My Day At the Vatican

Wednesday was Vatican day for me. Each Wednesday the pope has a scheduled appearance, which he sometimes attends and sometimes doesn't. This draws the crowds away from the horrendous line at the Vatican Museum; I had heard he wasn't going to make an appearance this week (he did, oh well), so I decided this was my quick way in (since without a printer I couldn't print off an online ticket). It worked like a charm. Twenty minute wait. It's usually two hours.

The Vatican Museum is one of the greatest museums in the world, on par with the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Smithsonian. In fact, throwing the Smithsonian in there probably does us a little more credit than we deserve, but I couldn't help myself (I'm looking forward to getting back to the Land of the Free, after all). Its collection goes on for five miles of hallways, and includes the Sistine Chapel as a finale. But Michelangelo's chapel is only the pinnacle of the experience; all the art and archaeology throughout the collection leads up to his work. The museum subtly, but unmistakably, tells that story.

There's no way for me to write up a full description of what I saw in the museum; whole treasures, like the Map Room, I'll have to skip. I'll just tell the story that leads up to Raphael and Michelangelo.

Guided by Rick Steves' Rome guide, I went around the painting galleries and Egyptian rooms for awhile until coming to Apollo Belvedere, in the courtyard (in the painting galleries, by the way, I saw Raphael's The Transfiguration, above). The original Apollo Belvedere was sculpted by the Greek Leochares, and the one on display that I saw is a Roman copy of the original. It was discovered during the Renaissance and delicate artists like Raphael took it as an example. It is the epitome of balance.

Nearby is a lounging Greek river god. Can you see how Michelangelo took it as his inspiration for God in The Creation of Adam?

But Michelangelo's real inspiration was Laocoon. Laocoon is the character in the Iliad who, as high priest of Troy, warns the Trojans not to accept the Greek's Horse. The famous "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts" is his statement. However, the gods were on the side of the Greeks, so they sent two huge snakes to crush him and his sons. This sculpture captures that horrific moment. It isn't just the death of himself, or his family; it captures the death of a civilization.
It was known to have existed since antiquity, but had been lost for a thousand years until rediscovery (in Rome) in 1506. It was a watershed in aesthetics and took Renaissance art in a new direction; one early viewer was the young Michelangelo. It was only two years later that he began on the Sistine Chapel, with its horrifying picture of The Last Judgment: the ultimate end of civilization.
A side note: Laocoon's right arm was long detached above the elbow, missing. It was popularly thought that the arm stuck straight out, in order to balance with the diagonal left arm; this was the culture bred on Apollo Belvedere. Michelangelo, however, insisted that it must have bent backwards, behind Lacoon's head. He instinctively saw the importance of tipping balance in order to confound the viewer. Sure enough, when the elbow was discovered in a farmhouse in the early twentieth century, Michelangelo proved to be right.

Back inside the halls I was directed to the Belvedere Torso. This hunk of unfinished and broken rock just shows how much effort goes into sculpture. And even if it were finished, it's not beautiful; the Hercules once depicted is chunky and knotty. And yet this torso turned out to be Michelangelo's inspiration for the torso and inner joints of Christ in The Last Judgment. This is not the effeminate Christ of western medieval artwork, nor the Christ of Raphael, but the hulking Christ of Revelation.
Skipping way, way ahead in my day (there was just far too much to even scratch the surface), I came to the penultimate exhibits: the Raphael rooms. The last one them contains one of my favorite pieces of art, ever: The School of Athens. I'm contrasting Raphael unfavorably with Michelangelo in so much of this post, but don't be misled; Raphael was a genius of the first order, and this painting shows you why (click on it for the full effect). It is the epitome of symmetry; philosophers on the viewer's left, scientists on the right, with Plato pointing up to the sky and Aristotle signaling to the earth below as their crux. Two archways above Plato and Aristotle form secular halos over them. Those gathered around them include Euclid, Socrates, and many others. Such a school never existed, and they lived at varying times and places; but it captures the spirit of the Renaissance, to bring them all together.
And yet, the Renaissance was above moving forward, too. Raphael worked this in by modeling the likenesses of the ancients on contemporary Renaissance men. Plato is Leonardo Da Vinci. Euclid is the architect Donato Bramante. Raphael himself stares out at the viewer, almost winking in playfulness, from the bottom right. Yet when Raphael finished he walked down the hall to see Michelangelo, at work in the Sistine Chapel. He gasped; he was astonished; he had never seen anything like it. He ran back to The School of Athens and added one more figure, in the foreground, leaning on a hunk of marble: Michelangelo.
Being in the Sistine Chapel was a deeply moving experience. No pictures; enforced rule of silence, with just a murmur from tour guides. It is so much bigger than I'd imagined (a contrast to St. Peter's; read on). The Creation of Adam is incredible, though one wishes it were a little larger. Yet The Last Judgment....

