in acres, a great deal of it gold.)21
The gold background of the seventh-century mosaic at Sant’ Agnese’s has been deliberately dulled. The gold sandwiched between glass layers is scant, and the tesserae may also have been reversed in many cases, so that the thicker layer of glass is uppermost, reducing the gold’s brilliance.22 A further refinement of gold mosaic technique has to do with the colour of the glass base, which could be greenish, brownish, yellow, red, grey, or colourless; the effect desired governed the colour chosen.23 Most of the gold tesserae at Sant’Agnese’s seem to employ grey or green glass. There is no angling of the pieces, but depth of tone is achieved with irregular tesserae shapes and changing interstices between them.24 The effect is carefully designed to set off and enhance with dull greenish gold the purple robes and the greens and blues that make up most of the rest of the design.
The face of Saint Agnes in the mosaic, with its marble tesserae, may have been made separately in a workshop and then transferred in one piece to the vault. In the apse of the cathedral of St. John Lateran there is a mosaic head of Christ that has twice been remade. According to tradition, the original head had been of supernatural origin: it miraculously appeared one day in the church. During work on the mosaic in the thirteenth-century, it was discovered that the portrait had been assembled on its own independent bed of travertine marble. Clearly, it had been made separately in a workshop. Suddenly it arrived, all in one piece, and the people of Rome have never forgotten their amazement.25
In November of 1887, Thérèse Martin, aged fourteen, was visiting Rome in the company of her father and her sister Céline. The family made a point of going to Sant’Agnese’s church. It had a special significance for them because Pauline Martin, Thérèse’s second-eldest sister, could not come. She was a Carmelite nun who had taken the name Soeur Agnès when she entered the convent. Pauline had become, when Thérèse wrote this account eight years later, Mère Agnès; and indeed Mère Agnès it was who asked her sister to write the story of her life. The section of what was later the book called Histoire d’une âme, (The Story of a Soul), in which this account appears, was dedicated to Mère Agnès.
Thérèse, the future saint, describes praying to Sainte Agnès in the church in Rome, and begging her for some memento of the visit for Soeur Agnès, Agnes’ name-child. Thérèse must have wanted to take something from the church, and may have been told that she couldn’t: she says she did everything possible—perhaps meaning that she did more than pray—to take away “one of the relics,” and that it was forbidden for her to take what she wanted. And behold, “a little red stone” detached itself from a “rich mosaic” for Thérèse to take back for her sister. She interpreted this as a special gift from Sainte Agnès herself, whom Thérèse regarded as a “childhood friend,” eternally of an age not much younger than she then was herself.
Where did the stone come from? Thérèse believed that the mosaic from which the tessera fell dated back to the time of Agnes, and that the saint “must often have looked at it herself.” The stone would not have actually dropped out of the apse, since the central figure in the mosaic, with her name clearly written over her head, represents Saint Agnes herself; Thérèse can hardly have thought that Agnes gazed at it while she was on earth. The red stone could have come from one of the cosmatesque fragments now in the passage down to the church, the decorated bands of which are in red and gold mosaic; some of these are even now in a shattered condition. These fragments, however, are said to have been discovered only in the early twentieth century.26 Perhaps the stone she found was not from a mosaic at all.
I have thought this small incident from the journals of Saint Theresa of Lisieux worth relating because it shows how very differently a church is experienced if the visitor is a pilgrim rather than a tourist or an art historian. Thérèse knew almost nothing of the history of the church, or of the history of mosaics or cosmatesque art. And really, she would not have cared more than mildly if she had had access to the scholarship. Her attention was focused on Agnes, whose story she knew intimately,27 and her sister in the convent in France. She reacted directly and intensely to the church building. Expecting a miracle, she prayed—and got one.
