A Roman Echo in Greyfriars: the John Bayne Monument and Tripoli
At first glance, the John Bayne monument in Greyfriars Churchyard looks like a striking piece of 17th-century Scottish funerary art. It may also reveal something else: a Roman connection.
In his study of the monument, Joe Rock argues that its design may have been inspired by the Roman Arch of Marcus Aurelius at Tripoli, a four-sided arch in North Africa dated to AD 163–4. He points in particular to the monument’s overall arch form and to details such as the central lozenge in the interior, which he compares with lozenge decoration in the Tripoli arch.
This is not a Roman monument in the usual sense. It is an Edinburgh tomb, erected in 1684 for John Bayne of Pitcairlie, a Writer to the Signet. Yet Rock suggests that its designer was drawing on Roman forms in a very deliberate way.
Rock argues that the monument’s meaning is not just architectural. He suggests it is also shaped by Virgil’s Aeneid. In Book VI, Aeneas reaches a place where the road divides: one way leads to punishment, the other to Elysium. Rock sees the Bayne monument as expressing exactly that idea — a man at the moment of death, standing at a crossroads.
The monument is not simply “classical” in a general sense. Rock’s argument is that it uses the image of a quadrifrons arch — an arch type often associated with crossings and transitions — to express a spiritual journey. A quadrifrons arch (from the Latin quattuor for “four” and frons for “front”) is a type of ancient Roman monument designed with four faces and four arched openings, one on each side. Architecturally, it is essentially a four-way archway. While a standard triumphal arch typically has one or three openings and is designed to be passed through in a single direction, a quadrifrons is built over a crossroads, allowing traffic to pass through it from four different directions. Rock suggests that the Bayne monument includes features specifically linked to the Tripoli arch, rather than to some generic Roman model.
How could such an influence have reached Edinburgh?
Rock points to several possibilities. James Smith, who may have had a hand in the monument’s meaning or design, studied in Rome. He may have encountered ideas and drawings connected with the classical world there. Rock also notes that Britain had a consul in Tripoli from 1658, and that travellers, merchants and antiquarians were active in the wider Mediterranean world in the 17th century.
Source note:
This post is based on Joe Rock’s article on the John Bayne monument in the Book of the Old Edinburgh Club. The argument that the monument relates to the Arch of Marcus Aurelius at Tripoli, and that its symbolism draws on Virgil’s Aeneid, comes from that study.
See also Joe Rocks website A Neoclassical Puzzle
