Mouth of Truth
The Bocca della verità outside Santa Maria in Cosmedin is one of Rome’s best known landmarks. It features significantly in that immortal film, Roman Holiday, but its history reaches back far beyond celluloid into the mists of history. The story goes that any liar who places a hand in its mouth will have it bitten off. In daylight, the round face looks pleasant enough. The legend attaching to it seems a bit of a joke. Illumined at night by a strange yellow light, the effect is different. The monument looks lunar, sinister, cruel. It makes me reflect that truth on its own, detached from virtue, can have an aspect that is vindictive and destructive. To be life-giving, truth must be suffused with humanitas, which to the ancients was a way of expressing ‘compassion’. The truth, said St Paul, must be enacted in love (Eph 4:15). Detached from love, it risk being marked by the the old titan’s features: an indiscreet, cold, incurious stare and a voracious mouth.