Standing at Agnes’ right hand in the apse mosaic is Pope Honorius I (625–638), under whose authority this church was built. He was a pope famous for having made an error in a matter of Church doctrine. He was condemned for doing so, at the Third Council of Constantinople, 680–681. During the First Vatican Council (1869–1870) the mistake of Honorius was used as an argument against the formulation of the Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility.
The Roman Empire was split in 324 when Constantine made Byzantium the “New Rome”; he later named it Constantinople. Subsequently, he governed the empire from the new capital, while the popes in Rome continued to lead the Church.28 By the early 600s the capital of the empire was threatened by Persian advances towards the Bosporus, while the Arabs, newly converted to Islam, were conquering with their armies province after province of the empire in the south.
Rome, meanwhile, had recently benefited from the outstanding leadership of Pope Gregory I, the Great (590–604), who had strengthened and regulated the social organization of the city, and improved the health of the Church. Gregory’s pontificate was marked by the Gothic Wars, which had been initiated by the emperor of Constantinople, Justinian I, in order to gain imperial control of the Italian countryside. The Germanic Lombards had entered Italy in 568 and continued moving south. They laid siege to Italian cities and terrified the population; thousands of refugees flooded into Rome and had to be fed and lodged. The advancing Lombards finally invaded Rome’s outlying districts. Gregory paid them off to keep them from further violence, agreed to continue paying a yearly ransom, and then adroitly negotiated peace; his aim, the pope said, was not to fight with the Lombards but to convert them.29 The independent settlement caused rage in Constantinople.
Rome, increasingly dependent upon the papacy for actual government as well as religious leadership,30 would continue to face barbarian invasions. But equally difficult and dangerous were its relations with the imperial court in Constantinople. The government there viewed religion as a social factor that could either divide or unite the empire. The need, as the Emperor Heraclius (610–641) saw it, was for unity in the face of Moslem advances. He therefore decided to impose unity of Christian belief upon his empire.
Christianity is a religion, as we have repeatedly seen, that rests upon a series of mighty paradoxes. At the core of the whole system of belief is the matter of Jesus Christ’s being both utterly human and utterly divine. This central dogma or belief is a tension between opposites that the papacy has always considered it to be its duty to uphold. But it is always difficult to keep the two ideas in balance. At times in the Church’s history, a leaning to one or the other idea has caused a fury of rejection of—and by—the other side. Once any argument becomes emotionally charged, it is easily manipulated for political ends. Even more sinisterly, political pressures, hatreds, and ambitions are then allowed to disguise themselves as religious disagreements.
In the 600s much of the Eastern part of the empire was Monophysite.31 As a theological position, Monophysitism held that Jesus Christ had one nature (monos physis in Greek). This formulation seems innocuous enough. But there was disagreement about what the Greek word physis meant: was Jesus one person (the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word of God,32 Son of the Father) or did physis mean the quality or character of his person—his humanness, his divineness? Out of this difference in the definition of a word arose a great theological battle. It was both encouraged by the increasing hostility between East and West, and used to exacerbate that hostility. The East insisted that Jesus was one person; the West argued that he had two natures, divine and human. In fact, Christian doctrine might be agreed to contain both positions. But as is so often the case, intellectual argument was fuelled by political rigidities. The paradox therefore split in two.
A previous attack on the paradox had been far more significant. It had earlier been claimed by certain Monophysites that Christ was only divine, his human nature having been absorbed by his divinity. Under Pope Leo I, the Great (440–461), this idea had been condemned as a heresy. What was at issue—and the Church of the 600s had not forgotten it—was the doctrine of the Incarnation, in which it is believed that God (Christ) became human or “took flesh” (“flesh” is caro, carnis in Latin). God, as Christians believe, has complete solidarity with the human race he came to redeem; human nature is involved in the ongoing process of salvation. The heresy that Christ is only divine (not really suffering, for example, in his Crucifixion) caused Pope Leo the Great to give the clearest expression to that date (449) of the doctrine of the Incarnation. (From the Church’s point of view, heretical ideas have always been indispensable, as occasions for the clarification of doctrine: they cause agreement to be reached on what it is that is not part of the faith.) “For he who is truly God,” wrote Leo, “is the same who is also truly human.”33 And the pope explained this by saying that Jesus Christ had “two natures.”
