by Daisy Dunn
When Pliny wasn’t confessing his secret desires he was seeking to capture the beauty of art and Nature in his verses. His contemporaries even sang some of his poems before an audience – though few of the lines have survived the course of history. In one poem Pliny attempted to describe the malleability of the human mind:
Praise is like wax, it softens, yields and obeys
The skilled fingers which press it into art;
Now shaping Mars or chaste Minerva,
Now resembling Venus, now Venus’ child;
And as sacred springs not only quench fires
But succour flowers and spring meadows, too,
So the mind of man ought to learn the flexibility
Of change; to be altered and influenced by malleable art.48
It was rather overwrought and scientific, but Pliny’s poem was at least inspired by life. The first ‘flowers and spring meadows’ were not to be found in Rome’s poetry schools but in the landscapes surrounding his Tuscan and Laurentine villas. At the coming of spring, the sheep and cattle and horses would be driven from the hills of Laurentum and ‘develop glossy coats from the grass and spring temperatures’ of the meadowland.49 Pliny had observed how his flowers responded to water, changing shape in accordance with their thirst. In his poem he compares them to the human mind in the mind’s ability to alter its form through absorbing the beauty of art.
The mind and the meadow are associated through Pliny’s allusion to wax, the product of the bees which pollenate the flowers. The most industrious of all the creatures to feature in the Elder’s Natural History, the bee had an important role to play in Pliny’s life, too, flitting through his fields as soon as she stirred from hibernation with the flowering of the bean plant.50 The urgency of her work is missing from most men’s lives. The bee draws pollen from the meadows while she still can, knowing that the opportunity will soon pass. Pliny was already as diligent as a honey bee, but in his poem he proposed to display something of her flexibility. Heeding his own advice to refresh his mind by altering the seeds he sowed, he determined to move with the seasons.
For the ‘sacred springs’ of his poem, Pliny needed to look no further than his home town of Comum (modern Como) and its lake – which was known in ancient times as Larius. On the lake’s southern shores, near the modern town of Torno, was a spring beside a waterfall that impressed Leonardo da Vinci no less than Pliny and his uncle with its peculiar motion. Centuries after Pliny the Elder first recorded the water’s continuous ebb and flow, Leonardo observed the spring swelling for six hours and then diminishing so far for the next six that it was ‘like watching water in a deep well’.51 In fair weather, Pliny would lie down beside the spring and remove a ring from his finger. Placing the ring on the edge of the rocks, he would observe the ‘great phenomenon’ of water rising to conceal it, and then falling to reveal it again.52
The sight of the water and its curious rise and fall brought Pliny to the minds of Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley during their visit to Lake Como in April 1818. This was the first lake they had seen since Lake Geneva two years earlier, and for Shelley, who spent much of his life in boats, something of a respite after the Swiss experience. Eighteen sixteen had been the ‘Year Without a Summer’, the Tambora volcano having erupted in Indonesia and blackened the skies across much of Europe and eastern America. Arriving in Switzerland in the spring of that year only to find it still covered in snow, the couple had resolved to make the most of the cold and murky darkness by exchanging ghost stories over the long nights with Lord Byron and Dr John Polidori. While Shelley found himself sufficiently spooked by the tales to fall into a hallucinatory stupor, Mary suffered a nightmare in which there appeared to her ‘the hideous phantasm of a man’, still at first, then awakened ‘on the working of some powerful engine’.53 Her dream spawned Frankenstein, which was published anonymously two years later.
The Shelleys travelled to Como a few months after the book came out in search of better weather and health. ‘This lone lake, in this far land,’ as Shelley described it in his Rosalind and Helen, struck them as the perfect retreat for the coming summer.54 The volcanic gloom had cleared by the time they arrived in April, and it was in the course of seeking a villa to rent that they found themselves thinking of Pliny. Having made their way from Como they came to ‘a villa called the Pliniana, from its being built on the site of a fountain, whose periodical ebb and flow is described by the younger Pliny in his letters’, which Mary had recently been reading.55 The fountain and its spring must also have been familiar to Shelley, who had translated almost half the Natural History in his youth, including the passage in which Pliny the Elder described their ebbing waters.56 The Pliniana villa had been built in 1573 around the spring. The villa’s courtyard overlooked the lake on one side. The other side was occupied by the fountain and, as Mary Shelley recalled, ‘bounded by a mountain, from whose stony side gushed, with roar and splash, the celebrated fountain’.
