On the second day in Naples and your eyes do not become
accustomed to its dirtiness but sharper. You realise that you must pick your
way lest you trample in something unsuspected (or unsuspecting). After time you
must become inured – the residents appear to be except one soul, a young woman,
I noticed following her dog with a scoop and plastic bag. She seemed
momentarily forlornly heroic!
However, eyes lifted from the pavement and the city has its
charms – close packed streets of elegant apartment buildings with quiet
courtyards, narrow passages and arresting shrines. Saints watch over the neighbourhood
kept painted, candlelit and accompanied by flowers.
I fled Mass in the cathedral – the congregation lost amongst
the circling crowds of nonchalant visitors and the swirling Baroque adornment –
and found it with the Franciscans at their quieter, more austere, simpler
church. Here the most noticeable art were crisp contemporary windows of stained
glass whose figures presented their stories with maximal lucidity and a
fifteenth century wall painting of the Trinity. God the Father, bearded red,
with an expression of tender compassion, holds the cross beams of a crucified
Jesus, as offering received, necessary but sadly so, between which a dove flies
in dancing communion. It was strangely peaceful and matter of fact a mystery
rendered present, accessible yet still utterly mysterious.
Between Mass rejected and accepted, I visited the Diocesan
Museum harboured in a converted church. The Church itself was a highly
decorated seventeenth century Baroque statement of counter-Reformatory piety of
which the only arresting particular piece was a surviving fourteenth century
fresco of Mother and Child where the child manages to appear both childlike and
majestic. In the seventeenth century, so often the baby Jesus contrives to
appear either arrogant or bored or misbehaved and the poor Virgin martyred by
her bambini! But the impression of the whole is overwhelming – a parade of
colour and light and action – that if in its detail frays the patience as a
whole sucks out admiration! Upstairs the galleries had been converted into a gallery
and here I walked, alone, lights clipping on as I past, revealing mostly painting
after painting of seventeenth century religious art, most of it, I confess,
pretty awful!
Again it was the earlier work that catches my eye, when
feeling has not become sentimentalised, and there is a humanity in the figures
that suggests a contemplative ideal rather than heightened emotions. There was
a beautiful late fifteenth century painting of St Benedict, accompanied by
panels of his life, the saint three quarters life size, holding out a copy of
his Rule, turned to its first words, summoning the reader to listen to the
words of the Master, to be attentive to the words and manner of Christ, to be
attentive to each and everyone, because each and everyone is Christ.
After Mass, it was lunch outside a small restaurant, under
an arch, and a mountain of seafood risotto, watching the world flow by and
reading Niall Williams’ “Boy and Man”. I had forgotten what a good writer he is
– the novels are Romantic – though the world is described with vivid realism: a
grandfather of lost, restoring memory and his grandson at work in an orphanage
in Ethiopia, they are charged with magic, of a world that conspires to care at
heart, in which love appears to hold to itself, always, a final word.
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