In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo.
—T. S. ELIOT, “THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK”
Like it or not, Pope Francis has had to come to terms with the fact that he is now the personal custodian of one of the world’s most important art collections. As many millions of people crowd into the Vatican Museums and shuffle through the Sistine Chapel every year as those who come to pray in St. Peter’s, or to attend religious functions at the Vatican. Francis’ first attempt to combine his care for the poor and the marginalized with this custodianship took place just over two years after his election. He invited 150 homeless people living on the streets of Rome to spend an afternoon admiring Michelangelo’s Last Judgment fresco and his huge ceiling painting of the story of the Creation in the Sistine Chapel. He surprised them by turning up in person and told them: “You are welcome! This is everyone’s house and your house. The doors are always open for all.”
Not quite true, although once a month the Vatican Museums do throw open their doors to the public for free.
In the Vatican, as people come and go, they not only talk of Michelangelo, they see his works all around them. First they see the imposing façade of St. Peter’s Basilica and its cupola. Later they spend twenty precious minutes inside the Sistine Chapel. Finally they stand in awe in front of his sculpture of the dead Christ in the arms of his mother, the Pieta.
But not everyone lives Michelangelo in the same way. As an article in L’Osservatore Romano pointed out back in 2011, “There is a widespread opinion of long standing that the Vatican is where very important art and cultural treasures are conserved, but that it is no longer a place of lively cultural achievement. There is only erudition, with scant life and little intellectual passion.” The election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI was an important sign of change, the author went on to say, as was his appointing art historian Antonio Paolucci director of the Vatican Museums.1
Fine—but what of Pope Francis? What are his interests in the visual arts? Father Federico Lombardi, official papal spokesman, once said: “He is a great fan of literature”—which seems a tactful way of saying that the visual arts are not among Pope Francis’ keen personal interests, Michelangelo notwithstanding.
Yet Father Antonio Spadaro, editor of the leading Italian Jesuit magazine La Civilità Cattolica (Catholic Civilization) managed to tease out of Pope Francis revealing insights into his personal cultural and artistic interests during a marathon series of interviews in his lodgings at the Casa Santa Marta during August 2013, while most people who work inside the Vatican were away on their summer holidays.2
Surprisingly it is not Michelangelo Buonarotti, sculptor, painter, architect, and poet of the High Renaissance, but Michelangelo Caravaggio, one of Rome’s most admired and robust Baroque artists, a street brawler frequently in trouble with the papal police, with whom Pope Francis says he has perhaps the closest artistic affinity.
On his visits to Rome from Argentina—when he used to stay at a residence for clergy in the Via della Scrofa in the heart of the historic center, not far from the house where Caravaggio used to lodge and had his studio—the then-Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio used to sneak inside the nearby French church of Saint Louis to gaze on one of Michelangelo Caravaggio’s most famous paintings, The Calling of Saint Matthew. The dramatically lit painting, which can be seen in a side chapel to the left of the main altar, was finished in 1600 and shows Jesus pointing his finger toward his future Apostle, picking him out from a group of Romans dressed in the fashionable doublets and hose of those times, all gathered around a tavern table.
“That finger of Jesus, pointing at Matthew. That’s me. I feel like him. Like Matthew. It’s the gesture of Matthew that strikes me: he holds on to his money [Matthew was a tax collector] as if to say, ‘No, not me! No, this money is mine!’ Here, this is me, a sinner on whom the Lord has turned his gaze. And this is what I said when they asked me if I would accept my election as pontiff.”
A year passed before we of the press were informed that the pope is also a “devoted fan” of the paintings of the Jewish artist Marc Chagall, and in particular of his White Crucifixion, painted in 1938 in France as a reaction to the Kristallnacht, the concerted attacks on German synagogues and Jewish-owned stores and buildings by the Nazis, the prelude to the Holocaust. In the painting, now in the collection of the Chicago Art Institute, Christ on the Cross is depicted wearing as a loincloth the tallit, or Jewish prayer shawl.3
In early 2014, Pope Francis was preparing his visit to Jerusalem when representatives of the American Jewish Committee called on him in Rome and presented him with the catalog of an exhibit of paintings by Chagall, just then on view at the Jewish Museum in New York.
“We showed him page 105 . . . where a print of White Crucifixion is included because of its relevance to the exhibit,” Rabbi Noam E. Marans, director of interreligious and intergroup relations for the American Jewish Committee, told a reporter from Religion News Service. “Pope Francis was moved by our recognition of his emotional connection to the painting, and responded with a joyous smile.”
It is typical of Pope Francis to be identified with, and to respond with deep emotion to, a painting whose focus is a link between Judaism and Christianity.
Rome is the unique custodian of the historic Christian heritage, and Pope Francis is responsible for the conservation of Christian Rome, including its centuries of art and architecture.
It was his predecessor Pope John Paul II who created in 1982 a charitable foundation that has raised millions of dollars from wealthy North American and European philanthropists to help pay for the maintenance and restoration of some of the Vatican’s most precious art treasures. Over a thousand members of Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums pay an annual family subscription of twelve hundred dollars for the privilege of lifetime free entry to the museums and a regular series of private viewings inside the Vatican including a weeklong session of receptions—and even an occasional meeting with Pope Francis himself. In October 2013, he thanked them at a private audience for their “outstanding contribution” to the restoration of paintings, sarcophagi, and even Egyptian mummies preserved in the Vatican’s art collections. Contributions from the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Patrons of the Arts paid for the purchase of a latest generation optical fiber ArtLight II laser, which enables restorers to use noninvasive techniques to analyze the best methods of bringing fragile or damaged artworks back to life.
The Catholic Church’s patronage of the arts dates back to at least Pope Callixtus I (219–222), responsible for the initial construction of the subsequently reworked church of Santa Maria in Trastevere; in the twelfth century another pontiff commissioned a fine mosaic showing the Coronation of the Virgin for that church.
In the most elemental way, Pope Francis is both the custodian and today’s court of last resort for decisions about maintaining the superabundance of these extraordinary treasures of Christian art and architecture created over the centuries in Rome, the former papal states, and beyond.