The Shelleys were quite taken with the property but failed to obtain the lease. According to Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley’s stepsister and mother of Byron’s daughter Allegra, Percy had the misfortune of being taken into custody after deciding to fire his pistol in ‘some solitary place’ on the lake. He was released only after Mary gave assurance that he was not intending to kill himself (or presumably anyone else).57 The episode may have cost him the Villa Pliniana or it may have been a story invented to disguise Shelley’s impregnation of a servant during the trip.58 Whatever it was that prevented the Shelleys from securing the Villa Pliniana, their memories of Pliny’s spring stayed with them long after they had left. More than twenty years later, Mary was still thinking of ‘the Pliniana, which remained in my recollection as a place adorned by magical beauty’.59 The influence of Pliny’s spring and waterfall (as well as the Swiss Alps) can also be seen in the imagery of Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, a story of the ancient counterpart to ‘the modern Prometheus’ of Mary’s Frankenstein: ‘Like fountain-vapours when the winds are dumb,/ That climb up the ravine in scattered lines./ And, hark! is it the music of the pines?/ Is it the lake? Is it the waterfall?’60
Now a luxury hotel, Villa Pliniana – Pliniana like Pliny the Elder’s favourite cherry – retains its mysterious spring. It runs under the building; open a window on an otherwise unremarkable corridor and it’s there, as loud as the flow from a dozen ruptured pipes, a glittering white slide upon a stairwell of rock. The spring continues to flow and tinkle over the moss of the courtyard pool even when, quite without warning, the water ceases to gush down the mountain side. For months at a time the cliff lies dry. Rainfall has no apparent influence upon the proclivities of its flow. On the terrace at dusk, some visitors gamely soak their hands in the mountain-cold waters where Pliny once drank and watched ‘with the greatest pleasure’ before retrieving his ring from the rocky ledge. As they repair to their rooms the more circumspect guests notice that, just as suddenly as it vanished, the waterfall has begun to play again.
Pliny never stopped wondering how the spring worked. Does it follow the progress of the waves, or is it like a river, forced back as it flows towards the sea by the strength of the wind or tide? Does spiritus, Nature’s breath, the same force that his uncle believed could trigger earthquakes, pass in and out of hidden apertures? Puzzled by the ebb and flow of the spring in particular, Pliny wrote to a friend, a senator named Licinius Sura, to ask him for an explanation. He was the same friend he wrote to regarding the possible existence of ghosts. Although Pliny did not in general keep practical friends – sunt enim omnes togati et urbani (‘they are all toga-wearers and city men’) – Licinius Sura clearly had a keen interest in natural and supernatural phenomena.61 He is known to have been a wealthy man, who built a gymnasium for the people of Rome, as well as a gifted orator.62 He later became such a good friend to the emperor Trajan that he hosted him for dinner and was even honoured by him with a public funeral and statue when he died. Pliny clearly considered him a man of great intellect –
Sura was ‘the most famous of learned men’, according to Martial – and the likeliest of his friends to understand the mysteries of Nature.63 Licinius’ response to Pliny’s letter does not survive, but perhaps he explained to him that the depth of the water was determined by the displacement of air by a siphon-like mechanism within the spring.64
Pliny made use of a similar mechanism in the ‘Tuscan villa’ he owned in the countryside near modern Perugia. In the shade of four vine-covered Carystian marble columns, he kept a curved bench made of shining white marble, from which would pour forth little jets of water ‘as if squeezed out by the weight of the people who sat on it’.65 The water collected in a delicate basin fitted with a siphon so that it never overflowed. When he wanted to be particularly lavish, Pliny would fill the basin with little models of ships and birds, upon which he would balance his lightest hors d’oeuvres for dinner guests to fish out at their leisure. The starters and heavier courses would be arranged around the basin’s edge, like his ring upon the spring’s verge. If Pliny had discovered the secret of the rising and falling spring near Comum, then he put this knowledge to imaginative use in his majestic floating dining table.
