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What's He Doing Here?

or, The Church Moves in Mysterious Ways

The tomb of Lorenzo Valla in the Lateran Basilica.

The Catholic Church is an extraordinary institution; she never ceases to amaze me.

Imagine with me for a moment that you were the pastor of this church, the bishop of this cathedral — OK, the Pope (since the Lateran Basilica is Rome's cathedral) — and you were about to bury a man who, although one of your priests, proclaimed the pursuit of pleasure to be the supreme good, was saved from a heresy trial only by the intervention of the King of Naples, spent his entire life trying to poke holes in Scripture, and worse yet, had exhaustively, conclusively, and embarrassingly debunked the foundation of your power as a civil authority and a nation-state by demonstrating it to be based on fraud: on a forgery that to boot, was in bad Latin; even inciting the inhabitants of Rome to take their city back from you.​a

Where would you have this man buried?

How about in an elegant marble tomb in a place of honor in your cathedral?

The man is Lorenzo Valla, a humanist who with a keen eye for what was correct Latin prose and what was not, and an equally keen taste for virulent criticism, set the stage for Martin Luther. The fact that he was right, that the so‑called Donation of Constantine (purporting to be a legal document by which the emperor Constantine handed the entire Roman empire over to the Popes, proved by him to be a forgery) was in mediocre, scarcely classical Latin, peppered with gross anachronisms, only made things worse, and it was only after 400 years of digging in its heels that the Church admitted as much. What earned Valla the fiercest enemies, though, was his blanket condemnation of most of his contemporaries for writing poor Latin! For his pains, he was accused of sexual depravities by Poggio Bracciolini, another great humanist scholar of the time who knew a thing or two about sodomy himself, mind you. Not to worry, Valla paid them all back, and then some.

The Church is not all about divine forgiveness, though. As a human institution she sometimes prefers to see people very dead before burying the hatchet; here, in 1825. The Pope (Leo XII) is not mentioned, rather the next couple of bureaucratic layers below him, but I can't imagine him not approving the belated honor:

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Notes:

a See for example the biographical sketch of Valla by Paolo Giovio, a contemporary — in fact, a student of Valla's. Notice that he gives a very different epitaph.

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b While I'm not absolutely certain of it, this can surely be no other than the eminent church historian of that name (Rome, 1751‑1826), who would have had both the interest and the influence to rehabilitate a fellow antiquarian.

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c Here we have a minor mystery. The inscription carefully notes the name of the chapel: the Chapel of the Manger. Yet the chapel where I photographed Valla's tomb in 2000, immediately next to the choir and the Pope's throne (greater honor really couldn't have been paid him, as a look at the plan of the church makes clear) is the Chapel of the Crucifixion, sometimes called the Chapel of St. John. I have been quite unable to find the slightest record of it, or indeed any other chapel in the Lateran, being referred to as the Chapel of the Manger.

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
I am indebted to Tyler Lansford for an important correction to my translation of the inscription.
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