Many of these treasures date from the grand era of papal patronage during the Renaissance and the Baroque eras. But they begin far earlier with the historical vestiges, and there are many, of the earliest years of Christianity, and especially with what is buried in the underworld of today’s bustling Rome. An example: among the sixty known ancient catacombs where Christians (and others) were buried in Rome is one only recently discovered beneath a Fiat automobile dealership. Its restoration, overseen by the Vatican, required five years of work and financing. Such new discoveries continue, and not only in Rome; in February 2014, extensive catacombs (owned by the Vatican) and dating from the fourth century AD were discovered at Carini in Sicily.4
While holding final responsibility for overseeing conservation of the ancient Christian heritage, the pope must also foster the new in the sacred arts and architecture in Rome. In so doing Pope Francis is not alone, of course. These tasks, which include construction of new churches in Rome, are delegated to three Vatican offices: the Pontifical Council for Culture, the Pontifical Commission for the Cultural Heritage of the Church, and the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology. Since 2007, all three have been headed by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi.
Ravasi’s career and role in the church are fairly unique. He is the Vatican’s minister of culture, as well as an intellectual powerhouse—congenial, affable, brilliant. And he was also a leading Italian candidate for the papacy prior to the election in which Francis was chosen.
Cardinal Ravasi can be as outspoken as he is charming. In his view, preaching in churches has become so formulaic and boring that it risks becoming “irrelevant” to congregations accustomed to the excitement and immediacy of television and the Internet. Reflecting this view, the Vatican has produced a booklet on how to preach sermons that are short and punchy.
As Ravasi told a conference in Rome, Twitter is an effective way to spread the word of God.5 Elsewhere he has said, “I want to affirm, as an a priori, the compatibility of the theory of evolution with the message of the Bible and the theology of the Church.” Neither Charles Darwin nor his The Origin of Species had ever been condemned by the church, he pointed out.
Gianfranco Ravasi was born in 1942 in Merate, near Lecco in Northern Italy. His father was an anti-Fascist tax official who served Fascist Italy as a soldier in World War II and reportedly deserted; his mother was a schoolteacher. Renouncing his original plan to become a teacher of classic languages, young Ravasi entered the priesthood in 1966 at age twenty-four. He subsequently studied at both the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Pontifical Biblical Institute, and spent summers working with archaeologists in the Middle East. Pope Benedict XVI created him cardinal in 2010, and that same year he was proclaimed cardinal deacon of the fourth-century Basilica of San Giorgio in Velabro, near the Circus Maximus in Rome. (The church was damaged by a bomb planted there by the Corleone mob of the Sicilian Mafia on July 27, 1993.)
It has been Cardinal Ravasi’s stated goal to draw the Vatican into cultural modernity. “My aim,” he said in an interview, “is to try to reconstruct what was essentially a divorce between art and faith.” As art trends gradually turned away from the figurative toward the abstract, many people, priests included, failed to keep up with changing tastes, he added. “Today our problem is to get ordinary people to welcome this type of art. We need to help them understand that art is part of the spirit.”
To this end he lobbied successfully to have the Vatican present at the fifty-fifth and fifty-sixth Venice Biennale Art Exhibitions in 2013 and again in 2015. The two, Biennale and Vatican, had a long and uneasy history, however. When the first Biennale was held in 1895, a painting by Giacomo Grosso of Turin scandalized the Vatican because it depicted five naked women swooning over a coffin in which lay the body of Don Giovanni, the fictional libertine and seducer immortalized by Mozart. Because the painting was seen as legitimizing a life of moral turpitude, the Patriarch of Venice—later Pope Pius X—assailed the work as immoral and demanded it be censored (it was not, and later won a prize). Another factor that had led to a weakening of ties between artists and the church was the unification of Italy in 1870, which reduced Vatican possessions from a large swath across the center of the peninsula to only 110 acres in the middle of Rome.
Paolo Baratta, president of that Biennale, introduced the Vatican exhibition at a press preview. “Today,” Baratta said, “Cardinal Ravasi is convinced that art and faith, as in the centuries of the great patrons of the arts, must continue to produce masterpieces.”6
Ravasi and curator Micol Forti were careful not to put on view works that would represent traditional Catholic themes like crucifixes and paintings of the Virgin and Child. Instead their chosen theme was a representation in three parts of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, in what was also a modern homage to Michelangelo’s five-centuries-old Sistine Chapel ceiling. “None of these works is liturgical art, and we did not ask the artists their religion. I doubt that anyone asked Leonardo da Vinci about his faith,” said curator Forti.
It worked: though attacked by a few irate bloggers, and also criticized by some as “bland,” the Vatican pavilion literally stole the show from the other eighty-eight countries with exhibitions at the Biennale at the opening June 1, 2013.
Working with and answering to Cardinal Ravasi is the second most important figure in the Vatican arts world, Antonio Paolucci, born in Rimini in 1939. The former director of the Florentine museums, he was appointed director of the Vatican Museums in 2007 by Pope Benedict XVI. It is no accident that they are called “museums” rather than “museum”: within the apostolic palace are six separate museums: the traditional picture gallery, the Pinacoteca Vaticana, the Gregorian-Etruscan Museum, the Ethnographic Missionary Museum, the Gregorian-Egyptian Museum, the Chiaramonti Museum, and the Vatican Historical Museum.
Altogether they are extraordinarily popular. Immediately before the election of Pope Francis, the Vatican Museums and St. Peter’s Basilica had over four million visitors each year. The figures continue to rise: the popularity of Pope Francis has meant that both were visited by 5.5 million people in 2012, and 6 million in 2014.
Among Paolucci’s first acts was to organize prebooking for tickets to the Vatican Museums in order to speed up the entry process and to shorten the lines already snaking far down the street every morning at 8:30 A.M.
Paolucci’s concerns are no less important than Ravasi’s and his curriculum is exceptional. For decades Paolucci was a superintendent of various Italian museums owned and managed by Italy’s Ministry of Culture. Pope Francis renewed his Vatican contract for a further three years.