The Monophysites, interpreting the word physis differently, objected: to them it seemed as if this formulation must mean that there are two Christs. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 reaffirmed the paradoxical belief that Christ is both human and divine, “one person in two natures”—and repudiated Monophysitism. The council also formally rejected the belief of the Nestorians, that Jesus Christ was both human and divine, but that Mary gave birth only to the human nature and not to the divine. At the Council of Ephesus in 431 Mary had been declared to be Theotokos, Dei Genetrix in Latin, “She who gave birth to God.” With this, the mother of Jesus was recognized as essential, not only humanly but also theologically, to the entire system of belief.
The repudiation of Monophysitism was received, in the East, as an outrage. Politics seized its opportunity. As academic arguments proliferated, Monophysitism increasingly assumed the role of apparent differentiator between Rome and Constantinople, between pope and emperor, even between West and East. Ordinary human beings trying to be followers of Jesus Christ would almost certainly have been baffled by the intellectual formulations of either side. While Christian scholars worried at the chestnut, the religion of Islam arose out of Arabia.
The seriously perturbed Emperor Heraclius demanded an end to Christian arguing; he wanted political unity.34 Sergius, the patriarch of Constantinople, was ordered to find an answer. He made a new formulation, one whose weirdness is explicable only in the context of the time. It became known as Monothelitism (“one-will-ism”) or Monenergism (“one-energy-ism”). Let us drop, said Sergius, the argument about whether Jesus had one or two natures, and ask whether he had one or two wills (one human, one divine) and one or two energies (one human, one divine). Having put the problem this way, Sergius concluded that it was silly to imagine Jesus having two wills and two energies; he must have only one of each. Sergius then wrote to Pope Honorius, setting out his propositions, and asked him what he thought. Obviously unaware of either the doctrinal subtleties or the wider political implications of the question, Honorius wrote back saying he thought Sergius was right: Jesus had only one will.
The emperor and Sergius were elated. A decree was promulgated in 638, known as the Ekthesis, which declared that Christianity was one and the faith was fixed: Honorius, the pope himself, had agreed. Very soon afterwards Honorius died. But theologians in the West, looking over Sergius’ formulation, rejected it. The formulation seemed to them (and quite possibly was) a cunning attempt on the part of Sergius to impose Monophysitism on the universal Church. Furthermore, and more important, the Christian faith was not something to be set by the emperor. Constans II (641–668), the new emperor, then issued a decree in 648 forbidding anyone even to discuss the question of whether Christ had one or two wills. To debate the matter was to be deposed if you were a bishop, to have all your property confiscated if you were a nobleman, to be tortured and exiled if you were an ordinary citizen. Christendom was to be unified, at all costs, in the face of Islam.
The papacy responded in 649 by calling a synod at the Lateran, refusing the doctrine of “one will, one energy” and excommunicating the patriarch of Constantinople. Furthermore, the new pope, Martin I, (649–655) had been made first bishop and then pope without Rome asking the emperor’s permission. For a century the emperors at Constantinople had insisted that all popes be investigated by the imperial government before being allowed to take office.
The exarch Olympios was ordered by the emperor to go to Rome, arrest Pope Martin, and bring him to Constantinople for trial. On arriving in Rome Olympios instead proclaimed himself emperor of the West, with a co-emperor named Valentinian. Olympios was killed fighting the Arabs in Sicily two years later. The pope, bedridden with gout at the time, was seized and smuggled out of Rome. At Constantinople he was condemned, not for religious beliefs, but because of the Olympios disaster. (Modern historians agree that the pope was made the scapegoat in this political affair.) He was publicly stripped of his vestments, dragged through the streets in chains and flogged, then taken to Chersonesos in the Crimea, treated very harshly, and finally starved to death in 655.
