I like the way you move (through complex architectural space)

Clio at the movies

Hello,

Welcome to another week and time for a Coffee with Clio. Grab a beverage and take a pause.

We took a break a week or so ago, and I knew immediately that I wanted to write about it here.

For a little while now, I’ve been wanting to go to the cinema. Sometimes there’s something I really want to see, but this was a more general thing: I wanted a big screen, a little pot of ice-cream with one of those clumsy little scoops for a spoon, the smell of popcorn that I always decide I don’t want quite as much as the ice-cream, the red velvet seats (our local cinema is a gorgeous old-fashioned place) and the fun of an evening out.

The problem for a lot of November and December was twofold. We didn’t really have time and, whenever I looked, there was nothing on I could even muster a ‘well, I guess that will do’ about.

Then, in the first week of January, a window opened in the diary and, looking up the local cinema timetable, so did a window of opportunity. In fact, we were suddenly spoiled for choice:

• Gladiator 2

• Nosferatu

• Conclave

Gladiator 2 seems pretty obviously terrible from the few seconds of trailer that I’ve seen, but also fun in that excessive, Ridley Scottish way that I could comfortably have enjoyed if it had been the only thing on.

Nosferatu wouldn’t normally move me deeply, and my partner is actively anti-horror, but Willem Defoe is pretty brilliant and this looks more like a costume drama than a slasher movie, so we’d probably have coped.

So, either of these may have won, if it hadn’t been for two friends, separately, telling us how great Conclave was. Also, I like Robert Harris’s historical fiction that I’ve read (Pompeii and Archangel, many years apart and, now, many years ago) and have been a fan of Ralph Fiennes since The English Patient.

Conclave it was!

One of the posters advertising Conclave, featuring Ralph Fiennes holding a white voting slip and John Lithgow and Stanley Tucci on either side, in profile. There were so many great performances in this move that every time I try to decide which was best, I reach a different conclusion. All three of these are in contention though.

I promise there are no spoilers in this post, and it is not a spoiler to tell you that it is a film about the election of a new pope, a process usually called a conclave. This is when the cardinals, the most senior clergy in the Catholic Church, are more-or-less sealed in together for as long as it takes to make a decision. It isn’t a complete locking away: it can take days and everybody needs to eat, sleep, use the bathroom, etc., but the idea of the conclave is to cut off the cardinals from as much outside interference as possible.

The film sort of assumes that the audience either knows or will figure much of this out, including, for example, the famous but not necessarily universally recognised smoke signals that are used to let the outside world know how the process is going. Every time the cardinals vote (how many times, when, etc., is largely determined by canon law and tradition), smoke is released: black smoke means that the vote wasn’t conclusive and the conclave continues. White smoke means that a new pope has been chosen.

This, for example, was the eruption of white smoke from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel on 13th March 2013 when Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected, choosing to become the incumbent Pope Francis I.

Conclave is not a historic film. The action is set in a pretty-much-now fictional reality. But a lot of that ‘action’ (consisting mainly in people having quiet conversations and a man in a long red robe soberly reading out numbers) is visibly rooted in deep historical traditions, and matters because of the historic importance of the role of pope.

There is a lot to recommend the film if you like any of intense, masterful performances of internal conflict and human frailty, mysteries, institutional politics, the slightly arcane rituals of the Catholic Church, or people doing cool things with language switching.

I absolutely loved it!

While there are a number of outstanding performances, though, the show is undoubtedly stolen by the Vatican itself. Parts of it were filmed on site and other parts, for example, the lengthy scenes in the the Sistine Chapel, where the meat of the conclave takes place, were filmed in incredibly realistic sets. (I had to check afterwards where it had all been shot.)

The result is entrancing. If you have been to the Vatican, the effect is probably most pronounced, but even if you haven’t, the Sistine Chapel and St Peter’s Square are so well known from television and images that I suspect you may still get a feeling of looking at familiar places from a strange new angle.