Whereas Paolucci’s experience in heritage management is vast (he was himself Italy’s minister of culture in 1995–1996), his vision appears conservative in comparison with that of Cardinal Ravasi. The official Catholic daily, L’Osservatore Romano, describes him in this way: “Paolucci’s particular quality is that he does not limit himself to an aesthetic vision of the masterpieces conserved [in the Vatican Museums], but sees them in their historic and living dimension.”7 For example, Paolucci finds even some of the newer churches in Rome designed by celebrated architects unattractive, “museum spaces which do not invite to prayer.”
Paolucci is endlessly busy. Even after a yearlong illness, he returned to his office, where he still carries on valiantly and industriously. Perhaps not surprisingly, he can sound grumpy. He makes no secret of disliking the ornamental lighting of the cupola of St. Peter’s Basilica and of the Castel Sant’Angelo, the ancient Roman mausoleum and later refuge of popes. “Men and women should rediscover the beauty of darkness,” he complained to Italian journalist Vittorio Zincone in an interview. “Museums are no longer linked to the concept of culture and knowledge. A museum visit now comes into the category of ‘leisure’ time activities.”8
Indeed for many this is true. But the Vatican is not only about its museums as a venue for leisure time, and this duality makes the work of the custodians of its art treasures particularly complex.
That work begins with welcoming the faithful as well as the tourists at St. Peter’s Basilica. Every day separate queues form of pilgrims waiting to pass through Vatican security in order to enter the basilica, and of tourists intent on visiting the Sistine Chapel.
For the visitors interested in the arts, the greatest single drawing card is the work inside the Vatican by Michelangelo Buonarotti. He was the principal architect of the façade of the basilica and of the original plan for the cupola, and the artist whose masterpieces in sculpture and paint lie within the basilica and two of its chapels.
Michelangelo worked on and off in Rome from 1496 through the end of his life in 1564. In 1497, the year after his arrival from Florence, he began two years of work on what would be one of his most famous sculptures, the Pietà, carved from marble from Carrara on commission for a French cardinal in Rome. In the sculpture, a young and tender Mary holds the dead and limp body of Jesus in her arms.
This was the sculpture inside the basilica that was attacked on May 21, 1972, by a mentally disturbed, unemployed Austro-Hungarian geologist named Laszlo Toth. With a hammer Toth smashed part of her nose, which had to be replaced with a section of the marble removed from her back.
On May 21, 2013, the Vatican Museums under Paolucci held a special daylong seminar on the statue and on its restoration, which had become controversial. Nazzareno Gabrielli, the last surviving member of the team that restored the statue, told conference participants of the restorers’ “anxiety and perplexities” as they experimented to find the best ways to repair the statue.9
“It is a good thing the hammer blows were vertical,” a fellow restorer said in a documentary shown at the conference. “If the blows had been horizontal they would have torn off the entire head of Mary.”
For two years Toth was confined to a Roman mental hospital, then deported to Australia, where it is believed he died in September 2012.
Another masterpiece by Michelangelo is invisible to almost everyone outside Pope Francis’ inner circle. The Pauline Chapel, or Cappella Paolina, is the pope’s personal chapel, inside the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican City. Built by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger between 1538 and 1540, it is named after Paul III, the Farnese family pope who had been Michelangelo’s benefactor for years, and who commissioned the aging Michelangelo to create two huge paintings for the side walls of the chapel in 1538. The first was The Conversion of Saul and then, on the right side of the chapel, The Crucifixion of St. Peter, the last painting Michelangelo ever executed.
Paul III did not live to see its completion, for he died in November 1549, three months before Michelangelo finished the work.
And therein lies a tale. Unlike the Sistine Chapel, visitors are not normally admitted to the Pauline Chapel, but photographs show clearly, in the second and more shocking of the two frescoes, St. Peter crucified upside down. Large black nails bind him to the cross. He is naked save for a wispy wrapping over his intimate parts. But the martyr’s entire aspect appears vividly alive; and, instead of raising his eyes to Heaven for solace, the white-bearded Peter—a mirror image of the Saint Peter in the Last Judgment—twists his head to glare furiously and directly into that large chapel in which, as Michelangelo well knew, a new pontiff would shortly be elected to succeed the late Paul III.
In June 2009, a $4.6 million, seven-year-long restoration of the chapel was complete, down to new LED lighting, and Vatican Museums director Antonio Paolucci made a formal presentation of it to the patrons who had donated the money for its conservation. “The Pauline Chapel is a religious place reserved for the Pope and for the pontifical family,” he said. “In a certain sense, even more than the Sistine Chapel, the Pauline Chapel is the place most identified with the Catholic Church.”
However, Paolucci went on to say, Michelangelo had worked on the two side walls off and on for ten years. “By then he was seventy years old and in poor health. He was exhausted from the immense fatigue of painting The Last Judgment. He was worried about his designs for the cupola of St. Peter’s. And his world was disappearing around him: in 1547, the poet Vittoria Colonna died, and then ‘his’ pope Paul III also died.”
As a result, in Paolucci’s view, Michelangelo’s twin frescoes reveal an artist suffering from “a vast sadness and profound pessimism.”10
Quoting Paolucci, the official Vatican daily, L’Osservatore Romano, added this:
The restoration of the Pauline Chapel is directly linked to its function as the Pope’s private chapel, where the Holiest Sacrament is preserved. Michelangelo, by then aged, had painted Saint Peter offering himself as a martyr. He turns his deep and thoughtful eyes towards the face of the pontiff who enters as if to tell him, “you are Peter, and the Cross is your destiny.”11
Are those eyes, as they gaze toward a future pontiff, thoughtful? And was there in Michelangelo’s attitude only sorrow and pessimism, as Paolucci has said?
Not everyone agrees with this interpretation. Italian art historian Antonio Forcellino, a conservator and the author of biographies of both Raphael and Michelangelo, points out that in the fresco of St. Peter crucified, the nails affixing Peter to the cross were added after Michelangelo died, and completely ignored the philosophy behind Michelangelo’s vision, which was that Peter had willingly placed himself upon the cross. Michelangelo painted the crucifixion without Peter nailed to the cross because they were not needed.
