A Roman Ruin, I, The Sistine Chapel, And Judgment Day

Nicoletta leaves the hotel at 6 AM to get in line to buy tickets for all of us at the Vatican museum. The plan is for Joe to meet her there at 7 AM with the students, at which time we will all be ready, at the starting gate, for entry to the hallowed halls of the museum, and, ultimately, The Sistine Chapel.

After a short ride on our hired bus, we disembark at the museum to see thousands of tourists in long lines, corralled between corridors of metal pipes, looking like cattle on the way to slaughter. Their heads are bowed forward into the blasts of cold wind. Hawkers selling rosaries, Sistine chapel and Trevi Fountain ashtrays, statues of David and replicas of the Pietà and Moses, walk up and down outside the fenced areas offering their wares. I notice that many of our students—or at least our female students—are buying rosaries.

“Do you think I can get a priest to bless this with holy water?” one of them asks the vendor. He nods vigorously: there is no doubt. If she asked him if the Pope himself would bless it, the man would surely agree.

When the line starts to move, it doesn’t inch forward, but jolts into movement till suddenly we are all walking very fast, almost running between the barriers, jogging up a circular ramp, rushing so fast that it’s impossible to look around and see where we are.

Nicoletta stands heroically facing us against the surging tide of people, and distributes, as we run past her, the tickets she bought for our group. Seconds later they are torn from our grasp by surly-faced ticket-takers as we enter the fabled halls of art and culture and continue to rush along, the press of humanity behind us, and on either side a million marble antiquities, going by us at the speed of light.

Since I can’t stop to examine even one piece of art, I begin to take photos of what flies by me, hoping that at some future time the essence that caught my eye can be considered at leisure. I photograph a marble bust of a man who has a lovely sensual mouth, even with his lips of stone. I photograph a statue of a man holding a child (when have I ever seen this combination in Italian sculpture? Surely never before.) I record in rapid fire; a series of gargoyles with hideous screaming mouths decorating the edges of a crypt, a series of female heads with pensive, sweet expressions, and a series of marble men in fig leaves, whose musculature and physical beauty is thrilling, even in the half-a-glance I can give them at this pace.

There is the sound of the thundering hoof beats of the thousands of tourists behind me. I feel a terror overtake me, I must have air. I pull Joe out of the line and flee to an open window in the corridor. From it I can see the dome of St. Peter’s and the green peaceful gardens beneath. (I remember the movie in which Tom Conte, who plays the Pope, tired of all the pomp and circumstance of his life, wanders out the back gate of the Papal Gardens and finds his way to a small village where he befriends the simple folk and finds the true meaning of life.)

“How much of this museum is there to go?” I gasp.

Joe consults his guidebook. “This must be the Gallery of Statues. Next is the Busts Room, the Cabinet of Masks, the Octagonal Court, the Etruscan Museum, the Room of the Chariot, the Raphael Rooms, the Religious Art room, the Borgia Apartment, and of course, The Sistine Chapel.”

“Let’s just go to that one and then leave,” I beg him. “I think I’m having a panic attack.”

Joe says we must at least see the Raphael paintings. But how to get there? Ropes and museum guards prevent us from straying from the prescribed course. There is no wandering around at your own pace, there is no free will here at all. Various paths have been designed to bring people to the Sistine Chapel by maze-like circumnavigations. We are trapped. We must follow along the prescribed path, the only course to take.

When we do, in fact, get to the Raphael room, the walls are draped in burlap. “In restauro” says the sign. Everything is in restoration in Italy. There can be no arguing with that. The entire country is falling to pieces, is itself a badly kept museum. The facades of half the churches are under burlap and behind scaffolding. Joe will surely not get to see the Raphaels today—and perhaps never.

“SILENCE WILL BE OBSERVED IN THE ROOM. THERE WILL BE NO PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN…SILENCE WILL BE OBSERVED IN THE ROOM. THERE WILL BE NO PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN.”

This message is broadcast over a loudspeaker in the Sistine Chapel at brief intervals as we are funneled in a doorway and are pressed forward with the crowd from one end of the room toward the other. If silence is what they require in this holy room, I wonder if a loudspeaker is the way to achieve it.

From one of two narrow benches along opposite walls, an Asian couple are just rising; I pull Joe with me and capture the seats in order that we might be able to sit down, lean our heads back, and look up at the famous ceiling. Above me I see God creating Adam (with Eve watching from the shelter of his arm). Those two forefingers, the finger of God and the finger of Adam, straining to touch across the vast heavens (over the vast armies of people below, over the repeated refrain of “SILENCE WILL BE OBSERVED IN THE ROOM…THERE WILL BE NO PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN”) bring me to surreptitiously remove my camera from its case, hold it blindly in my lap, aim its general view-finder upward, and release the shutter. Michelangelo fell from a scaffold in this place; I will at least take this small risk to capture part of his creation so I can take it home and look at it there. I certainly can’t contemplate it here.

I wonder that Michelangelo was a mere thirty-three when he began painting this ceiling. I read somewhere that for months after he could read mail from his father only by holding the letters above his head. A glance into the guidebook reveals to me that he wrote, when first seeing the site: “This place is wrong, and no painter I.” His comment about trying to complete the task was: “I strain more than any man who ever lived…and with great exhaustion; and yet I have the patience to arrive at the desired goal.” (Which reminds me of my single-minded desire to reach the bed in my hotel last night.)

It took him four years to do the ceiling, 5800 square feet of surface, covered by more than 300 figures (when only twelve were originally planned). Hundreds of feet above our heads are the episodes from the Bible, the drunken Noah, the creation of Eve, the flood, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Those scenes across the room are upside-down to us, some depictions facing horizontally, some vertically. One would have to lie on the marble floor with binoculars for several weeks, spinning in a slow circle, to appreciate this monumental creation. Preferably without the loudspeaker—begging for silence—blasting in our ears.

Now Joe takes my hand and leads me forward to the altar, above which is Michelangelo’s depiction of The Last Judgment. This is truly terrifying. Painted twenty-five years after the ceiling, Michelangelo seems to have had a more judgmental, less generous, view of life. In the center is the wrathful Christ with the Virgin Mother at his side, his arm raised in damnation, while all about him the sinners tumble toward hell, the damned souls harassed by wingless angels and clawed demons. Charon, with devil’s horns for ears, is beating his passengers with a stick (as he ferries them across the River Styx to hell). Most hideous among the horrors is the flayed skin, the empty hanging human form (with Michelangelo’s face caricatured on it, the guidebook tells me)—is this done as an expression of his sincere sentiment, or as a masochistic act, or as a cynical prank?

But the general impression of both ceiling and altar is one of roiling, writhing bodies in chaos: the whole shebang of history and religion swirling around in confusion, much like what is taking place right now on the floor of the Sistine Chapel itself as bodies pour in the doors at one end of the chapel and are ferried along, by force, by pure bodily pressure, to take in the depictions of the horrors that lie ahead, and to flee to their fates on the other side.

I see that some of our students are rebelling: they are blatantly aiming their cameras around the room, come what may, damnation and hell itself. And like a lunatic deity, the voice from above continues: “SILENCE WILL BE OBSERVED IN THE ROOM… THERE WILL BE NO PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN.”