The power of place

Watching Conclave, a voice in my head would suddenly exclaim, ‘I’ve been there!’ A glimpse from an enclosed porch onto an area where tourists wander, a door that I’ve passed, with a tour guide telling us, ‘that is where the clergy stay’. Until now, that had been as far as I (and probably most of you) could go. In Conclave, the perspective flips. The nuns and tourists wandering around outside are glimpses of another world. Reality is behind the door, in the austere, identical rooms and slightly claustrophobic corridors where the cardinals stay.

The feeling was most intense with the grand staircases and squares, mostly filmed on site, and the Sistine Chapel, for which the set building is exquisite. I was fooled. These places are at the centre of the Vatican tourist circuit but look totally different as places of work.

Now is time for a confession: I don’t have much of a soul for Renaissance art. I find lots of things beautiful, but I remember growing up and being shown things that were evidently assumed to be transcendental and I just… didn’t get it. Maybe it was because I don’t like being told what to think. Maybe I find things lovelier the better I understand them and I didn’t then have much context for the Renaissance or most of the religious stories in the paintings. Maybe it just isn’t my thing.

Whatever the reason, I can now admire and enjoy Renaissance painting and sculpture, but I still don’t love it. It doesn’t make me swoon or gasp. I don’t understand, when people tell me, with total sincerity, that the increasingly lifelike rendering of human bodies and expressions in the art of Italy and the Low Countries from the 1500s onwards, makes it more emotional, more relatable, more moving.

I can see that it was a new way to paint - it looked different from what went before. And it was clearly technically difficult. A great revelation last year was really looking at the sculptures of Bernini: I don’t understand how you could make marble look so soft and fleshly.

The so-called ‘Rape (or Abduction) of Proserpina’, carved by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in 1621-22, depicts the scene from Roman myth, in which Proserpina is seized and carried to the underworld by the god, Pluto. Just look at the way his fingertips sink into the flesh of her thigh.

Still, I’m admiring a skill.

If you want to see me getting all emotional, show me a Byzantine icon or a Roman tomb relief or the dense, stylised, sculptures at Mahabalipuram or the much more recent, surreal paintings of Marc Chagal.

The ‘Descent of the Ganges’, carved into two huge boulders at Mahabalipuram for the Pallava Emperor Narasimhavarman I in the 7th century, shows the mythical decent of the sacred river from the heavens. Highlights include a cat performing a yogic posture in front of the lead elephant.

As a result, the Sistine Chapel was a bit of a disappointment when I first saw it. It doesn’t help that it is the grande finale of the walking route through the Vatican Museum, which is a bit of a slog unless you really do live for (mainly Renaissance) art. It is usually hot and crowded and is just stuffed with… stuff.

A single room of Roman sculpture in the Vatican Museum has treasures sitting up corners that another museum would have as their poster objects. And the same goes for art of every period, ceramics, tapestries… There is a whole gallery of gifts received by various popes, which I enjoy partly because I find myself thinking, ‘What the heck are you supposed to say when somebody gives you that?’

Anyway, the Vatican Museum: I absolutely do recommend it, but it is a lot. And there are very few benches, toilets or coffee stops along a route that can easily take 3-4 hours in a rush. As a result, when you finally get to the Sistine Chapel, it is a bit like being spewed out of the end of a long, sweaty, twisty waterslide into the crowded paddling pool at the end.

There, you stand around, pressed up against knots of people staring upwards or trying not to lose their tour group, conscious that there are more people pouring off the slide behind you all the time.

Guides aren’t allowed to talk in the chapel itself so they just wave flags or scarves discreetly to let people know it’s time to move on. In fact, nobody is meant to talk. It is a chapel, after all. But everybody does. So the whole experience is accompanied by rolling waves of whispers and stern but routine reprimands from the guards: ‘No talking. Be quiet. Shhh, shh…’.

And in the midst of all of this, the first time I saw it, I remember thinking, ‘It’s smaller than I expected.’

If that makes you think less of me, I’m sorry. But so it was. The paintings did not transport me. It was cool to see images that I knew so well from a million reproductions or close-up shots, but that, too, was actually a bit disappointing. It is much easier to see the stunning details of Michelangelo’s work on a screen or a print than on the walls or ceiling of the chapel itself, especially if, like me, you’re not the tallest tourist in the crowd.