“This was the first conceptual work of art in history, and in it Michelangelo was saying that only faith, not the nails, can sustain Peter. That faith is interiorized, and the fresco is a sort of manifesto of a heretical spirituality,” said Forcellino.12
Perhaps the fresco did not begin that way, but it certainly became heretical. During Michelangelo’s years of work in the chapel, he belonged to a group known as the Spirituali, whose leader within the church was the eminent English cardinal Reginald Pole, the last archbishop of Canterbury before England broke definitively with Rome under King Henry VIII. For thirty years the Spirituali, who included Michelangelo’s close friend the poet Vittoria Colonna, had worked to reform the church from within. They promoted reconciliation with the Protestant Reformation and the “evangelical” followers of Martin Luther; some authorities believe that Paul III, who had commissioned Michelangelo to paint the twin frescoes in the chapel in the first place, was in sympathy with the Spirituali. The movement failed by a hair. When Paul III died in November 1549, Cardinal Pole was a front-runner to succeed him, but on February 7, at the end of ten weeks of bitter fighting within the conclave, Pole lost by exactly one vote.
Instead the conclave elected Cardinal Giovanni del Monte, who took the name of Julius III (1487–1555). Del Monte, born in Rome, reigned as pope for five years. During that time he reinforced the Inquisition, and his papacy was deeply mired in personal scandal involving a penniless youth of seventeen whom he had his brother adopt. The Catholic Encyclopedia offers this tactful if candid description of their relationship:
The great blemish in his pontificate was nepotism. Shortly after his accession he bestowed the purple on his unworthy favorite Innocenzo del Monte, a youth of seventeen whom he had picked up on the streets of Parma some years previously, and who had been adopted by the pope’s brother, Balduino. This act gave rise to some very disagreeable rumors concerning the pope’s relation to Innocenzo.13
“Bestowed the purple”—that is, the sixty-something Pope Julius III made his one-time teenage lover a cardinal, with all the perks this implies. By the way, after Julius’ death, Cardinal Innocenzo murdered two men and was accused of raping two women.
After Michelangelo died, the two huge frescoes of the Pauline Chapel—the last paintings he ever made—were snubbed by his contemporaries, who compared them negatively with his earlier work on the ceiling and far wall of the Sistine Chapel. “They were considered the shoddy work of an old man,” according to biographer Forcellino, who says that in his painting of Saint Peter, Michelangelo had been openly provocative. “He was being censored, as is clear from the fact that in 1549 the Vatican declined to pay him to finish the frescoes in the chapel. They were completed by other artists in 1572, twenty-two years later.”14
Like the painted nails, the wrapping over the saint’s genitals was an addition from that later tidying up of Michelangelo’s work. “In Greek classical sculpture an unadorned figure was a reference to the status of the depicted person or deity: athletes and gods could be identified by their adornment or lack of it,” according to Dr. Anna Tahinci, the author of Removing the Fig Leaf.15
What is significant here, however, is that during the seven-year restoration of the Pauline Chapel, completed only in 2009, or two years after Paolucci’s appointment as head of the Vatican Museums, the restorers had chosen not to remove either the belated additions of nails or the mini loin cloth. Neither had been in Michelangelo’s original work, but no complaint seems to have come from the Vatican cultural czars, and they are still there, the nails looking like “cockroaches,” as one outraged art historian put it because the critics missed the point entirely—that the saint had given himself up willingly to God, not because he had been forced to the cross.
Today’s cardinals still meet in the Pauline Chapel to pray before entering the Sistine Chapel to begin the proceedings for election of a new pope. And this is also the chapel where, immediately after his election, Pope Francis withdrew to pray alone for a few minutes before appearing before the crowds gathered to welcome him for the first time in St. Peter’s Square.
Of all Paolucci’s responsibilities, none looms larger than the Sistine Chapel, which he has called the spiritual heart of the Roman Catholic Church worldwide, because within its august walls popes are elected. Five hundred years old in 2012, the Sistine Chapel is also the chief calling card for the Vatican Museums—a “transcendent work of genius,” to quote from the Smithsonian magazine—for it houses what most art historians consider the two greatest single works of art produced in the Western world. It is one of those places that foreigners of all faiths and all nations expect to see when they come to visit Rome; for many, it is why they visit Rome, and reason enough.
Michelangelo was thirty-four years old when he began painting the ceiling with scenes from the Book of Genesis. After four years of solitary, painful labor, an exhausted Michelangelo set down his paintbrushes, and the finally complete Sistine Chapel was formally blessed and inaugurated by Pope Julius II with a mass on November 1, 1512.
The unveiling of the ceiling came as a shocking surprise for the papal court, for, as art historians tell us, the pope and cardinals had been expecting to see the likes of a flock of flying angels. Instead they saw what seemed acres of human flesh, and this came to them as a not altogether agreeable experience.
Michelangelo began painting the Last Judgment on the wall behind the chapel altar in 1536, a quarter of a century after the ceiling. Four years later, when he was sixty-six, that too was complete. In its host of figures—four hundred of them—covering forty by forty-five feet of painted surface was a sturdy St. Peter gripping two huge keys; the face and beard are those Michelangelo would repeat in the Pauline Chapel, but the saint is gazing directly at the Christ figure, and not yet glaring at the cardinals.
In Michelangelo’s time many within the church considered the Last Judgment fresco obscene because it too had many stark naked figures. Biagio da Cesena, who was the papal master of ceremonies, called the scene “very disgraceful . . . a work not for the chapel of a Pope, but for the public baths or a tavern.” Some translate public baths as “brothel.” Here is Vasari’s account, from Le Vite:
When Michelangelo had completed about three quarters of the work, Pope Paul went to see it, and Messer Biagio da Cesena, the master of the ceremonies, was with him, and when he was asked what he thought of it, he answered that he thought it not right to have so many naked figures in the Pope’s chapel. This displeased Michelangelo, and to revenge himself, as soon as he was departed, he painted him in the character of Minos with a great serpent twisted round his legs. Nor did Messer Biagio’s entreaties either to the Pope or to Michelangelo himself, avail to persuade him to take it away.