Meanwhile, Maximus the Confessor, a widely admired Eastern theologian, had written fierce condemnations of the emperor for usurping papal authority. He and his companions were also sent into exile in 655. Refusing under pressure to recant from their position that the emperor had no right to decide what Christians should believe, he and his followers had their tongues cut out and their right hands cut off, so that they should neither speak nor write again.
In 681, at the Third Council of Constantinople, the letter Honorius had written to Sergius, apparently supporting what had come to be called Monothelitism, was condemned by the Church as erroneous. The new formulation, later promulgated by Pope Leo II, was that Jesus Christ “is our true God” and “his two natures shine forth in his one hypostasis.” Hypostasis (“substance”—both words mean literally “what stands beneath” in Greek and in Latin) was a sidestep from the noun physis. It was to have a long theological future.
In 1870, at the First Vatican Council, the Church formulated the doctrine of papal infallibility. This doctrine means that the Holy Spirit remains with the Church until the end of time and will not allow her, over time and in the end, to deviate fundamentally from the truth of the Gospel message, from her mission to bring about God’s kingdom, or from her life of faith in Christ.35 And therefore, on the very rare occasions when the pope as leader of the Church tells the world what the Church believes, and that only in the areas of faith and morals (the expression is ex cathedra, “from the chair” of Peter), then what he says will be the truth. (It does not mean that the truth of the Gospel is adequately expressed by doctrinal definitions: formulations are admitted always to be limited by culture, by history, and by language. No formulation—including that of the doctrine of infallibility—is ever the last word on the subject.)
When the First Vatican Council made the formulation, opponents brought up Honorius. Honorius, the pope, had been wrong! Following this objection it was stated that infallibility does not refer to what the pope himself thinks, says, writes, or even publicly announces. It is the Church as a whole that counts when it says what it believes; this point was insisted upon at the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965).36 According to Catholic belief, the pope, speaking on behalf of the bishops and the people of God, is infallible only when he proclaims what the Church believes. And the Church had rejected Honorius’ opinion.
Modern theologians have tended to exonerate Honorius entirely, saying not only that he was not speaking ex cathedra, but that what he wrote is, in fact, utterly unexceptionable.37 The incident, and its use in 1870, did however serve to clarify the formulation of the concept of papal infallibility.
Pope Honorius I was apparently not a man of theological sophistication, but apart from the incident of the letter to Sergius, he does appear to have been a practical and efficacious leader. His pontificate stands near the very beginning of what would later be called the Middle Ages; although, according to another evaluation of those times, it immediately precedes the early Dark Ages. Born in Campania, Honorius was the son of a Roman consul and a fervent admirer of his older contemporary Pope Gregory the Great, whose work he vowed to continue. He laboured to achieve peace in northern Italy, inducing the schismatic states of Istria and Venice to be reconciled with Rome, and further reached agreements with Spain, Sardinia, and Epirus. He continued the policy of Gregory the Great in the evangelization of Britain, and created two archbishoprics in England; the first to hold office were Honorius of Canterbury and Paulinus of York. The Anglican Church still has two archbishoprics in England, Canterbury and York; the archbishopric of Wales was created in 1920.
Honorius was one of the great building popes.38 Still standing today in Rome are two churches he founded: Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura and San Pancrazio. The latter basilica was rebuilt in the Middle Ages and restored in 1609 (at about the same time as Sant’Agnese’s), but suffered serious damage and looting in 1798 and again in 1849. The church stands outside the walls near the via Aurelia Antica, a highway historically of value for armies approaching Rome from the west. The apse of San Pancrazio’s, despite later accretions, is still the one Honorius built.39
Underneath San Pancrazio’s survives a semi-annular crypt, also provided by Honorius. This was an arrangement for ordering pilgrim crowds and preventing unseemly jostling at the grave of a saint. Pilgrims would walk along a semi-circular passageway underneath the church’s apse in order to approach the saint’s grave. From the centre of the half-circle a short, straight corridor led directly to the tomb underneath the altar; each person in turn could look down the corridor and see the tomb, and then had to move on. The semi-annular crypt at the grave of San Pancrazio’s is the second-oldest example of its kind after that at St. Peter’s, which had been created by Gregory the Great, the man upon whom Honorius modelled himself.