It is almost impossible to get a sense of the Sistine Chapel from any single, still image, but this gives you an impression of the challenge. Every inch of the walls and ceiling is covered in images and every image is dense, complex and magnificently skilful. The floor is also pretty amazing: a multi-coloured stone patchwork of geometric shapes, laid in a technique called opus sectile, that, in many another building, would be the highlight of the visit but which hardly anybody even looks at here.

Anyway, I don’t mean to moan. It has been a privilege to see the Sistine Chapel, now twice, and the second time was actually much better. It was less crowded and I had learned a lot more about it since then, so that I could see how the whole decorative scheme was making radical and challenging artistic choices.

None of that prepared me for seeing the chapel in Conclave. Of course, it involved shots from angles that a tourist on the ground can never get, but it wasn’t that. Suddenly, it was revealed as a place where people did something purposeful and significant. The paintings were transformed into reflections on that seriousness: of worship and the administration of the global Roman Catholic Church.

Characters in the movie, in moments of deep emotion, find themselves glancing up at scenes on the walls and ceiling, or the camera pans over them as we sweep into a critical turning point in the plot. The paintings, as they were always intended to, serve as a commentary and an encouragement: to remember the temptations and fears of being human and the ideals of faith.

I said no spoilers, so all I’ll say is that the plot kept me guessing but, whatever the end had turned out to be, I’d still have been glad that I went. The power of the film really is the journey, and, in this case, it’s a journey through space that adds depth to the action every step of the way.

And the thing about a space like the Vatican is that this is exactly what it was always meant to do.

After the film, I found myself thinking back to a great article I read for teaching last year:

Kerscher, Gottfried, ‘Ubi Papa Ibi Roma. The Bishop of Rome’s Residence in the Fourteenth Century: Avignon’, in Princes of the Church: Bishops and Their Palaces (Routledge, 2017), pp. 249–65 (the Latin in the title means ‘Where the Pope is, Rome is’, or, I suppose, alternatively, ‘Rome is where the pope is’!)

It is about the Papal Palace in Avignon, and pretty much that whole phrase warrants some explanation.

What makes a palace a palace?

Let’s work it through from ‘palace’. Palaces are usually associated with kings/queens or emperors/empresses. They are generally considered to be lavish, large, complicated building complexes, where rulers live but also do much of their royal business, like meeting official visitors, hosting grand events, putting up dignitaries, etc. As a result, palaces need space for all of these activities but also for all of the things and people that make those activities possible:

• kitchens

• wardrobe rooms

• bathrooms

• stables

• room for soldiers or guards

• spaces for servants

• offices

• gardens or other outdoor space

• workshops

• libraries

• strongrooms

Palaces are often distinguished from other buildings where rulers might live, like castles or fortresses, by not being primarily fortified buildings. But then, some of them are!

What I’m doing here is pulling together some general expectations - what you might think of when I say palace - and practical things that this sort of building would need.

One of the points that Kerscher makes is that there isn’t really a much better definition of a palace than this. Sure, you could build a longer, more detailed or specialist list by mainly asking specialist scholars who work on palaces what they think of when you say palace, rather than just you and me, but the process is the same.

There is no handy ancient or medieval ‘Dummies Guide to Building a Palace’ or ‘100 Rooms Every Palace Needs’. No two buildings we call a palace are the same in layout, in the number or kinds of rooms (beyond generalisations - they all have rooms, kitchens, bathrooms, etc.).

Still, palaces: big, fancy places where rulers live and work. They were never all the same, but mostly, we can recognise one when we see one and that is a definition that we, and apparently people in the past, can work with.

Popes: a matter of definition

So, what about popes? They are, of course, the head of the Roman Catholic Church. The pope is the Bishop of Rome, and the head of the church hierarchy.

But popes, and indeed, other bishops, were (and are) also a great many other things: landowners, political leaders and, at various points in the Middle Ages, rulers, in the sense that they were the highest civic authority, as well as the religious commander of large territories.

