Scipio the Continent

Napoleon once said, "this old Europe bores me".  No wonder then that he wanted to kill it.   There was a temptation, still alive today, to regard the classics as something tired, old and dead.   There is a very real inducement to do this as Latin and Greek has been virtually expunged from all academic expectation.  So, too, are the classics, relegated by the perversity of multiculturalism to languish in old libraries and the few classics departments where it is still lingers on like a flickering light among the tombstones and memorials in the cavernous darkness of this present age.

If there were a temptation to join with those who don't know Ozymandias and stare in incomprehension when his name is mentioned, it is a temptation to that same desolation from which he suffered as part of the poet Shelley's ironic contrast, part of that motive force of self-destruction so prevalent in modernity which celebrates the evil as good, and portrays the most deplorable and vile scenarios for the viewing public, to desensitize their finer natures...as if despising creation itself.  If there were a temptation to join that vexing crowd of moral zombies, it would be staved off by a quiet journey to stand before the plan for that drawing by the Venetian painter Pordone, Giovanni Antonio de' Sacchis (c. 1484 – 1539), called, "The Continence of Scipio"

It was astonishing to encounter this work in a public gallery, thrown together by the curators who now guard these collections, what might be a fossilized rendering of the moral refinement of a bygone age, unexpected, perhaps passed by without much of a look.  This painting demonstrates at once the hand and vision of a man raised and bred in Christendom, and who makes something he has witnessed through a lens, peering back through the ages, to the heart of noble antiquity where the conquering General Scipio is offered one of the vanquished city's maidens to have for pleasure;  but he astonishes us, astonished his men, astonished the grateful people of the captured city and pleased the young girl, by having her fiance restored to her as a free gift.

Such grace, nobility and beauty amid the cruelty of war, particularly a war as brutal as that between Carthage and Rome, is captured for us, held in thrall as it were in a modern museum, like an exotic captive, war booty from some revolutionary's conquests, and brought for the contemplation of the masses who pass it by, perhaps unremarked, the way they carry on under the roofs and lattices of Europe's prayer in stone, Her glorious Cathedrals.

It is a work of great moment, because it is a great moment of art history, and of history, of the story of a man, that any man, even a great man though he,  great not unlike the now forgotten Ozymandias, refuses to do what he is expected to do and acts graciously to those in his power, acting for their good, for no other reason than his own virtue.

Is it any wonder, considering the men who are our masters now, that the classics are no longer taught in schools, and that the master works, and the classical education that was their matrix, instead are pushed aside as mere curiosities, antiquarian interests and dusty mementos of the past.