Near the traditional site of Saint Paul’s martyrdom outside the city walls to the south, Honorius founded a church in 625 at the monastery Ad Aquas Salvias (“at the saving waters”), now known as “three fountains,” Tre Fontane.40 In the 650s a monastic congregation arrived at this monastery in Rome from Bethsaloë in modern Iraq, bearing with it the head of the Persian martyr Anastasius, murdered by King Chosroës II in 628; the monastery’s church was called St. Anastasius by the eighth century, and Saints Vincent and Anastasius after 1225, when the relics of the Spanish martyr Saint Vincent were brought to Rome.41 Over the centuries this church was entirely rebuilt; the one we see today was completed in 1221.
In the apse mosaic at Sant’Agnese’s, Pope Honorius I is the figure portrayed as founder,42 carrying in his arms (both they and his hands decorously covered by his cloak) a model of a church. It was long thought that this model was a purely conventional representation of a generic church, with curtains at the front door as was the custom of the time. When Sant’Agnese’s was restored (1956–1958), the medieval plaster that covered the outside walls was removed.43 The restorers discovered with excitement that the model in Honorius’ arms is, in fact, a fairly exact copy of the part of the building that stood above ground level in the seventh century. The pope’s purple mosaic cloak covers up the buried lower half of the church.
The two black rectangles on the side of the model can now be seen as bricked-up areas behind the pepper pot turrets of the chapels on the side of the church along the via di Sant’Agnese. They were doorways that once led directly into the upper galleries in the church from what was then ground level. The original wooden lintels are intact. A small window with its lintel (not shown on the model) has also been revealed. The façade of the church had previously appeared to have four small rectangular windows, rather than a doorway and one window on either side as in the model. Today, facing the front of the building, we can see that originally there were indeed two windows and a door, as the model shows. The threshold of this door, high above the present entrance, shows us exactly where the floor of the gallery lies: this was the door that the model shows hung with draperies, leading into the galleries of the church.
The present roof is higher and more sloping than the original one depicted in the model; the roof was presumably altered, and a frontal with a round window (an oculus, or “eye”) was added, in approximately 1000 A.D. (There are three windows below the oculus, rather than the two on the model.) Behind the triangular frontal inside the building, a fresco portraying peacocks with garlands was found, dating to the twelfth or thirteenth century. Peacocks symbolize immortality in Christian art; they create their own small epiphany every time their tails open out into a brilliant wheel filled with eyes.44 They appear on either side of the round window, which is thus made to signify eternal light. The fresco cannot be seen today unless one climbs into the space above the church’s seventeenth-century ceiling.45
The ecclesiastical clothing of Honorius in the apse, and of his companion on the other side of Agnes, shows us that she has been given a kind of sacerdotal dress,46 but far richer than earthly priests’ vestments. The popes are wearing white dalmatics, and over them purple cloaks known as planetae or chasubles. A planeta, literally a “floater,” was a thin and costly version of a chasuble. The latter word comes from Latin casula, a diminutive of casa, a hut: a cape or cloak was thought of as a shelter, in the same class as a primitive house. The original chasuble was a serviceable poncholike cape with a hood, which gradually became ecclesiastical dress; the hood was abolished for church vestments in 438. Chasubles are still worn by Roman Catholic priests saying Mass.