“Round his legs”—well, around his private parts, and not entirely, in fact, for the serpent twisting around the body is plainly, openly biting Cesena’s genitals. As if this were not enough, this high official of the Curia, whose face was uniquely recognizable as a portrait, is shown as Minos, hell’s demonic judge of sinners, and is given the ears of a foolish donkey. Supposedly the pope jokingly replied to Cesena’s appeals for it to be removed that the figure showing Cesena was in hell, and because the pontiff had no jurisdiction there, donkey ears and coiled serpent could remain.
Michelangelo died on February 17, 1564. That same year the Council of Trent decreed that the purpose of religious art was visual and theological clarity—that is to say, to teach the illiterate. Nudity was formally disapproved for religious paintings and sculptures. It was all the worse that Michelangelo’s Christ in the Last Judgment had been inspired by pagan depictions of Apollo, and some saw a Venus behind his Mary. The result was that many of the painted nudes of the Last Judgment were given modesty drapes by Daniele da Volterra. One of Michelangelo’s pupils and a caregiver at the end of his life, Daniele for his role in overpainting his late master was later given the dismissive nickname Braghettone, or the britches-maker, braghetti being a somewhat crude word for pants.
The overpainting was part of the church’s new didactic approach—an element of the official church propaganda that Michelangelo had rejected while he was alive. The Counter-Reformation was in full sway, and that same year the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Prohibited Books) was officially proclaimed.
Almost from the beginning, the chapel paintings presented a serious practical as well as moral problem: candle smoke. In 1543, only two years after Michelangelo completed painting the ceiling, it had to be cleaned. Pope Paul III himself appointed an official chapel cleaner, whose yearly duty was to use bread crumbs and fine linen cloths to wipe away the deposited grime. Later, some artists overpainted figures so as to heighten the contrasts.
By 1980, the Sistine Chapel paintings had been dulled by further centuries of greasy candle smoke, and a full-scale restoration of Michelangelo’s ceiling paintings began, bankrolled by a Japanese television network in exchange for exclusive rights to document the work. Among other things, those old overlays were removed.
When it was completed in 1994, after fourteen years of work, a number of influential art critics argued furiously that the frescoes had been seriously damaged by overly zealous restorers who eliminated their nuances and added vulgarly bright colors.
Vatican officials went on the defensive, arguing that these were Michelangelo’s true colors, previously unseen because dimmed by the centuries of accumulated grime. They also argued that the many retouchings of Michelangelo’s paintings over centuries had falsely emphasized the chiaroscuro.
Fabrizio Mancinelli, curator and codirector, with Gianluigi Colalucci, of the restoration, claimed in 1986 that the restoration “had brought to light (and will continue to bring to light) a totally new artist, a colorist quite different in character from the unnaturally somber character who has in the past fascinated generations of historians, connoisseurs and fellow artists.”16
To this a group of angry American art historians and artists responded with a petition of protest, in which they complained that the restored colors were unlike those that Michelangelo had habitually used. In particular, the late Prof. James Beck of Columbia University protested that an entire layer of glue covering the surface of the painting had been heedlessly scraped away by the restorers. Beck, who died in 2007, aged seventy-seven, was an Italian Renaissance specialist and cofounder with Michael Daley of ArtWatch International. Their position was that this glue layer had been intentionally applied by Michelangelo as a topping for the frescos, in order to enhance their sculptural effect with a final layer of subtle shading.17 And indeed comparative photographs demonstrate the elimination of significant details and nuances. The drastic overcleaning, moreover, also exposed the entire surface to modern pollution, he said.18
In October 2013, Paolucci was asked about future restorations. His reply was that he hoped never to see another one because they are “so traumatic” to the works of art. “There won’t be any more restorations,” he said—at least not on his watch.
But maintenance continues, he added. Indeed it does; as the manager of the Sistine Chapel today, he faces other maintenance problems that are both complex and immediate. The first and foremost is how to avoid the slow but inevitable destruction of the 2,730 square yards of wall and ceiling paintings that are being sacrificed to their very popularity. The Vatican’s creation of a free-of-charge 3-D virtual visit in 2012 had been intended to reduce the presence of tourists but, if anything, made a real visit all the more enticing. The elevation of Pope Francis contributed further to attracting ever larger numbers of visitors to Rome and the Vatican, by at least 10 percent.
These visitors must cram themselves into a severely limited space. The chapel floor covers just 5,896 square feet. In order to keep the daily flow of almost 17,600 moving along at the rate of almost two thousand every hour, the faithful and the tourists are allowed entry at twenty-minute intervals, and are actively discouraged from remaining longer than that. During a quick gawk at the ceiling and Last Judgment, they are constantly hushed by Vatican custodians and urged to keep moving, as indeed they must at the risk of being trampled by the next group of arrivals who have snaked their way through seemingly endless access corridors.
The twenty minutes allow just time enough for a selfie, to show you have been inside a place sacred to art and religion. The custodians are not to blame; the chapel is small, and the visitors are many.
But in the meantime, the damage is done. The Sistine Chapel managers know well that the people pressure translates into massive pollution from breath, but also from dust, sweat, perfumes and deodorants, the soles of shoes, the stench of cigar and cigarette clinging to clothes, and the textile fibers exuded from clothing.
For this reason, in December 2011, a pollution detector was installed to measure temperature, humidity, and chemical and air currents using thirty-six suspended and fourteen other detectors fitted on the walls of the chapel. The sensor data obtained was then compared with the number of visitors at any one time, counted via thermal cameras fitted on the doors. (If its results have been released, we have not seen them.)
The sensors were expected to be a first step before deciding upon improved air-conditioning, to the extent that this is possible. Less than a year after their installation, Pietro Citati, an influential Italian writer and literary critic, wrote after a visit that the chapel risks an “unimaginable disaster.” On entering the chapel he was met by a “horrendous wall of human breath,” he wrote in the daily Corriere della Sera.
In June 2014, three years after the sensors were placed in the chapel, the Vatican formally announced that work would be completed by the end of that year on installing new air-conditioning—a “landmark system,” the Vatican and its manufacturer described it, for heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) specifically designed to protect the chapel masterpieces from deterioration. The new system was designed to have twice the efficiency and three times the capacity of the previous system, Vatican Radio predicted, adding: “The custom-engineered solution uses energy-saving technologies, as well as methods of minimizing noise and limiting air motion around the frescoes.”
