Today is the feast of St Thomas of Villanova (1488-1555), a Spanish Augustinian friar who was archbishop of the see of Valencia for the last 11 years of his life. After completing his studies at the University of Salamanca, the oldest in Spain, he joined the Augustinians, and served first as prior of his monastery, then visitor general and prior provincial for the regions of Castile and Andalusia. He was well-known as an excellent preacher, and a reformer in an age very much in need of reform. In 1544, when he was offered the archbishopric of Valencia, he had to be compelled to accept the office by his religious superiors as a matter of obedience; his subsequent career proved the truth of Aristotle’s dictum that power is best given to those who do not want it. Throughout his life, he was also known for his extraordinary charities to the poor; the Breviary notes that the very bed in which he died was one he had previously given away to a needy person.
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| The Charity of St Thomas of Villanova, ca. 1660, by the Spanish painter Mateo Cerezo (1637-66) |
St Thomas was canonized in 1658 by Pope Alexander VII, who had been elected to the papacy about 3½ years earlier. Alexander’s predecessor but one, Urban VIII (r. 1623-44), had been the first pope to regularly spend his summers in the town of Castel Gandolfo, about 16 miles to the southeast of Rome, a tradition which has continued on and off to this day. (Among recent popes, both Pius XII and Paul VI died there; Pope Leo has spent a good deal of his time there in his 4½ months.) Pope Urban built the pontifical villa whose main entrance dominates one end of the town’s main piazza, while Alexander greatly enlarged the piazza, and commissioned his friend, the famous architect and sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, to build a new church for the town, named for his first canonized Saint.
The church and piazza seen from within the central door of the papal villa.
The façade as it appeared before a recent restoration, (note the crest of Pope Benedict XVI over the door)...
Bernini is, of course, the name most associated with the term Baroque, which in our own time is generally thought of as a very busy style. Compared to the sterility of so much modern architecture, including, alas, even the architecture of modern churches, this is understandable. But the artists of the Baroque saw themselves as the simplifiers of art, compared to the very busy Mannerist style that preceded them, and in this church, one of the very few in which Bernini, we see why. The walls are not festooned with complicated decorations; large parts of them are flat and white. The painting of the Crucifixion over the high altar stands in a transitional place, between the altar itself and God the Father, a pure white sculpture in the upper part of the reredos. The building is not plain by any means, but there are very few different kinds of things, and very few different colors.
The spandrels under the dome are filled with relief sculpture of the four evangelists, and inside the dome itself are eight medallions depicting events of St Thomas’ life. These events, like the Saint himself, now belong to the kingdom of heaven, represented by the much more luminous upper part of the church.
One of the side altars is dedicated to the Assumption. For a long time, it was the custom that if the pope was in Castel Gandolfo for the feast of the Assumption, he would celebrate the Mass of the day in this church,
a custom happily revived this year by Pope Leo.
The other side altar is dedicated to St Thomas.
The stem of Pope Alexander VII on the counter-façade.
A relics of St Sebastian and statues of Saints on the altar of the Assumption.
The preaching pulpit
The baptismal font.
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