The Last Judgment may be the most sublime artwork ever created. And I use sublime the way the philosopher Immanuel Kant used the term, not in the frilly way that the term has come to be used. He contrasted the beautiful and the sublime; Raphael is beautiful. The beautiful is balanced. The sublime is a thunderclap. It challenges us. It deeply moves us by disturbing us rather than drawing us in. Michelangelo is sublime.

No one smiles in The Last Judgment. The righteous dead, resurrected to new life, wake to find themselves still corpses, and must scamper up to the divine embrace. How much more terrifying, then, for the damned. They are shot down to hell, to the welcome of the boatman, Charon, looking all too excited to ferry them across the River Styx. The terror on their faces terrifies the viewer. In the center, Christ raises his right hand, preparing to smite the damned to his left; his left hand holds up a sign of peace to those on his right, but his attention is focused on the smiting to come. Just by Christ, Mary huddles, curled submissively, looking away from the damned, unable to watch. Her days interceding for sinners are over indeed.

When the painting was unveiled to the public in 1541 the pope dropped to his knees and said, "Lord, charge me not with my sins when thou shalt come on Judgment Day."

And Catholics say the Reformers overemphasized wrath!

Awestuck and not a little introspective of my own sins, I headed out the secret back door directly into St. Peter's.

Since I took the right door, reserved for tour groups, out from the Sistine Chapel rather than the left door, which leads back to the Vatican Museum entrance, I got dropped right on the colonnaded porch of the basilica. So I didn't get to walk up through St. Peter's Square, with its famous obelisk and Bernini columns. Instead, my first view of the church was passing through the doors into the nave.

Did my jaw drop? No. Actually, I was confused. I was in the Hagia Sophia two weeks ago, after all. That felt far, far larger; far more open, with its wide dome. This was grand, to be sure, but it seemed like it was on a far smaller scale. Was this the right church?

Then I looked down the nave, and saw the size of the people at the far end.

And then my jaw dropped.

The church was actively designed to appear- and feel- smaller than it is. The canopy over the altar is a full seven stories high, but it is more than a football field away, so it looks smaller; the height of the altar canopy also cuts the distance between the floor and the dome, in order to reduce one's feeling of isolation (which is exactly what I felt in the Hagia Sophia). For instance, the twin statues of St. Teresa, on the right pillar when one enters the nave, look the same size. However, the one at the top of the pillar is a full six feet taller than the one at the base, in order to create the illusion that the church is not nearly lofty as it appears. The end result is something grand with an immense capacity for congregants that still retains a cozy, intimate feel.

The other significant thing about St. Peter's is its Counter-Reformation thrust. The whole church is designed to make absolutely clear where the church is, and where it ain't. Around the frieze of the building runs a gold band with seven-foot tall letters (it looks like it can't be more than two feet tall from ground level) that contains every phrase spoken to Peter by Christ in the New Testament. The lettering around the base of the dome reads: "You are Peter, and upon this rock I will built my church." The basilica is built on the supposed location of Peter's tomb, directly beneath the altar. To the right of the altar is a bronze statue of Peter, holding keys in his left hand and extending his right hand in blessing, and clad in Roman toga. He is wearing the toga of a Roman senator, and pious pilgrims touch or kiss his foot.

The climax of any tour of the basilica is Michelangelo's Pieta, with the life size sculpture of Christ's corpse being held by a larger-than-life Mary. Her size, and yet her youth, capture in the abstract of non-realism her maternal love for our savior. Unfortunately, it is behind bulletproof glass because a crazy man came into a church a few years ago and began chipping it with a hammer.
After a stroll through the crypt (where I located the tomb of John Paul II) and the treasury (uninteresting except for a single pillar from the Constantinian basilica), I headed out for the National Museum of Rome. Once in the square, I turned around for my first look at the Basilica of St. Peter from the outside.

Wow.

My evening in the National Museum of Rome didn't quite compare to either experience, but it is definitely worth a trip. It is one of the four great museums in Rome (with the Vatican, the Capitoline Museum, and the Borghese Gallery which I won't be getting to) and contains a collection of Roman sculpture that chronicles the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. Neato.

And that was my Wednesday at the Vatican.