Thinking of the medieval period, when the papal palace in Avignon was built, the church was a wealthy, powerful organisation and that made people holding high church office wealthy and powerful individuals. That meant they needed to do many of the same things as secular rulers:

• host visitors

• meet important people

• negotiate difficult discussions

• house servants

• protect themselves

In addition, they needed to be able to do things specific to their religious role, such as lead processions and, more than anything else, run religious services. Royal palaces often had chapels or a church, but we might expect these to be more important features of a papal or episcopal (bishop’s) palace.

So, finally, if a papal palace is where a pope lives and does business, what is one doing in Avignon?

Why Avignon?

The pope is the head of the Roman Catholic Church, the bishop of Rome. Surely, his palace would be in Rome?

Well, it is. Thinking back to Conclave, what it shows is the Vatican complex doing exactly that job. It is where the pope lives (and usually dies), where decisions are made about his replacement, where tourists, journalists and dignitaries throng.

The Vatican is a complicated, vast collection of buildings, squares, corridors, and stair cases, from vaults to rooftops, constructed over centuries. Each new generation has had to live not just with the buildings of past generations, but in many cases, also with how they have been used. Things change, of course. New construction and demolition happens, but inevitably becomes harder and harder over time, in terms of space, cost, tradition and expectation.

One of the most beguiling elements in Conclave for me was a series of scenes set in what is, effectively, the staff canteen, with its associated kitchens and a rather mundane, half-glass-walled side office that would have looked just fine in a grubby police procedural or a sitcom at a slightly pretentious utilities company. Ideas of convenience and necessity alter and even very old, very important buildings have to accommodate or disappear.

Still, much of the business of the papacy is bound up with the constancy of space. It isn’t supposed to change quickly.

The process of choosing a new pope did not always take place in the Sistine Chapel, because popes have been being selected for far longer than there has been a Sistine Chapel. Popes did not always greet crowds in St Peter’s Square from the famous balcony. But to change where those things happen now would need considerable effort (including expectation management), probably some good reason (like a need for temporary closure or a building actually being unsafe) and, above all, a good alternative: somewhere that does the same spatial things.

For a conclave, it would need to be a single room, large enough to hold and seat the college of cardinals, with nearby accommodation and places to eat, sleep, etc. and secure enough to shut out outside influences. It would need a chimney. And even if most rituals can be performed in extremis with a lot of compromise and corner cutting, it is important for an organisation like the Catholic Church (or, indeed, a kingdom or empire) not to look as if you have to do these things in extremis. Once or twice every few centuries looks like an organisation that can cope under pressure. More often than that starts to look like an organisation in crisis. Consequently, you would probably want a nearly-equivalently fancy, famous and spiritually significant building if, for whatever reason, a conclave couldn’t be held in the Sistine Chapel, so that it didn’t feel like ‘making do’.

For the meeting of the pope with the crowds, an alternative arrangement would still need a fairly safe, open, raised spot for the pope and a large, fairly easily accessible but manageable area for the crowds. And such an arrangement would have to contend not just with logistics but with the emotions of tradition. Millions of pilgrims every year travel to the Vatican, many in the hope of seeing the pope, imagining themselves in the crowd in the square, picturing the view up to the balcony. How much disruption to that imagined scene can a practice take before people start feeling as if it is ‘not quite the same’ in some important way?

As a result, traditions change slowly, often reluctantly, and usually because there is no other choice. Everybody just has to do their best and hope that ‘not quite the same’ can be ‘good enough’ until the new way becomes ‘the way it has always been’.

And so, back to ‘the Papal Palace in Avignon’ and why there is one of those, if, in general, the papal palace, and the business of being pope, takes place in Rome.

Between 1303 and 1376, for various reasons (papal relations with European monarchs and infighting between the great families of Rome), a succession of seven popes, starting with Clement V, decamped to France and, after a couple of years, settled in Avignon.¹

The papal palace was built over the course of around sixty years, making it incredibly interesting.

