Italy Part 3: The Final Solution

The Italians seem to have the ability to indulge their baroque architectural fancies without incurring that tacky and tasteless look. Perhaps it’s just as well that English architects gave the baroque period a miss and stuck with the clean Palladian, otherwise I wonder if the English could have carried it off as successfully as the Italians.

Anyway, here is a picture of the interior of Farrara Cathedral, lavishly Baroque at least in the sense of being sumptuously carved and painted (since it is actually structurally Romanesque), and yet it still succeeds in conveying a sense of lightness and elegance.

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Coming to this Catholic temple cold one might have expected amidst all this lavish detail to find somewhere an effigy to a gloriously towering confident god, awesome and fearful to behold. However, in spite of the encrusting layers of religious elaboration that the Roman Catholic faith has accreted over the years it nevertheless retains the peculiarly Christian image of God, an image that never ceases to bring the genuine God seeker up with a jolt; the cruel image of a suffering, emaciated and humiliated God, the God of the cross. This is the God who gave up all for human salvation, even his claim to the Godhead. It was here in Farrara Cathedral that that image was centre stage:

Somehow the irony of finding this epitome of desolation and pain at the centre of a palace of décor fit for a king makes it all the more compelling. I’m no fan of Popes, priesthoods, processions and pomp, but piercing the accretions of many years of tradition, here we have it, the core of the faith – the God who in suffering and sacrifice leads from the front, the God who for a while made Himself lower than the worshippers who come to his Temples so that those worshippers might be raised up.