Battered but unbowed, cleansed of the brilliant, scandalous excesses of the Renaissance, the Church of Rome entered its sixteen hundredth year sanitized and set on a straight and narrow road. Its housecleaning complete, the edifice buffed and gleaming, the Church recast itself. What it had lost in political power, it gained in moral authority.
The Counter-Reformation Church had slowed the momentum of Protestantism and reaffirmed its mission, creating a new Church for a new century. Three million pilgrims thronged Rome for the Jubilee of 1600. A reorganized and reformed Curia set the standard for efficient government. Moral and ethical standards were demanded of the clergy, and missionaries brought the faith to Asia and the Americas.
In the new century, the Holy Father emerged as the exemplar of the new and improved Church. No more mistresses in the papal apartments, illegitimate children showered with benefices, or families made wealthy. No more war parties or papal bulls discharged like cannon fire. The pope became the model of the blameless Christian life. It was quite a change from the Renaissance popes and even from Peter, the flawed Everyman.
A mere fifty years after its unity fractured, the Catholic Church was reborn, more confident than ever, but increasingly closed. The resurgent Church became cautious, not humble. Orthodoxy became paramount. What was lost was not munificence but magnanimity—that largeness of spirit that made anything possible, that allowed every voice and every cockamamie idea to be aired. The church that had invented the term devil’s advocate to raise intellectual challenges became leery of open debate. That is, perhaps, one of the lasting legacies of Protestantism.
Still, the Church flourished, and the city flourished with it. By 1600, Rome was the third-largest city in Europe, surpassed only by Paris and London, and the Church of Christ was more distinctly than ever the Church of Rome. Although its embrace was universal, its soul was Latin, and it was expressed in an exultant new art. The resurgent Church gave Rome the Baroque. It was a heavenly marriage.
Like the city and its people, the new art was emotional, sensual, and unrestrained. Renaissance art was intellectual, intended to be appreciated by the ennobled few and instructive to the rest. It taught but it didn’t touch the illiterate masses of faithful Christians. The romance of the Baroque was an unabashed appeal to the emotions. In its graphic displays, the agonies and ecstasies of saints and martyrs and the sorrow and sweet solace of the Virgin Mother, deplored by Luther, became potent visual narratives that everyone could read.
Where the Protestants rejected Mary, the Church of Rome made devotion to her a cult. Where the Protestants attacked miracles as hogwash and black magic, the Roman Church enshrined relics in the four piers of the new Basilica. The Protestants had denied the authority of the pope and chastised Rome for its ostentatious wealth, and the Church had countered by forging ahead with the most audacious statement of its supremacy, the new Basilica of St. Peter. In the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, the Fabbrica reconstituted itself. Once Sixtus made it a congregation, it accrued greater authority and greater accountability. Vastly different from the committee that Michelangelo had deplored and steamrolled, the Fabbrica now established offices in many cities to collect and handle contributions and legacies earmarked for the Basilica. It arbitrated disputes relating to the building—settled legal issues, probated wills, and the like—and supervised the final phase of construction.
Today, the Fabbrica is housed in the upper realms of the Basilica, far above the tomb of Peter, in two spacious octagonal offices, each with a graceful cupola. Known as the ottagoni, they were probably the workrooms of the last great architect of St. Peter’s, Gianlorenzo Bernini. Equipped with recessed lighting, climate control, and computer banks, the ottagoni are lined with more than 2,400 feet of glass-fronted metal cabinets containing the full archival history of the Basilica.
Stored in bound volumes, boxes, folders, and packs of documents are a day-to-day record of the gradual destruction of Constantine’s basilica and the often agonizingly slow progress of the new construction. Registers and receipts detail expenditures for material. Account books, contracts, and bills of authorization spell out the payments to architects, artists, and workmen. Other files contain reports and legal documents pertaining to wills, disputes, gifts, and the like. There are lead and wax seals used to stamp papal bulls, edicts, decrees, parchments, and letters from the architects.
The Fabbrica not only preserves the history of the Basilica, it maintains the physical building with all its art and treasure, and oversees a unique corps of maintenance workers. Known as the Sampietrini, the corps was conceived as the Basilica neared completion. At the start of the new century, realizing that maintaining such an immense construction could not be left in the hands of casual laborers, an illiterate mason recruited thirty workers skilled in the various building trades and decorative arts. They made St. Peter’s their lifework, and in turn, trained their sons.
Over time, the Sampietrini became a unique hereditary force with particular rules and customs. Still operating today from shops concealed in the depths of St. Peter’s, they travel through the cavernous chambers and narrow twisting stairways within the walls to reach the most dizzying heights. Like circus acrobats, they balance on cornices and capitals, run along the dome and lantern, squat on the heads of the giant statues, and hang from the soaring vaults.
Their ancestors, the original Sampietrini, were the masons, carpenters, painters, stuccoists, glaziers, and gilders who worked with the master of the Baroque to transform the very stones and mortar that had sparked the Reformation into the transcendent symbol of the Roman Church.