Still worse shocks were to come – and Christians, amid the struggle to cope with them, would be obliged to negotiate in new and momentous ways the relationship between spirit and flesh.
Brides of Christ
When workmen digging the foundations of a new house uncovered the statue, experts from across Siena flocked to admire the find. It did not take them long to identify the nude woman as Venus, the goddess of love. Buried and forgotten for centuries, she constituted a rare trophy for the city: an authentic masterpiece of ancient sculpture. Few people were better qualified to appreciate it than the Sienese. Renowned across Italy and far beyond for the brilliance of their artists, they knew beauty when they saw it. Everyone agreed that it would be a scandal for such a prize to be hidden away. Instead, the statue was taken to the Campo, the city’s great central piazza, and placed on top of a fountain. ‘And she was paid great honour.’14
At once, everything began to go wrong. A financial crash was followed by a rout of the Sienese army. Then, some five years after the discovery of the Venus, horror almost beyond comprehension brought devastation to the city. A plague, arriving from the east, and spreading with such lethal virulence across the whole of Christendom that it came to be known simply as the Great Dying, reached Siena in May 1348. For months it raged. ‘The infected perished almost immediately, swelling beneath the armpits and in the groin, and dropping down while talking.’15 Pits were filled to overflowing with the dead. Work on the city’s cathedral was abandoned for ever. By the time the plague finally eased, over half of Siena’s population had been wiped out. But still disasters kept coming. An army of mercenaries extorted a massive bribe from the government. There was a coup. A humiliating military defeat was inflicted on the city by its nearest and bitterest rival, Florence. Leaders in the new governing council, looking from the Palazzo Pubblico to the statue in the Campo outside, knew what to blame. ‘From the moment we found the statue, evils have been ceaseless.’16 This paranoia was hardly surprising. Admiration for ancient sculpture could not outweigh the devastating evidence for divine anger. Almost eight hundred years before, during the pontificate of Gregory the Great, it was cries of repentance that had halted the plague. It was told how Saint Michael, standing above the Tiber, had held aloft a blazing sword – and then, accepting the Romans’ prayers, had sheathed it, and at once the plague had stopped. Now, overwhelmed by calamity, the Sienese scrabbled to show repentance. On 7 November 1357, workmen pulled down the statue of Venus. Hauling it away from the piazza, they smashed it into pieces. Chunks of it were buried just beyond the border with Florence.
The insult offered by the honouring of Venus had been very great. Siena was the city of the Virgin. Her tutelary presence was everywhere. In the Palazzo Pubblico, an immense fresco of her dominated the room where the governing council did its business; in the Campo, the fan-shaped design of the piazza evoked the folds of her protective cloak. Those who had demanded the destruction of the Venus were right to see in its delectable and unapologetic nudity a challenge to everything that Mary represented. A thousand years had passed since the original toppling of the statue. In that time, the understanding of the erotic had been transfigured to a degree that would have been unimaginable to those who, in cities across the Roman world, had offered sacrifice to the goddess of love. Convulsive though the experience of reformatio had certainly been, it was merely the aftershock of a far more seismic event: the coming of Christianity itself. Nowhere, perhaps, was this more evident than in the dimensions of desire. It was not just Venus who had been banished. So too had gods fêted for their rapes. A sexual order rooted in the assumption that any man in a position of power had the right to exploit his inferiors, to use the orifices of a slave or a prostitute to relieve his needs much as he might use a urinal, had been ended. Paul’s insistence that the body of every human being was a holy vessel had triumphed. Instincts taken for granted by the Romans had been recast as sin. Generations of monks and bishops, of emperors and kings, looking to tame the violent currents of human desire, had laboured to erect great dams and dykes, to redirect their flood-tide, to channel their flow. Never before had an attempt to recalibrate sexual morality been attempted on such a scale. Never before had one enjoyed such total success.
‘We say with the dear apostle Pauclass="underline" “Through Christ crucified, who is within me and strengthens me, I can do anything.” When we do this, the Devil is left defeated.’17 Three decades after the coming of the plague to Siena, a young woman from the city by the name of Catherine wrote to a monk much troubled by how chill and inscrutable the workings of the universe appeared. Nothing, she reassured him – not disease, not despair – could snuff out a gift that was given in love to every mortal by God: free will. The phrase was one with an ancient pedigree. First coined by Justin, the great apologist of the generation before Irenaeus, it had offered to Christians a transformative reassurance: that they were not the slaves of the stars, nor of fate, nor of demons, but were instead their own masters. No surer way existed to demonstrate this, to stand free and autonomous in defiance of all the manifold evils of the fallen world, than to exercise continence. Catherine herself, by 1377, had become Christendom’s most celebrated exemplar of this. From childhood, she had made a sacrifice of her appetites. She fasted for days at a time; her diet, on those rare occasions when she did eat, would consist exclusively of raw herbs and the eucharist; she wore a chain tightly bound around her waist. Naturally, it was with sexual yearnings that the Devil most tempted her. ‘He brought vile pictures of men and women behaving loosely before her mind, and foul figures before her eyes, and obscene words to her ears, shameless crowds dancing around her, howling and sniggering and inviting her to join them.’18 But join them she never did.
Yet virginity, to Catherine, was not an end in itself. Rather, it was an active and heroic state. Proof against the touches of a man, her body was a vessel of the Holy Spirit, radiant with power. Catherine, the illiterate daughter of a dyer, was acknowledged by all as a donna, a ‘free woman’: ‘the owner and mistress of herself’. On ‘the tempestuous sea that is this life of shadows’,19 her virgin body was her vessel. Navigating the tides and currents of a cruelly troubled age, she came to offer to great multitudes of Christians a precious reassurance: that holiness might indeed be manifest on earth. Even the greatest were not immune to her charisma. In June 1376, she arrived in Avignon, where she set to urging the pope, Gregory XI, that he should signal his commitment to God’s purpose by returning to Rome. Three months later, he was on his way. The venture, to Catherine’s bitter disappointment, proved a disaster. Barely a year after arriving in Rome, Gregory XI was dead. Two rival popes, one an Italian and one an aristocrat from Geneva, were elected in his place. At stake was the issue of where the papacy should be based: the Lateran or Avignon. Catherine, loyally rallying to the Italian pope, Urban VI, hurried to his side. Her presence in Rome proved a key factor in shoring up his base. At one point, Urban even summoned his cardinals to one of the city’s churches, there to hear Catherine lecture them on the rights and wrongs of the schism. ‘This weak woman,’ he declared admiringly, ‘puts us all to shame.’20