The jewelled overgarment Agnes wears has become, on the two men, the papal pallium, which is what marks them as indisputably bishops of Rome. In their case, the pallium has become a narrow white band, fringed at the ends and embroidered with small black crosses. Like Agnes’ garment, this pallium is crossed in a V in front, and strips hang straight down, front and back. The pallium has been worn by bishops of Rome ever since the fourth century.47 Even earlier than the fourth century in the Eastern church, a cloaklike forerunner of the pallium, in Greek an omophorion (“worn over the shoulders”), was ecclesiatical dress, as it still is in Orthodox churches. A pallium very similar to the two in the apse mosaic is worn by the pope and by his fellow archbishops today. The style has changed, but not the colour: the modern pallium is round rather than V-shaped, and the straight pieces front and back are usually only about a foot long.
The symbolism of the white woollen pallium is that its wearer is an earthly “shepherd” of the Church. The wool symbolizes the faithful as “lambs,” which shepherds used to carry on their shoulders when they were in special need of care. One of the earliest sculpted images of Christ shows him as a young shepherd in a short tunic and buskins, carrying a lamb on his shoulders in an attitude well known in ancient Greek and Roman art: Jesus had called himself “the good shepherd.”48 After his Resurrection, Jesus spoke to Peter, giving him an opportunity to make up for his triple betrayal of his master in the time of trial before the Crucifixion. Three times Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love me?” and each time, after Peter had declared his love, Jesus said, “Feed my lambs,” “Feed my lambs,” “Feed my sheep.”49 According to Catholic Christendom, the pope’s leadership of the Church is inherited from Peter; and the wearing of the pallium over the pope’s shoulders is in memory of the injunction to Peter to become the “shepherd” of Christ’s “sheep” and “lambs.”
The duty extends also to all Christians, but in a very specific manner to clergy, to bishops, and to their superiors, the archbishops. In the Roman Catholic Church every archbishop is granted the wearing of the pallium. It is a favour the archbishop has to petition for, within three months of his appointment. Asking for and receiving the pallium expresses the jurisdiction he is granted by the pope, and also his allegiance. When Pope Honorius I appointed the first two archbishops in England, he did so by sending them these insignia; and the arms of the Anglican archbishopric of Canterbury still include the pallium. In modern times, a Roman Catholic archbishop usually goes to Rome to receive his pallium. He wears it only in his own diocese, because only there does he have jurisdiction. The pope, in contrast, can wear the pallium anywhere on earth—and he does so whenever he wears priestly vestments. He puts it on last so that it is always clearly visible, just as it is on the two popes in the apse mosaic at Sant’Agnese’s.
Each pallium-bearer gets his own personal pallium, and he is buried wearing it, in recognition that ecclesiastical office is never to be hereditary. Before anybody can receive a pallium, however, it is traditional to petition Saint Peter himself to bless the sign of authority. The newly woven palliums are laid inside a silver-gilt box and placed in a special alcove at the confessio of Saint Peter—as close as possible to the spot where Peter is believed to have been buried, and over which the enormous basilica of St. Peter’s is built. The palliums remain there for the night before the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, June 29. On that day the pope invests new archbishops in a ceremony called the Mass of the Rings; in addition to a pallium, each archbishop receives a ring, which, like a wedding ring, symbolizes binding promises.
But even before the palliums are woven, the entire process begins at the church of St. Agnes outside the Walls. On the feast day of Saint Agnes every year (January 21), two live lambs are brought to the church, placed on the altar, and blessed. They are crowned, one with red roses and one with white roses; these are attributes of Saint Agnes, in her double status as martyr and as virgin, respectively. The lambs are symbolic of innocence and purity, and also of Christ as the lamb,50 whose death Agnes has imitated in her martyrdom. The name Hagnes means “pure” in Greek; the word agnus (“lamb” in Latin) turns her name into a pun. A lamb is therefore the attribute of Agnes, together with the palm for her victorious martyrdom.
