The mouth-watering churches of Rome

This coffee-table book is visually stunning, says BRIAN BRINDLEY but if you use it as a travel guide to Rome you'll end up hopelessly lost
Churches of Rome by Pierre Grimal and Caroline Rose, Tauris Parke Books, £35
MOST PILGRIMS and firsttime visitors to Rome begin, I suspect, by liking all the wrong things: the vast nave of St Peter's with its ludicrous statues; the windswept fascist expanse of the Via della Conciliazione; the mirror finish marble floors with which the Romans delight to disfigure their more frequented churches. On a second visit you fall for the sheer luxury of the decorations and the wonders of the baroque. Only with time do you come to enjoy the really exciting characteristic of the churches (as of the city itself) of Rome: its many-layered antiquity. Here are buildings where Christian worship has been offered since the time of Constantine, on the site of, even using the very fabric of, pagan temples and basilicas, re-built many times since after earthquakes and fires and barbarian invasions, and lovingly enriched from the counter-Reformation onwards with all the lavishness and gigantism of the Roman character; to the Roman mind no space is too small to contain a church, no church too small to boast a towering facade. Finally you come to appreciate the rugged simplicity of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, even if you never quite learn to like the chilly over-restoration of Santa Sabina on the Aventine.
Professor Grimal gives us a useful lesson in the form of a learned thesis tracing the development of Roman churches from their classical beginnings, through the Renaissance, the Mannerist, and the Baroque. Everyone intending to visit Rome (again or for the first time) should read it. It has been translated into American by Edmund Jephcott, who gives the impression at times that he has not altogether got the hang of the Professor's intentions. What, for instance, are we to make of the following passage? "More often the benediction loggia was incorporated in an attic story of modest proportions, as in Saint Peter's. In this way aesthetic requirements were reconciled with a sense of measure." Has the Professor not noticed that the benediction loggia occupies the upper half of Maderna's boring facade, the attic storey being given over to bells and (nowadays) loudspeakers? Or has he been betrayed into absurdity by his translator? Without recourse to the original French it is impossible to say.
Professor Grimal has also been betrayed (ironically) by his publishers' lavishness and gigantism: who wants to read such an essay from a book 13 inches by 16 inches, the natural dimensions of a coffee-table book? I suspect that not one person in a hundred who turns over its pages to revel in the photographs will find time to read the thoughtful and instructive text. Let me say quite simply that Caroline Rose has taken the most beautiful photographs of Roman churches that I have ever seen. Comparison is inevitable with The Churches of Rome, which sold for a mere £15 in 1981: I would judge that Peter Gunn's unpretentious text in that book, a gazetteer of all the Roman churches, was more serviceable than Professor
Grimal's, but that Roloff Beney's photographs, many of them in blackand-white, are out-classed by Mlle Rose's full-colour beauties.
She has obviously intended faithfully to illustrate the text, and there are some telling pictures of the more primitive churches, and helpful illustrations to such chapters as "The Triumph of the Cupola" and "The Contraction (sic) of the Centralized Plan". But then no more than I can she resist the mouth-watering extravagance of interior decoration. I have always thought that entering Santa Maria della Vittoria (strangely not included) is like going into the inside of a rich plum cake; in these photographs the churches look good enough to eat: the stucco incrustations of Bramante's Tempietto on the Janiculum look like the most elaborate confections of candied fruit and meringue in the windows of Alemagna on the Corso; and the marble laminations of the walls of so many churches resemble ostentatious displays of salami, prosciutto, bresaola, and gorgonzola.
Fortunately one can gourmandise on these without missing the point entirely. Two churches are well depicted in ways that bring out their serious as well as their delicatessen sides. The vast Santa Maria Maggiore and the much smaller San Clemente have features in common: well-worn Cosmati pavements, antique columns, ancient mosaics, deeplycoffered gilded wooden ceilings; each
in its own way is the best-designed and most satisfying environment for Christian worship in the world. Despite what Pugin said, every faithful Roman Catholic must learn to love the Church of Rome, and thus the diocese of Rome, and thus the churches of Rome. Take time to revel in Mlle Rose's pictures; puzzle your way through to Professor Grirnal's meaning; then return to Rome. As they say, per Roma, non basta una vita for Rome, a whole life-time is not enough.
Sadly I cannot praise the maps and plans in this book, said to be the work of Els Baekelandt. With one exception (the long-closed Santo Stephano Rotondo) the plans of churches are taken, unacknowledged, from the familiar green Michelin Tourist Guide; in the context of a pocket guide they are adequate, but not in a book of this portentousness; furthermore, they seem to have been re-drawn by someone who does not understand them. At the end of the book appears the most baffling map of Rome I have ever seen: Piazza del Popolo is labelled Piazza di Spagna; Santa Maria Maggiore and the Chiesa Nuova are tucked away in obscure back streets, while Sant' Ignazio and the Gesii are transported bodily to the vicinity of the Palazzo Colonna; Ponte Sant' Angelo (referred to in the text and illustrated) is omitted entirely; Via Giulia is carried on a flyover across Corso Vittorio Emmanuele to land in what is said to be Piazza Navona. I suppose nobody is likely to use a coffee-table book to find his way around Rome, but I pity anyone who tries.
Non fa niente; when all is said and done, this is a lovely book to own and to look at, for the sake of the photographs alone.