Mission & Justice

Peter N. Miller; 28/10/08

Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic; By Ingrid D. Rowland; Hill & Wang
On February 17, 1600, Giordano Bruno was executed for his ideas, burned at the stake in the centre of Rome, his tongue spiked to prevent him from speaking or crying out. In her provocative biography, a marvellous feat of scholarship, Ingrid Rowland brings before us the pieces of an extraordinary 16th-century life. She begins, in fact, with that death and with the memorial to it, the famous statue of the murdered thinker, on the Campo dei Fiori. Most of the time the brooding figure on his plinth is lost amid the diurnal market stalls and nocturnal revels that make this Roman Covent Garden such a crossroads. But on one day a year, Rowland reminds us, things on the Campo dei Fiori are different. The mayor of Rome comes and lays a wreath in the name of his city, and then various groups of ideologues come and turn the sculpture into a soapbox. The place has been consecrated to freedom of thought and speech for a long time. Already in the 19th century, when the sculpture was commissioned by the students of Rome and dedicated to a new patron saint, it was seen as a blow against papal domination of secular, modern and (it was hoped) enlightened interests. At first, Bruno’s back was turned to the Vatican, but this was too much even for those who despised clericalism. Now his hooded eyes glower in the direction of his persecutors.
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