Part
21: The Vatican
Tuesday October 8:
Another
trip on the Metro, across the Tiber to see the Vatican Museums, the Sistine
Chapel, and St Peter’s.
In her notes Bonnie summed up this day: “People, more people. Buildings, more
buildings.” To that I would add “lines,
more lines.” Vatican City is a crowded
place. When we got back to Portland
there was an article in the paper saying that the management of the Vatican
Museums is thinking about limiting the number of tourists. If the crowds get any bigger they will stress
the air conditioning system which will lead to potential harm of the art. There were five million visitors in 2011,
about the same as the Grand Canyon.
Luckily all this was indoors, because halfway through the journey,
there was a serious cloudburst which would have ruined anything that was
outside.
Our guide through the Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel and St
Peter’s was Christopher. Guides are
good, very good. In his guidebook Rick
Steves has several pages on strategies for negotiating the Vatican – it’s complicated. A guide makes it simple. The downside is that you have to stick with
the group; so you can’t linger or branch out and see something that you want to
see. But I’ll stick with the guide.
The Vatican Museums are
one of Europe’s “top three or four houses of art...with four miles of displays”
(Rick Steves).
Photography (but no flash) is allowed in all the museums except
the Sistine Chapel. But the crowds make
it difficult.
Pope Julius II founded the museums in the early 16th century when
he sent Michelangelo and Giuliano de Sangallo to check out the authenticity of
a sculpture of Laocoön and his Sons in a vineyard near the basilica of Santa
Maria Maggiore in Rome. On their
recommendation, he bought the sculpture and put it on public display at the Vatican.
We were able to get a picture of Laocoon. There is a lot that is not known about this
statue, but it seems to date from somewhere between 200 BC and 70 AD.
In his history of Rome, Robert Hughes describes Julius II
(1503-1513) as a “monster of will and appetite and the greatest patron of art
in the Roman Church. He, Michelangelo,
and the architect Bramante (designer of St. Peter’s) form the most remarkable
body of artistic talent ever assembled by a European.”
This is not Julius II, just an interesting piece. If you want to know more about Julius and
nepotism and the papacy during Renaissance, check out his page on Wikipedia.
Here are some other pieces that we were able to get decent pictures of in the museums. In the museums the pieces are grouped by chronology, genre and artist. These pictures are arranged by “what came next.”
This is the Sala Rotunda which is shaped like a miniature Pantheon. It contains many works from the Roman Empire.
These
are close-ups of the mosaics on the floor of the Sala Rotonda.
Bust of Pertinax, Roman Emperor for three months in 193. He is known as the first emperor of the tumultuous Year of the Five Emperors.
This sarcophagus in the Greek Cross
Gallery was built to contain the remains St Helen, Constantine’s mother or her mother
Constance. There are identical
sarcophagi on either side of the hall. But the remains were never put there.
There is one room (hallway actually) with nothing but tapestries. This is a close-up of one of one of them. I was about 3 feet from the piece when I took the picture. I was amazed by the its fine pictorial quality.
These maps are in the Galleria delle Carte Geographiche. They are topographical maps of the whole of Italy, painted on the walls by Friar Ignazio Dante and, commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII (1572–1585). It remains the world's largest pictorial geographical study.
The Raphael Rooms - Stanze di Raffaello
This is a section from Raphael's The Mass at Bolsana, one of the fresco
panels in the Raphael Rooms
SISTINE CHAPEL
“SILENZIO!” “SILENCE!” This is what you hear every five minutes or so in the Sistine Chapel. And it is silent, considering there are hundreds of people crowded into the room (134 feet by 44 feet).Standing up I kept trying to look at the ceiling, but in a while my neck was hurting and I kept losing my balance. Bonnie spied some just-vacated spots on the benches lining the sides of the room. What a blessing. Now the Sistine Chapel had become a pleasant place to view art. There is no way you can take all it in, so I just focused on one or two panels.
After 20 minutes we started feeling a little guilty, so we let others have our seats. It was also time to rendezvous with Christopher, who was taking us to St Peter’s.
Michelangelo is responsible only for the ceiling (1509-1510) and the Last Judgment (1535-1541) which covers the wall behind the altar. The side walls were done earlier – before 1482 – by several different artists.
Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the twelve apostles on the ceiling, but Michelangelo demanded a free hand and instead painted a series of nine pictures showing God's Creation of the World, God's Relationship with Mankind, and Mankind's fall from God's Grace. Alexander III commissioned the painting of the Last Judgment.
Here are pictures from Wikipedia that show the Sistine Chapel, a portion of the ceiling, and The Last Judgment.
St. Peter’s
This "is the richest and grandest church on earth…plaques on the floor show where other churches would end if they were placed inside…thousands of people wander about hardly noticing each other” (Steves Guidebook)
This St. Peter’s was built between 1506 and 1614. It was commissioned by Julius II.
Donato Bramante was the original architect but died in 1514. Michelangelo succeeded him in 1546 to revive a project that had stalled. He designed the dome and stayed as chief architect until he died in 1564. In 1607 Carlo Maderno extended the length of the church by converting the original Greek cross design (four equal sides) to a Latin cross design (long vertical, short horizontal) which almost doubled the length of the church.
This new St. Peter’s replaced an older one built in the fourth century on the same site. That St. Peter’s was commissioned by the Emperor Constantine (who legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire). He wanted a place to reverently keep the remains of St. Peter who had been martyred at that spot in 65 AD.
Bernini’s bronze canopy (seven stories high) was finished in 1624. Bernini designed much of the interior: the dove window over the apse, the marble floor decoration, and the Tomb of Alexander VII.
Alexander VII was pope from 1655-1657 and was very involved in Rome’s urban planning during the Counter reformation. Bernini was his preferred architect and Sculptor.
Michelangelo’s Pieta is now behind glass – In 1972 some crazy attacked it with a hammer. Michelangelo was 24 when he did it, and it was the only piece he ever signed – supposedly because he heard some pilgrims attributing it to some other artist. So he carved on it “Michelangelo Buonaroti made this.”
He also designed the dome.
St Peter's dome is the highest in the world (448 ft) but not the widest (136 ft). The pantheon and the Duomo in Florence are both over 140 ft.
Monument to Pius VIII by Pietro Tenerani (1866)
Pius was very sickly and was pope for little more than 1 ½ years (March 1829 to November 1830). He wrote an encyclical disparaging religious pluralism (a "foul contrivance of the sophists of this age" that would place Catholicism on par with any other religion”) and warned against modern translations of the Bible (“We must also be wary of those who publish the Bible with new interpretations contrary to the Church's laws. They skillfully distort the meaning by their own interpretation. They print the Bibles in the vernacular and, absorbing an incredible expense, offer them free even to the uneducated. Furthermore, the Bibles are rarely without perverse little inserts to ensure that the reader imbibes their lethal poison instead of the saving water of salvation.” Such a big monument for an insignificant pontiff.
* * * * *
Outside
the rain had stopped and it was a beautiful day, and St. Peter’s Square was set
up for Pope Francis’s appearance the next day.
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