“The Sistine Chapel in Rome now has a new air-conditioning and illumination systems that will permit the number of visitors to be tripled,” crowed an Italian website called Aria, under the headline “Celestial Air for the Sistine Chapel.”19
The system’s manufacturer, Carrier, a subsidiary of United Technologies Corp. (UTC), is the same company that installed the air-conditioning system immediately after the restoration of the early 1990s. The new system was installed at year-end. “We are confident that Carrier’s HVAC system will enable us to realize our goal of ensuring the preservation of Michelangelo’s masterpieces in the Sistine Chapel while allowing visitors to continue to behold the frescoes for years to come,” said Paolucci.
To behold the frescoes is the point, but to do so in this day and age and at all seasons and hours is a challenge, especially during those dark evenings when well-heeled visitors pay $250 or so for the privilege of seeing the Vatican highlights in private after 6 P.M. in what one promoter described as “without the daytime crowds or summer heat . . . in a quiet, stress-free environment.” A type of illumination never envisioned by Michelangelo has become de rigueur, and so artificial lighting is now required, and this presented yet another knotty problem.
In the late 1980s, a new lighting system was installed. The best available in its time, it utilized halogen lamps emitting 90 percent heat but only 10 percent light.
On Paolucci’s watch in late 2014, these outdated lights were replaced by seven thousand new cold LED lights following an open-ended European Union competition. Long used in traffic lights and other outdoor illumination, LED lighting is increasingly popular in art galleries and museums; London’s National Gallery began installing LED lighting in 2011.
German manufacturer Osram Licht AG won the bid, and throughout 2013 the company’s Munich laboratory worked together with Vatican technicians in Rome to study and analyze the project’s visual qualities and possible conservation risks. The lights, which can be dimmed, were applied to existing overhead beams and hence are invisible to the viewer from below. Lighting is indirect, with no glare. LED lights contain none of the damaging ultraviolet rays of sunlight, said an Osram spokesman in an interview.
The new system cost around $2.6 million, paid not by the Vatican, but by the European Union together with five international commercial sponsors. Running costs will be reduced by at least 60 percent, says Osram, in part due to reduced lightbulb packaging and to lower CO2 emissions.
Speaking at a conference at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., Joseph Padfield, senior scientific officer of the National Gallery, pointed out that while all visible light is potentially damaging to artifacts, lighting is necessary in order to view them. That said, a problem is that LED lights must be specifically designed for color; they do not give off ultraviolet rays, and give more light than ordinary lightbulbs, but do not cast sunlight-type light. They are color-toned in three colors, which are adjusted as they fix upon every given, variously colored surface so as to exalt that color, which is why such a large number of lights are needed. Some critics have suggested the result for the Sistine Chapel might turn out to be a gaudy, “nightclub look.”
Fortunately, when the new lighting was switched on in October 2014, the effect was stunningly beautiful. It is a daunting thought that not even Michelangelo had ever seen his paintings illuminated so perfectly.
In theory, another practical conservation step could be to limit the number of visitors, but until recently Paolucci has opposed this on religious grounds, given the chapel’s importance in the history of the Catholic Church and to the faithful. He has admitted that he is at least thinking about the problem and has acknowledged that should the new air-conditioning system prove ineffective, “I’ll be forced to impose a limited number of visitors, but that would be a painful solution.”20
Painful in various ways: the money involved is considerable. The Vatican Museums are among the most visited and profitable in the world, and in 2012 had an income of $113 million through ticket sales, plus almost as much again through merchandising. The Sistine Chapel can also be rented for occasional corporate events.
As Italian reporter Andrea Bevilacqua has pointed out, it is not easy for the Vatican to say no to the mass purchase of tickets to visit the Vatican museums, since many go solely to visit the Sistine Chapel and enter and exit rapidly. In the United Kingdom the Guardian quickly picked up this story and commented acidly that even if the Vatican needs “funding for its various activities,” it is preferable to eliminate such “monstrosities” as the overcrowding of the Sistine Chapel.
In places of religious and artistic pilgrimages elsewhere, limitations upon the number of visitors have been successfully applied. The administrators of the Chapel of the Scrovegni in Padua, whose masterpiece fresco cycle was painted by Giotto between 1303 and 1305, faced a similar problem. Ever since its restoration was completed a decade ago, the number of visitors permitted there has been limited. Tickets when paid by credit card must be purchased through a call center at least twenty-four hours before a visit; if by bank transfer, three days in advance. Tickets must then be picked up at least one hour before the time assigned for entry.
At one point Paolucci considered construction of a high-tech replica of the Sistine Chapel where visitors could linger to study the complex paintings. In an interview with journalist Judith Harris for ARTnews some years back, he mentioned that it could be built on an old tennis court close to the museums. Successful replicas are now becoming common where precious ancient sites are involved, including the painted Upper Paleolithic Altamira cave near Santander in Spain, built in 2001 to acclaim, and the replica, built in 2013, of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt, which faced the same array of pollution problems as the Sistine Chapel.
From earliest Christian times a patrimony of the arts and architecture, and the upkeep of the acquired church possessions, went hand in hand with politics. A thousand years later, politics continued to affect the church, including its heritage possessions. By the time of Italian independence (the Risorgimento) the Papal States—also known as the “Republic of Saint Peter”—stretched some sixteen thousand square miles across central Italy, from Lazio to eastern Emilia-Romagna.
Unification of Italy in 1870 shrank that Republic of Saint Peter to just two-tenths of a square mile. “Monasteries and Catholic schools [were] suppressed, convents disbanded,” writes Robert P. Lockwood in his history of Pius IX, who was pontiff from 1846 to 1878, all particularly difficult years for the church.21 Under the terms of a law passed in 1873, the new state had the right to seize ecclesiastical properties, including seminaries like Rome’s prestigious Collegio Romano, which was then converted into a state school. Within the newly miniaturized Vatican state, entirely encircled by Rome, Pius became a virtual prisoner by his refusal to set foot on Italian soil.
