Cavallini, or A Bird Before Cecilia

[July 15, 2019]

Rome sweats. I forget it is near the ocean until I hear gulls. The combination of gulls and church bells is a strange one. It strikes me as I enter La Santa Cecilia. This is my second time here today. The morning’s visit feels a bit disastrous. But this feeling, I tell myself, is the product of nightmares—not, in any case, of actual events. Still, I sweat on my walk to the church (it is already noon and the bar I enter into is not a bar after all), and I bump into, or rather stumble upon, a dead bird. 

This bird is not a gull, but a kind of eagle or osprey. Knowing nothing about birds, I note the pattern of its wings: coffee-colored ringlets surround a milky center. The image leaves me queasy, unnerved. I return to the path from which I erred (the “err” that brings me to this bird to begin with). I continue to the church, to be quieted away upon entrance—“chiuso, chiuso, torni dopo”; “posso vedere gli affreschi senza guida?”; “più tarde, alle quattro, quattro”; “ma senza guida?”; “quattro.”  

4:30, back in the church: the bird has been cleared, but, I admit, I do not look closely for it. Fortunately, the frescoes can be seen without a guide, senza guida, for €2.50. I give €3 to a lady stationed in the church’s small gift shop. She directs me: exit the church, climb the stairs to the left of the portal, ring the bell there, and ask, politely, to see the frescoes. 

Cavallini’s Last Judgement stretches across an expanse of wall opposite the nave. Once visible to its congregation, the wall (during some point in the 15th, maybe 16th, century) is concealed: a choir built. Knowing or unknowing, nuns sit in front of the fresco on mahogany chairs. Few know of the fresco today, and visitation remains an isolated affair. A woman in her thirties enters the space. (The elevator’s ding promises the arrival of this only other guest.) We look for several moments, staring silently at our mutual subject. Could Cavallini have anticipated this kind of communion? “Incredibile,” I say. She nods. 

Cavallini’s angels flank a Christ, preserved in mandorla. His figures are to human scale. The viewer is level with them. The renovation of the space—the discovery and later exhumation of the frescoed wall—has left an aperture of three feet or so between viewing ground and visionary wall. Signs warns one not to step too closely. Red rope undergirds the separation. This distance seems fitting, the angels too “other,” too ethereal to approach. The wings offer themselves as I imagined: the gradation of measured tones produces a shimmering effect. Light catches. It falls.  

Perhaps Cavallini came across dead birds. Did he perch before them? collect them? He, too, must have looked and—not so suddenly as I—turned away. The angels’ wings glisten; elude, as if fleetingly. They divulge no referent beyond the material from which they emerge. Still, or perhaps because of this, they feign indifference to nature itself, and, in so doing, have the pretense—the ostentation—to claim immortality.  AN