Throne and Altar

Abstract

This book is astonishing. Its subject matter is not something that the modem educated reader is likely to have encountered before: a longish Latin poem together with a dedicatory epistle and several shorter poems published by what one cannot help describing as a court poet in the court of Pope Urban VIII—a man who was, surprisingly, a priest. The Latin is not easy, and one is grateful for the translation the Newmans have supplied. But the medium is not half so strange to the modem eye and ear as the message. It is adulation of a monarch of a kind which old fashioned Republicans like Tacitus found so unwelcome in the world of the Emperors: bad enough under Augustus; how much worse under a Nero or a Domitian! And it is to Domitian that the editors look as a precedent for the adulation accorded to Pope Urban.The particular topic is the canopy recently made by Bernini for the central altar in St Peter’s, which the poet, Guiddicioni, refers to as the “Ara Maxima”. This is indeed the title of his poem, and one does not have to be a Protestant to feel uncomfortable with the paganism of the title itself. Worse still, a few lines into the epistle dedicatory, and one finds that the altar has become a throne—not the throne of God and his Christ, a theme which would have respectable Christian and Judaic precedents stretching back to the Holy of Holies and the Ark of the Covenant, but a throne for the Pope himself.