That situation of hostility was definitively resolved, and the then-pontiff Pius IX finally freed, only after Cardinal Pietro Gasparri and Benito Mussolini signed the Lateran Pacts of 1929. By the terms of their Article 30, Vatican ownership of its patrimony and properties, like the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome, was once again guaranteed.
One article in the 1929 Concordat granted the church custody of all the catacombs in Rome along with the crucial obligation for “keeping, maintaining and conserving them.” The church also received the right to conduct future excavations in Italian territory; the corollary was that when and if new catacombs were found, the Vatican would have the obligation to keep, maintain, and conserve these too.22 And indeed new catacombs were and continue to be found, including important ones in Sicily, with consequent financial responsibilities. At the same time Italian politics also brought disaster for the church. When Mussolini’s Fascism drew Italy into war on the wrong side, the church shared in the ensuing tragedy. In 1943 Rome’s medieval Papal Basilica of Saint Lawrence Outside the Walls (San Lorenzo fuori le Mura), which had been constructed atop an oratory built by the first Christian Emperor Constantine, suffered serious bomb damage that included the destruction of several of the precious frescoes on its facade. In early 1944 Allied planes dropped fourteen hundred tons of bombs onto the Abbey of Montecassino, which had been founded by Saint Benedict in the year 528 on the foundations of a temple to Apollo, and then enlarged in the eleventh century. By the time the Allied advance through Italy drove German troops away, the Abbey lay in ruins. Eighty miles south of Rome, it was entirely, expensively rebuilt at the end of the war.
Catacombs and monasteries are only a part of the physical heritage of the church still guaranteed by the Concordat, and not only in Rome, but in the rest of Italy and even beyond. Long lists of the Vatican-owned properties—buildings used by the church like the Cancelleria in downtown Rome, but also buildings that bring in rental income—exist.
Where are they? No one knows. Writing for the respected Italian weekly Il Mondo, investigative reporter Sandro Orlando affirmed that church properties have “dodged every census in the almost eighty years passed since the Concordat was signed in 1929.”23 In 1985, when Parliament was debating a bill that would provide funds for churches in Italy (presumably for their upkeep as well as construction of new ones), a Radical Party deputy named Francesco Rutelli read out an “interminable list” of buildings owned by the no less interminable ecclesiastical organizations in Rome. Thanks to the Christian Democratic Party in power from 1947 onward, said Rutelli, the Italian state was already providing the church in Italy with “trillions of lire” solely for maintenance of the churches of Rome.
Ironically, Rutelli himself would later become mayor of Rome, and would, in the Jubilee Year 2000, successfully expand the earthly belongings of the church in Rome. As mayor, he promoted public contributions for restorations of chapels and church buildings, plus construction of new hospices for the expected arrival of pilgrims and even public parking lots.
By Orlando’s estimate, the church in Rome owns 400 institutes for nuns, 300 parishes (churches), 250 Catholic schools, 90 religious institutes, 65 medical facilities, 50 missions, 43 high schools, 30 monasteries, 20 old-age homes, 20 seminaries, 18 hospitals, 16 convents, 13 oratories, 10 confraternities, 6 hospices, almost 2,000 religious organizations inside Rome, and properties of some 20,000 pieces of land and buildings; one fourth of Rome belongs to the Curia.24
More properties were being added. With the approach of the Jubilee Year in 2000, the activist Cardinal Camillo Ruini, vicar general of the Diocese of Rome from 1991 to 2008, launched a campaign to build fifty new churches in the towns that had mushroomed on the outskirts of Rome after the 1950s. These are not garden suburbs, but bleak conurbations, with ten-story buildings jammed together higgledy-piggledy. Ruini’s goal was to upgrade the poor architectural quality of that neglected Roman periphery or periferia, as Pope Francis would call it.
The Italian Bishops Conference (CEI) held an international competition. The world-famous Richard Meier won the contract to build the Church of God the Merciful Father (Dio Padre Misericordioso) in Tor Tre Teste outside Rome. Meier gave the church three gigantic white, slightly curved concrete sails, like a trio of stone sheets hung out to dry. Attached to the church proper, these sails overhang the church’s tall, Spartan, all-glass entrance, which resembles a Times Square hotel entryway, and separate it from the densely populated high-rises of its neighborhood context. (Meier’s controversial work on Rome’s publicly owned Ara Pacis Museum followed in 2005.)
Of Ruini’s fifty desired new churches for these suburbs, forty-five have been completed. The very fact of so many new churches in the often bleak Roman outskirts has been celebrated by many in Rome as a step forward because they provide an otherwise absent focal point for community life as well as worship.
Cardinal Ravasi does not look so kindly upon them, however. During a lecture at Rome University La Sapienza in 2011, Ravasi dismissed the new churches as “congress hall spaces, akin to sports palaces. They are vulgar and ugly places.”25
Two years later, speaking at the launch of a book illustrating these new Roman churches, Vatican Museums director Antonio Paolucci took the microphone to say that he too was less than impressed by them. “I cannot help pointing out, having examined this new book more than once, how much confusion there is under the Roman skies because of these new churches. How can one not be concerned? Churches? Parishes? At best we are looking at a museum space—the sort of place which does not invite either prayer or meditation.”26
Paolucci argued that Rome’s new modernist churches fail to have the “visible tabernacles, the cupolas, icons and images of the life of the Church which help the parish priests teach the catechism. Even the Russian Orthodox churches fully carry out these tasks of formation and catechism teaching.”
A later speaker, Professor Marco Petreschi of Rome University, rebutted the cardinal’s critique firmly if politely. Petreschi is the architect who designed the great altar, gigantic cross, and huge stage expressly requested by Pope John Paul II for the celebration of the first World Youth Day in Rome in 1986. Also for the year 2000 Petreschi created the modernist Church of Saint Thomas the Apostle, located twelve miles outside Rome at Lunghezza. It was dedicated in 2013 to Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and became the forty-fifth completed since Cardinal Ruini’s project began.
