Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [52]
In the landscape he painted at Subiaco, Morse managed to divorce such iconography from its meaning and to treat a shrine to the Virgin as little more than a picturesque rural object. Still, the strain between his religious and aesthetic responses to Catholicism sometimes left him benumbed. One night, for instance, he attended an illumination at the Vatican. Upon a signal, the thousands of spectators lighted candles, suddenly making visible in the darkness the vast piazza with its surrounding colonnade and the immense dome of St. Peter’s. Morse reached for language to describe the effect: “like enchantment … overpowering in brilliancy … truly sublime.” He reminded himself, however, that the magical event had been staged on a Sunday—the Sabbath treated as carnival, desecrated. “I never wish to spend such another,” he concluded glumly; “St. Peters is a world of magnificence … and to what purpose!”
Such uncomfortable reminders of the seductive power of the Church led Morse to question the power of his own art. His painting aimed, after all, at promoting moral refinement and respect for republican ideals. But might the sensuous appeal of color and form promote instead, as Catholicism did, a “religion of the Imagination”? He remained persuaded that when properly employed by the painter the medium would communicate truths to the Understanding. But there was clearly a danger. Without an “enlightened piety,” a love for art could sink into “heartlessness and frivolity.” And if it came to choosing, he preferred sermons on The Fall to Raphael: “I had rather sacrifice the interests of the arts, if there is any collision, than run the risk of endangering those compared with which all others are not for a moment to be considered.”
What Morse regarded as his deepest insight into Catholicism came during a walk on the Corso. Out to get some air, he paused to observe still another ceremony, a celebration of the Corpus Domini. A procession advanced toward him, several men upholding a canopy above the Host. As the canopy passed, spectators uncovered their heads and genuflected. Instead of doing either, Morse began writing some notes about the scene. Suddenly his hat flew off as he staggered under a bash to his head. The blow had come from the rifle of a soldier, one of the guards of honor for the officiating cardinal. The soldier pressed a bayonet against his chest and began cursing him, with “the expression of a demon,” Morse said, “pouring forth a torrent of Italian oaths.” He asked why the guard had struck him, but was answered only by more oaths, unintelligible to him except for the words il diavolo.
Morse often recalled the savage moment, and later wrote about it several times for publication. The soldier, he believed, must have been under orders to see that people knelt and took off their hats in respect to the display of the Host. That taught him something. Catholicism sustained its beguiling-horrifying dumb show by coercion. It was above all a “religion of force.”
Morse’s first trip abroad, eighteen years earlier, had landed him in a country at war with his own. Remarkably, he soon realized that his second trip had taken him to a country under revolutionary siege.
In the time between Morse’s two journeys—since, that is, Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo—most of the rulers displaced by Bonaparte’s imperial armies had regained their thrones. The kings, emperors, and statesmen who gathered in 1814–15 for the Vienna Congress hoped to prevent any country from again dominating Europe, as had Napoleonic France. To establish a lasting balance of power they rearranged the Continent, making some domains larger, some smaller, combining or creating others. Yet the European political order remained volatile. Its aristocratic leaders governed uneasily, aware of massive unemployment, democratic aspirations, and a widespread sense of grievance.
Morse had been in Rome only about six months when the political system contrived at the Vienna Congress began