The lambs come from the Trappist priory of Tre Fontane, outside the walls to the south of the city, traditionally the place where Saint Paul was beheaded. The original church at this site was, as we saw, founded by Pope Honorius himself. Every year a monk who is a shepherd at the community’s fellow monastery at Val Sereno near Pisa chooses the two best white lambs from their flock and brings them to the Trappists in Rome. The custom is for the two youngest monks at the Roman monastery to take them, on the appropriate date, to the pope to be blessed in the Sala Clementina, a hall for private audiences with the pope at the Vatican. Vatican staff then wash and brush the lambs, and crown them with roses. By custom one lamb has the letters SAV in gold paper stuck to its wool, and the other SAM: Sancta Agnes Virgo and Sancta Agnes Martyr.51 Until the advent of cars, it was the custom for a crowd to process through the streets of Rome and out along the via Nomentana accompanying the lambs, lying on cushions in baskets that were carried on the backs of flower-decked donkeys. By the feast day of the saint the almond trees in Rome—always among the first fruit trees to flower in the Mediterranean region—are often in bud and a few in flower: the feast is also a spring festival.
Today, the lambs arrive at Sant’Agnese’s by car. They are kept briefly in an annex of the church on a table covered in flowers, and then taken in procession through the ranks of the congregation by bearers carrying them on leafy palanquins, still on their cushions in their baskets. Loud baas usually delight the crowd. After they have been placed on the altar and blessed, they are returned to the table outside, where people are allowed to see them and pat them when the service is over. They are then whisked off to the pope’s residence at Castel Gandolfo in the Alban hills, to join the flocks kept there. When they have grown, they are shorn and their wool woven, by the Benedictine nuns at the church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, into palliums for archbishops. (Obviously, the wool of two sheep is no longer sufficient for all the palliums bestowed, even though palliums are quite small; it is said, however, that care is taken that some wool from these particular sheep is included in each one.)
The age of the custom is uncertain; the earliest reference so far known is a document dated 1442,52 when Benedictine nuns inhabited the monastery buildings at Sant’Agnese’s. It is still Benedictine nuns who do the weaving. There are many descriptions of the lamb festival, especially by travellers to Rome, from the sixteenth century to the present.
The two popes, one on either side of Saint Agnes in the apse of the church, are wearing identical seventh-century ecclesiastical dress, and constitute valuable evidence, for historians of costume, of apparel at that date. They are both tonsured. It is common in all cultures and religions for monks’ heads to be shaven, either partly or completely. The styling of head hair is, culturally speaking, an individualizing physical attribute, and men in groups (including soldiers and other aggressive collectivities) often forgo their hair as an expression of determination, equality among their number, and brotherhood. It is a macho sign: long hair is often regarded as “feminine,” and in any case locks can be a nuisance when men have intensely physical work to do. Hair styling can signify humility, however, and a desire to renounce gentility and mainstream fashions: ascetic men often either wear long hair (as in conventional depictions of Jesus) or shave their heads bald. Christian monks have often partly shaved their heads. Among Celtic monks, all hair was shaved off from the forehead as far back as a line extending over the head from ear to ear. The Catholic tonsure (from Latin tonsura, “shearing”) shows obedience, and engagement in a group—but also humility. It leaves a fringe all round, in memory, it is said, of Christ’s crown of thorns. The custom began about a hundred years before this mosaic was made.
Who is the second pope, the one carrying a Bible with a cross on its cover? No one, in modern times at least, has been sure. The Liber Pontificalis says that Pope Symmachus (498–514) restored the apse at Sant’Agnese’s.53 Most writers have therefore taken Symmachus to be the other figure: who more deserving of recognition when Honorius had the apse mosaic made? Scholars have even speculated that two figures, one of them Symmachus, might have been portrayed accompanying Agnes in an earlier apse mosaic; Honorius had the overall design copied, but he himself took the place of Symmachus on Agnes’ right. Which begs the question of the identity of Symmachus’ companion in the earlier design.