Said Petreschi: “It is clear that the professor [Paolucci] is accustomed to historical analyses of the churches designed by the great architects of the past. But it is too easy to analyze historical [building] complexes which had the benefit of ample financing.” Today’s architects, he pointed out, work on drastically limited budgets. “And if in the periferia there are forty-five new churches, it is an authentic miracle, aside from aesthetic and architectural judgments.”
When Pope Francis made his first local parish visit as bishop of Rome, he chose the new parish of Prima Porta that has recently grown up around one of these rather stark new churches completed in 2010 in the outer northern suburbs of the capital. Previously, Sunday mass had to be celebrated there in the garage of an apartment block.
Probably the least known of Pope Francis’ responsibilities for preservation of the Catholic cultural heritage is his role as overseer of the Vatican’s literally unique collection of ethnological artifacts, sent to Rome by missionaries from all over the world. The first arrivals came in 1692 from Oceania, China, Australia, and the Americas.
When Pope Pius XI called a Holy Year for 1925, an anthropologist priest named Father Wilhelm Schmidt (1868–1954) appealed to Catholic missions worldwide for artifacts to be displayed at the Universal Missionary Exhibition. Schmidt was the founder of Anthropos, a journal that reported field research in ethnography conducted by missionaries, especially in New Guinea and Togo, and the goal for the Holy Year was to illustrate the reach of the church beyond Europe.
Missionaries working as far afield as the Easter Islands, South America, and the Congo responded. The one hundred thousand artifacts that arrived from Native American tribes, and from Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic religious cultures, were displayed in twenty-four pavilions erected within the Vatican Gardens, and were seen by one million people.
Today these objects form the core of the Vatican’s collection, housed in the Ethnological Missionary Museum within the Vatican Museums complex. The oldest single item in the collection is a chipped stone tool made two million years ago.
“When people think of the Vatican Museums collections, they often forget that over half of what we have is not European,” said Jesuit Father Nicola Mapelli, the Ethnological Museum’s director, in an interview. “The missionaries were the links between the church in Rome and aboriginal peoples.”
Many are of particularly delicate materials, from ostrich plumes to woven straw, leather, wood, crocodile, and glass beads. To protect this heritage, the Vatican also created a Diagnostic Laboratory for Conservation and Restoration, which today stands in the forefront in worldwide studies of conservation of cultural artifacts outside the European standard, which is largely based upon classical and Renaissance antiquities.
At the closing of the Exhibition of 1925, Pius XI predicted that “the Missionary Museum [will remain] like a school, like a book that is always open.” In fact, the diagnostic laboratory, in which fifteen restorers work, is actively involved in the exchange of conservation experiences worldwide, and to consideration of how preservation of an ethnographic heritage can promote local cultural identities, including marginal cultures, while also enhancing cultural exchange. To this end, in 2014 the Vatican published a handbook, “Ethics and Practice of Conservation,” on ethnographic heritage policies.
An example of how the Vatican today reaches out to other cultures is its contribution to restoration of panels depicting the life of Buddha and his reincarnations on the monumental Borobudur compound, built in Java, Indonesia, in the ninth century AD. Weather and the interaction of iron rods and cement had taken its toll upon a series of carved stone panels illustrating the life of Buddha, and details were lost. Fortunately, the Ethnological Museum had both plaster and cement casts of the panels, on which details lost on the originals were visible, and two diagnostic laboratory restorers went to Borobudur to help in their conservation.
From its Ethnological Museum, the Vatican loaned precious copies of ancient pages from the Koran, for a temporary exhibition in 2014 at the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization in the United Arab Emirates. For that exhibit, “We selected our most beautiful objects so that we might know each other,” said Father Mapelli. “We not only want to work on preservation of an object; we want to give life to it and to connect with the populations who created the objects. What is important to us is to have a connection with people.”
In the 1920s, a missionary was given a mask from the Yaghan indigenous people in Tierra del Fuego in Chile. “To learn more, we went there, and managed to locate the 90-year-old daughter of the Yaghan who had offered the mask to the missionary. The daughter wove a basket for us,” said Mapelli. That basket is now in the Ethnological Museum collection, next to the mask.
Vatican technicians have also become coveted partners with other museums. They share their cutting-edge knowledge of how to use lasers for restoration of ancient objects with other museums, such as the Egyptian Museum of Turin. A laser was also used for restoration of the Scala Santa at the Chapel of San Lorenzo in Rome.
Another Vatican partnership with the world of high tech is a project of one of the oldest libraries in the world, the Vatican Library, to digitize its unique collection of eighty thousand manuscripts and make them available to scholars worldwide. Under a four-year program begun in 2014, the Japanese NTT Data Corporation has sent a team of technicians to work with Vatican staff on digitizing a first selection of about three thousand manuscripts. Scanning of books illuminated with gold and silver requires special equipment and the project could drag on for decades. So far the Japanese company has invested $20 million. The Vatican Virgil, one of the earliest manuscripts of works by the Roman poet dating from the fourth century AD, should be online by 2018.
Pope Francis made an unusual choice for the artist who would paint his first official portrait. Shen Jiawei, sixty-seven, was born in Shanghai and became famous as an official propaganda artist for the Chinese Communist regime. His painting Standing Guard for Our Great Motherland of 1974 shows a trio of rosy-cheeked soldiers from the People’s Army peering into a frozen landscape. Madame Mao Zedong herself selected this painting as a propaganda tool and the painting was reproduced millions of times. Tiring of Communist life, Shen Jiawei emigrated to Australia in 1989, where he began an international career as portrait artist. In 2002 he had painted Pope John Paul II together with Mikhail Gorbachev inside the Sistine Chapel.
From Rome’s historic underground, where worshippers of Apollo and Isis lie buried side by side with the earliest Christians, to the endangered Sistine Chapel, to the new redbrick suburban churches built on a shoestring, to a Yaghan mask from Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America and to the conservation of one of the world’s most valuable collections of ancient manuscripts and printed books: this is today’s complex, fascinating Roman Catholic Church heritage of the arts and architecture, which it is the task of Pope Francis to maintain. Francis, in his personal crusade on behalf of the world’s poor, has shown no inclination so far to divest his church of its artistic riches and sell off some of its priceless art treasures, as some feared he might do when they first learned of his election as head of the Catholic Church.