SEVEN
The Shadow of Verona
Filled as our culture is with the classical spirit, we can hardly imagine how deeply the human mind was moved, when, at the Renaissance, in the midst of a frozen world, the buried fire of ancient art rose up from under the soil.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance, 18731
Pliny once visited a lake filled with floating islands, ‘all of them grassy with reeds and sedge and whatever else fertile marsh at the edge of a lake puts forth’.2 Lake Vadimon (Lago di Bassano), situated some eighty kilometres north of Rome, captivated him with its rare beauty. It is small and round, ‘very like a wheel lying on its side’; its water was said to be so healing that it could mend fractured bones.
Pliny stooped to smell it: sulphuric. And to taste it: medicinal. While the lake had no boats, for it was ‘sacred’, the sight of the islands passing over its surface called to mind a busy harbour. When the smaller islands weren’t attaching themselves to the larger ones, ‘like skiffs to merchant ships’, they were brushing past each other and knocking pieces out of each other’s sides. If not entirely unlike the pumice islands which formed on the waters off Pompeii in the early stages of the eruption, the floating masses of Vadimon delighted Pliny as they raced one another over the ‘whiter than sky blue’ water.
The most extraordinary spectacle of all was of cattle inadvertently stepping onto the islands while they grazed. It was only when the poor cows were some distance from the mainland that they realised that the ground was moving. Though terrified to be surrounded by water, they seemed to Pliny to be oblivious to disembarking onto terra firma once the wind had blown their islands back to the banks. ‘There are very many things in our city and near our city which we know neither with our eyes nor with our ears,’ Pliny wrote soon after visiting the lake for the first time. He left convinced that people were too quick to go abroad in search of new sights when there were so many wonders ‘under their eyes’. He asked himself why this was and considered that it was not necessarily through desire for exoticism, or even avarice, as Pliny the Elder had often supposed, but simply because we put off going to see what we know we can visit at any time.
Pliny could never have been accused of overlooking the places nearest him. Even in his home town of Comum he was forever going in search of new sights. Lake Larius may have lacked the symmetry and cows of Lake Vadimon, but it had its own quirks which he was only too keen to explore. From the mysterious spring where he placed his ring he would wander down to the coast and boat up the lake. Once he was far enough out, he enjoyed looking at the villas on the shoreline and trying to spot the private terraces and gardens which were ordinarily hidden from view.
He was not far now from the main town. Novum Comum, as it was formerly known, was founded by Julius Caesar in 59 BC within a neat, rectangular grid of roads to the south of the lake. Going some way towards compensating for the Romans’ defeat of the local tribes in 196 BC, Caesar had conferred first Latin rights then Roman citizenship upon the people of the new town, which entitled them to vote in Rome’s elections.3 A vibrant centre with high walls and low horizons, Comum was accessible from both water and road. Visitors from nearby Mediolanum (Milan) and its environs came by the latter, filing into the town via a large gate flanked by two octagonal towers. There was one entrance for pedestrians and two for horses and carriages; their heavy wheels left grooves in the stone, much of which was quarried from Moltrasio, just across the lake from Torno and its spring.
Limestone from the same quarry was used in the construction of a large set of baths nearby. A maze of rooms – rectangular, octagonal, crescent-shaped – was laid out between barrel-vaulted corridors adorned with richly decorated red walls and rounded archways.4 Every year during the festivals of Neptune, the bathers and exercisers of Comum would receive free perfumed oil at the bequest of one Lucius Caecilius Cilo, a local magistrate who set aside a generous 40,000 sesterces for this purpose in his will.5 He has been identified variously as Pliny’s father, paternal grandfather, and great-uncle, but could equally have been a more distant relation.6 Pliny provided in his own will for the construction and decoration of baths in the town. Perhaps his funds went towards developing the existing set, which were expanded and refurbished in the century he died.7 (Their foundations survive today in the basement of a car park.)