But only very recently the architectural history of the church of Sant’Agnese has been shaken to its core: the entire background of the church has had to be rethought. Symmachus repaired an apse here—but it may well not have been the apse of this church. We shall look at the truth of the matter in Chapter Eight when we move outside the building. Since Friedrich Wilhelm Deichmann, the archaeologist, made his momentous observations in 1946, the Symmachus theory seems questionable. But most writers on the church still repeat it, faute de mieux.
Another theory has suggested that this mysterious figure is Pope Liberius (352–366), because he is known to have set up a marble altar over the grave of Agnes in 358.54 A further candidate for the other pope is Silvester (314–335), under whose pontificate “Constantine built a basilica to the holy martyr Agnes, at the request of his daughter [Constantina], and also a baptistery in that place, where his sister Constantia and [his] daughter were baptized by bishop Silvester.”55 Other scholars speculate that the second pope is included in the mosaic only for the sake of symmetry—a sort of generic “other pope.” But this seems unlikely, given the importance of the figure and the tendency of churches to opt for meaning.
Although I have not seen or heard the idea mentioned, I like to believe that the pope whom Honorius made his partner in the apse mosaic is Gregory I, the Great. In spite of the fact that five papacies intervened between Gregory and Honorius, only twenty-one years had passed between the death of one man and the beginning of the pontificate of the other. Gregory was an older contemporary of Honorius, and a man Honorius greatly admired and tried to emulate. Like Gregory, Honorius was probably himself a monk, which might explain the tonsures. Both Gregory and Honorius were noblemen. Both abjured personal possessions and turned the papal residence into a monastery. Being a pope who supported monks was to take sides in a rivalry between pro-monastic and pro-diocesan clergy. Only Pope Boniface IV (608–615), among the five popes between Gregory and Honorius, had been pro-monastic. The epitaph on Honorius’ tomb described him as “following in the footsteps of Gregory.”56
Underneath the apse mosaic, Honorius placed an inscription in strange and corrupt seventh-century Latin, gold on a dark blue ground. (It may be that later restorers—or even the original mosaicists themselves, who were almost certainly Greek—had trouble with the Latin.) Corrected, therefore, and translated, the inscription says something like this:
This picture stands up aloft, golden with neatly cut cubes of metal.57 Here daylight itself is embraced and enclosed—as if Dawn, arising out of snow-cold waters, breaks through torn clouds and irrigates the fields with dew; or as if Iris, the rainbow, spreads her colours, glittering like the fiery peacock. He whose power fixed the boundary between night and day58 has expelled darkness from the tombs of the martyrs. Look up! With a glance take it all in! Bishop Honorius has given these votive gifts—you can tell him by his clothing, and by what he has made. He shines; his aspect shows the generous heart he bears.
Whatever the accuracy of the text and its interpretation, it is clear that light and colour are what enchanted the seventh-century viewer of this mosaic. The dew at dawn, rainbows, and peacocks’ tails were what it was expected to bring to mind.
Under the arch in front of the apse we have a very earthly depiction in mosaic of flowers and fruit growing out of two pots, each decorated with coloured stripes and standing on either side at the foot of the arch’s curve. The two garlands, a traditional element of apse mosaics, include leaves, grapes, white roses, pomegranates, lilies, red roses, pears, pine cones, and more lilies. They meet at the top of the arch, in a silver cross on a blue circle outlined in white: earth’s beauty lifts up the crowning apex of the cosmos, the Cross, where earth meets God. In the Cross, the vertical intersects with the horizontal in the shape of the human form. Christians believe that God, becoming human, suffered the worst that human beings could devise. And through his submission and forgiveness, Christ transformed the instrument of pain and infamy into a revelation of love and hope. An early Christian sign put it this way:
The vertical line of the cross is phos, Greek for “light”; the horizontal line is zoë, “life.” God’s loving light strikes down from above, illuminating all of life with its transcendent glory.