It is not a copy of the papal complex in Rome. After all, how could you replicate that? The Vatican is a product of the unique landscape and history of Rome. But the popes in Avignon still needed to do like popes in Rome. As a result, we see a suite of buildings that reveal an organisation figuring out what kinds of buildings you actually need to do that.

As Kerscher’s chapter shows, apart from all of the practicalities (kitchens, stables, workshops, etc.) the popes in Avignon had a need for sliding scales of privacy and grandeur, expressed in movement and architecture.

That makes sense: a palace - any palace - is a place where you go to see somebody very powerful, and that power is managed, in part, through buildings and space.

Power radiates from the person, whose decisions might have the force of law, the authority of the divine, or simply the backing of a quite sizeable army (often, some combination of all three).

The building of the papal palace in Avignon mirrors this radiating effect, with the shape, size, purpose and decoration of rooms and intervening spaces (corridors, squares, gardens, staircases), building a sense of growing wealth, security, anticipation and control as a visitor or resident got closer and closer to the pope himself.

Rooms become more decorative, culminating in a grand audience chamber and the pope’s private chambers. The spaces become more protected, with curtains, doors and narrow places that could serve as checkpoints, where people could be stopped on their inward journey, by convention, by orders or simply by armed functionaries. How far you got through the labyrinth was a sign of importance and privilege, just like tourists being shown that door to the clerical quarters in the Vatican.

On the way, though, other spaces, from guest quarters to the apartments of senior officials at the papal court provided other opportunities to slip messages more deeply into the system than you personally might be able to get, by having the ear of a friendly cardinal or access to one of the pope’s personal servants. Quiet corners and sheltered squares and corridors provided places to collaborate (or, indeed, conspire).

We see, in the plan of the Papal Palace at Avignon (and you can find out more about its history and see images of the spaces here), how power and administration and day-to-day life might actually work through the spaces built to house it.

Numbered plan of the Papal Palace at Avignon, from Kerscher p. 259.

In the plan above, 5 is the great chapel - an interface between the outside and the inside of the palace, where the pope would preside over services and (theoretically) anybody could enter. 8 and 9 next to it show where the original bishop’s quarters were, right next to the church.

That changed over time, though. The pope’s own quarters moved to what is marked on the plan as 1. To get to them (and the chapel), you now had to move through a complex of new rooms and courtyards. 3 is a huge practical space - kitchens and latrines.

Entry was through 13, the great gate, accessed via C, another huge open square, with 11, the hall of judgement, in front of it. 10 was where conclaves were held, and directly in front of the pope’s chambers were two large antechambers (2), where people waited and gathered.

It is rare to have this combination of two linked building complexes - the papal complex in Rome and its alternative in Avignon, designed to do the same job in different circumstances, as well as a lot of texts about both. We have people describing doing things in these places, from private letters, asking friends or potential allies to pass messages on, to descriptions of services or events.

Thinking about buildings, landscapes and how we move through them is often referred to by historians as ‘the spatial turn’. It wasn’t something I set out to get very involved with. Apart from anything, I can get lost in a parking lot (and, indeed, have!).

But I’m glad that didn’t turn out to matter. The spatial turn kept finding me. I have some inspiring scholars to thank for that, but also some incredible buildings, and at some point, without any great moment of revelation, it just seemed obvious that the places we move through shape us as much as we shape them.

So, do watch Conclave, if you haven’t and if what I’ve said here seems appealing, but most of all, take a moment as you wander around your home, your neighbourhood, your workplace. Look for the ways the spaces nudge in the direction of particular kinds of activities or make others difficult. The spatial turn can make a blockbuster movie and the everyday look equally different.

1. I’m glossing over a lot of complexity here, which is not, in any case, my period or region of specialism, and which can get very dense, very fast, but if you are interested, find out more: Zutshi, P. N. R., ‘The Avignon Papacy’, in The New Cambridge Medieval History, Volume VI c. 1300–c. 1415, ed. by Michael Jones, New Cambridge Medieval History, 6 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 653–73 <https://epdf.pub/the-new-cambridge-medieval-history-volume-6-c1300-c1415.html> [accessed 26 April 2018]