Buildings were being erected in such numbers both within and beyond Comum’s town walls that Pliny could only ‘rejoice, because my patria is going from strength to strength’.8 There were temples to Jupiter and Mercury, and one to Rome and her emperors which was built by a local magistrate and military engineer named Lucius Caecilius Secundus, another contender for being Pliny’s father, and dedicated by his son.9 A magnificent sculpture of Augustus in the guise of Pontifex Maximus presided over what was probably the forum, at Piazza San Fedele.10 There was also a theatre and, just beyond the walls, on the very outskirts of the town, a meticulously designed brothel. A labyrinth of small rooms, each with their own heating system, was arranged around a central courtyard and large communal kitchen.11 The complex extended to perhaps 6,000 square metres. Business must have been thriving.
Pliny never tired of coming back to Comum. It was his deliciae, his ‘delight’, a word he might sooner have used to describe a lover or a pet than a town.12 Whenever he was away he longed for its fishing (the lake is particularly rich in trout, pike and perch) and hunting ‘as an ill man desires wine and baths and springs’.13 Though never the most dexterous of sportsmen, Pliny boasted of being able to fish and hunt and read while he was here – all at the same time. You appreciate how far he was exaggerating when you see how steeply the mountains rise from the lake. The people of Comum appear to have had rather a habit of magnifying the opportunities of their landscapes. A large relief sculpture exhibited in their town celebrated their prowess at hunting with horses, dogs and spears.14 One bold hunter is shown grappling with an enormous lion.
Comum was a hunter’s paradise but also an Arcadia. Pliny had a friend, a fellow equestrian named Caninius Rufus, who transformed his corner of the town into something out of Virgil’s Eclogues. His villa had a colonnade where it was ‘always spring’ with views over a shady grove of plane trees, sun-soaked, open-air baths, and a sparkling green stream that flowed into the lake.15 Italian archaeologists have been eager to locate it on Via Zezio on the lower slopes of the Colle di Brunate mountain.16 Built in the late first century AD, possibly over three storeys, the villa they excavated had a long paved walkway, black and white mosaic floors, and extravagantly adorned walls.17 Some had frescoes inspired by the waves of the sea or lake. Others featured niches mosaicked in blue, turquoise, green, yellow, brown and white glass – a ‘new invention’ when Pliny the Elder was alive.18 Pliny made no hesitation in crowning Caninius Rufus’ house suburbanum amoenissimum after the locus
amoenus or idealised countryside setting of pastoral poetry. Amorous shepherds may not have been reclining beneath its porch, but the goddess of love was not far away; an exquisite bronze and gilt statuette of the Venus Pudica was discovered in a charred wooden box at the site.19
In the sixteenth century, the Como scholar Benedetto Giovio stumbled upon some tesserae of an ancient mosaic which he believed to have come from the villa of Caninius Rufus. The remains lay at Borgo Vico, at the south of the lake, some distance from the town and the Colle di Brunate. When Benedetto’s brother Paolo saw this stretch of coast he felt it was so evocative of the plane trees and ancient baths and springtime walks which Pliny had described at Caninius Rufus’ villa in his letter, that he determined to establish a villa-museum on top of it.20
It was in the brothers’ interests to highlight as many Como sites as possible in Pliny’s letters to counter the claims of the Veronese. In constructing his museum on the supposed grounds of Caninius Rufus’ former estate, Paolo Giovio established a new Plinian landmark. When the building was finished in 1543 its walls were hung with hundreds of portraits of famous poets, scholars, politicians and artists. The portraits of the artists were a particular attraction. Paolo Giovio had read an early draft of Vasari’s (ultimately illustrated) Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects and urged its immediate publication before it could be illustrated.21 While it was not Paolo’s intention to divert readers from Vasari’s book, anyone who did want to look into the eyes of the most celebrated artists needed only to make their way to his Plinian museum. His magnificent building had views over the lake and a balcony to fish from in homage to one of the villas Pliny described in his letters.22
