Swooning Over the Super-Small

If models and miniatures make you ooh and ahh, have I got a castle for you.

When I was a kid, I collected little animal families made of bone china that I loved with an intensity I can still feel decades later. Too cute not to touch, most of them ended up sporting blobs of glue on their delicate, spindly legs. Then there were my trolls (my favorite was, of course, the smallest one), for which I made cardboard houses complete with curtained windows and painted shutters like the ones on most houses in Italy. And for me, no visit to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History was complete without a 20-minute inspection of the 5-story, 23-room Doll’s House. It’s home to 19 people and 20 pets and 1,354 things—tiny dishes and sponges and brooms, paintings and vases, bedside tables and clawfoot tubs. The best part? The attic, jammed with relics and memories.

So you can imagine my delight when I went to Castel Sant’Angelo recently and discovered there’s a new permanent exhibit that features models of the mausoleum/fortress/prison/castle/pope’s residence in its various configurations over the centuries. The actual building crouches, menacing and somehow triumphant, at the north end of the Sant’Angelo Bridge, where rows of stunning angel sculptures designed by Bernini in 1688 guard the approach.

Castel Sant’Angelo today. All photos mine.

It’s a fascinating place, oozing with atmosphere—dungeons, despair, death—and it comes with a bonus: the hands-down best view of Rome, which you can enjoy along with a cocktail at an upper-level bar.

After wandering up a long incline on which the remains of Emperor Hadrian once traveled, we arrived at the new exhibition space and discovered six models, each painstakingly done, each worthy of admiration and awe.

Castel Sant’Angelo’s first incarnation: the Mausoleum of Hadrian, ca. 139 AD. Model constructed by Giuseppe Graziosi in 1901.

Ruins of the Mausoleum of Hadrian. Model constructed by Giuseppe Francesangeli in 1944.

Why, I wondered as I studied these masterpieces, are miniatures so appealing? Why does my voice rise an octave on the word adorable, and why do I stare at models in a sort of glassy-eyed stupor, as if I’d consumed too many mind- and body-altering substances? Well, as it turns out, drugs are involved. Okay, not drugs, exactly, but chemicals. Hormones, to be specific. We are biologically programmed to like small things because doing so creates the desire to nurture, which in turn helps us survive.

And here I thought cute was just cute. But no.

In an article in Real Simple, journalist/professor Elizabeth Yuko explains the “psychology of cuteness.” Simply put, small + cute = desire to nurture. That applies to babies and puppies, and yes, tiny things. Yuko writes: “Part of the whole helpless-but-irresistible, big-eyed baby narrative is that seeing these adorable tiny humans or animals releases oxytocin—aka the ‘love hormone’—which is involved with forming emotional bonds.” (This according to Varun Choudhary, MD, a board-certified forensic psychiatrist.) Yes, it’s that oxytocin, the same one that stimulates uterine contractions during childbirth. In this case, though, it makes us feel us all warm and fuzzy and reduces blood pressure and cortisol levels (which rise during times of stress).

But oxytocin can’t do the whole job on its own. It partners with dopamine, a feel-good hormone. In the same article, Yuko quotes clinical counselor and mental health practitioner Pareen Sehat: “Dopamine is one of the most important hormones that triggers happiness and any positive emotional response. Whenever we see tiny things we find cute and attractive, our brain releases dopamine and makes us feel happy.”

Other factors are at play according to this article in The Guardian, specifically the return to the childhood satisfaction of feeling powerful (as children, we are giants to our tiny toys) and the pleasure of visualizing the whole of something that’s too big to grasp in real life. Author Simon Garfield writes: “The ability to enhance a life by bringing scaled-down order and illumination to an otherwise chaotic world—a world over which we may otherwise feel we have little control—cannot be overvalued. [. . .] At its simplest, the miniature shows us how to see, learn and appreciate more with less.”

Maybe. Probably. But I wasn’t thinking any such thing at the Castel Sant’Angelo exhibit. I was marveling at the walk through time these models offered. It’s one thing to know a castle was once a fortress was once a tomb of mind-boggling scale, but to see what it looked like, to understand the transformation of a building in concrete terms, is another kettle of fish.

Castel Sant'Angelo in 1500, during the time of Pope Alexander VI (the infamous Rodrigo Borgia) and before the demolitions done by Pope Urban VIII. Model built by Ermenegildo Menichetti in 1927.

Castel Sant’Angelo’s history spans more than 1800 years—quite seductive to those of us who like the super-old as much as the super-small. The Roman emperor Hadrian, who reigned from 117 to 138 AD, designed the mausoleum, which was built in 135–139 AD. A few hundred years later, in the fifth century, the mausoleum became a fortress, gaining the name Castel Sant’Angelo in 590 when Pope Gregory I saw a vision of a sword-bearing archangel Michael atop the building—come to protect the people from the plague then devastating Rome, said the pope. Nearly a thousand years later, in the 1500s, the fortress became a castle, and for decades it served as courtroom, prison, and papal residence.

Castel Sant'Angelo in the1700s, modified by Pope Urban VIII. Model built by Ermenegildo Menichetti in 1942.

On a side note, Castel Sant’Angelo is a prime example of the kind of recycling of sites and materials so often found in Italy. Catholic churches built on the ruins of ancient temples (like the churches of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome and Assisi); columns and cornices and slabs of marble carted off to become part of something “new” (like the salvaged columns in Perugia’s Chiesa di San Michele Archangelo and marble veneers on the gallery walls at Rome’s Galleria Borghese).

Castel Sant'Angelo in 1943. Sorry, I forgot to note who built the model.

In Italy, history is everywhere, layers of it, revealing egos and grandiosity, sophisticated design skills and innovative construction methods, emotions and sentimentality and the drive for power. Fortunately, in many museums here in Italy, some of history’s residue takes the form of models and miniatures. Sure, they’re imitations, but they’re also pint-sized and utterly adorable.

You’ll find this wooden miniature of Florence’s Duomo inside the real thing.

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Books of the week:

·       The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

·       Fleeting Rome: In Search of La Dolce Vita by Carlo Levi

Poem of the week:

• “Go Thou to Rome” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (part of “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats”)

Comments? Thoughts? I’m all ears.