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This month's museum pick...
The Vatican Museum
By Patrick Totty
Vatican Museum
Visitors Shouldn’t Forget
The
Magnificence of St. Peter’s Basilica
Practitioners
of casual anti-Catholicism, a sentiment that one social critic called
the “last permissible bigotry in modern America,” should avoid the
Vatican Museums. Here, the case for a church still mired in the Middle
Ages is refuted by some of the world’s most magnificent collections of
Renaissance art. The art –
bold, exuberant, humanistic – was inspired in great part by a Church
whom the artists of that era unabashedly respected and thanked for its
patronage. The museums, housed primarily in
the former papal apartments of the medieval Apostolic Palace, cover the
Renaissance from its late 14th-century origins to its full
flower in the 16th century. Among the artists whose works
visitors can find there are Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Signorelli,
Michelangelo and Raphael. Of course the capstone of the Renaissance
collection is the Sistine Chapel. But even the Vatican’s museums
play second fiddle to the great edifice that dominates Vatican City: the
magnificent basilica of St. Peter’s, the largest church in
Christendom, and beneficiary of some of Michelangelo and Bernini’s
greatest works. Bernini’s great twin colonnades of robust,
piazza-forming, Tuscan-order pillars, which seem to stretch in an
immense embrace from the basilica, were for years the ceremonial
entrance to the Vatican for diplomatic travelers. They would ride their
carriages or horses along the wide, curving path formed under the
colonnade roof, catching tantalizing glimpses between the great pillars
of St. Peter’s facade. Bernini had planned at one time
to construct a third colonnade at the bottom of the piazza, hoping to
block off the view of the great church from casual passersby while
rewarding determined pilgrims who would work their way through the
columns with a first, breathtaking view of the basilica. His other great contribution was
the soaring, 95-foot tall bronze baldachino, with its renowned
twisted spiraling columns, over the main altar of St. Peter’s. Bernini’s baldachino, essentially a canopy traditionally placed
over a sacred spot, has always been to central focal point of the
basilica. That is until the eye gazes
upward at Michelangelo’s magnificent dome, the best known and most
imitated in the world. He designed the dome, which is even larger than
Brunelleschi’s prodigious Il
Duomo in Florence, to rest on four massive piers that form the
transept of St. Peter’s. But he made certain that the cornices of the
piers would have such a powerful horizontality that they would make the
dome itself appear to float above them. Visitors over a span of almost
400 years have come away wondering how such a large dome seems to rest
so lightly on its foundation.