My Way Is The Highway

Musei Vaticani/Vatican Museum, Vatican

(Yesterday, we visited the Colosseum, Roman Forum, Pantheon and the Piazza Navona)

May 26th, 2009

We started out a tad late having to pack our bags and stow it with the hotel reception to be picked later in the day.

We walked 10 minutes to the Republican metro station and took the rather crowded train. We crossed the Tiber and pulled into Ottaviano 5 stops, 12 minutes and €3 later. Rhea rode free. We grabbed a standup breakfast and walked at a clip to the Musei Vaticani not wanting to miss our 10:00 AM entrance.

The tickets we had booked online allowed us to bypass the line completely. The security is thick with airport style bag and metal scanners. I was asked to leave my backpack in the cloakroom and later missed my guidebook and the tripod (especially in the Sistine chapel that justifiably does not allow flash). No guidebook mentioned this and I hate surprises.

We met our tour guide and were given headphones so we could hear her without needing to huddle. While walking to the Vatican, Rhea has complained of chest pain. Almost as soon as the tour started the reason surfaced. She needed to use the restroom. By the time, we tried to merge back, the entourage had disappeared.

Then we stumbled upon the magnificent Laocoon.

 

In January of 1506, farmers in a vineyard near Santa Maria Maggiore found this sculpture buried and intact. Julius II, the residing pope and lover of all art forms, sent Michelangelo to investigate and guide the excavation from the Sette Sale of the Domus Aurea. The statue shows Laocoon (a priest  who warned fellow to no avail of the dangers of accepting the wooden horse from the Greeks) being punished by Greek Goddess Athena who sent snakes to drag him and his sons to a watery death.

A delighted Julius II bought the sculpture and put it in the Belvedere Courtyard to allow contemporary artists to study it.

In recent years, some scholars have suggested that Laocoon is indeed a Michelangelo forgery. The statue has been described vividly in Pliny’s Roman history from first century ACE and had been lost for over a thousand years. Researchers believe that Michelangelo carved it from a great block of Carrara marble and buried it to be found later. If this is true, then he successfully managed to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.

The next two hours were a daze. Corridors leading to corridors leading to huge rooms. Huge rooms with huge vaulted ceilings, detailed in rich golden, blues, reds – very expensive colors at the time. Hundreds and hundreds of frescoes, mosaics, painted glass, canvas, tapestry.

The Borgia apartment with Pinturicchio’s complex iconography. The brilliantly conceived and executed Stanze of Raphael, an explosion of paint and emotion that Julius II liked so much he chose to use as his personal apartment.

I liked how Raphael pays sincere homage to his competition number 1, Michelangelo, to whom he lost the Sistine Chapel commission.

       Raphael’s Scuola di Atene – the School of Athens, a collage of several Greek philosopher and Roman artists

Raphael is said to have spent many an evening in the Sistine Chapel after Michelangelo was done for the day. Raphael’s sheer respect for Michelangelo is reflected in the premium spot he gets in the painting. He is slouching on the stairs, in a thinkers pose, a wee bit morose. The leather boots, Michelangelo’s trademark are visible and thrust towards the audience, almost like a signature.

After Raphael, I only had eyes for the Sistine Chapel. There was not much in me for anything else. In Vatican, anyways, all corridors lead to the Sistine Chapel.

 

(Read on. Next, we are headed to the Sistine Chapel)

 

Sistine Chapel

(Earlier today, we were at Musei Vaticani)

May 26th, 2009

The first reaction on entering the chapel was that it is smaller than I had expected. Then I looked at the ceiling and I froze.

I realized, it is impossible to prepare for an event like this. You can read all the books you want, you can see every image of every paining a thousand times beforehand, yet, you are unprepared to experience it in situ. The hand that painted it cannot not belong to the God – which incidentally is the leitmotif of the ceiling in its entirety – God and man working together.

I found a spot on a bench nearby. It does not matter where you sit. Every square inch in the room has the best view.

The only painting on Michelangelo’s resume, all those years ago, was the Doni Tondo (now available in the Uffizi). It must have taken Julius II tremendous foresight to ignore Bramante’s advice, who surreptitiously was plugging for his nephew who went by the name Raphael, and drag Michelangelo back from his comfortable life in Florence to take this work on. Bramante was not wrong though. Michelangelo had never been tried on figures this large, that would demand the highest level of detail for foreshortening.

One would assume a project so dear to the pope and of such obvious importance would enjoy a carte blanche. It did not. The budget would allow only half the Chapel to be scaffolded – so costly was the rope and the wood - at a time and the Chapel services continued unabated while the work was in progress creating severe constraints and heartburn to the artist.

Michelangelo rejected Bramante’s advice of a suspended scaffolding – by itself no mean feat given the reputation Bramante commanded at the time – as he gingerly pointed out the tiny detail of filling in the holes that such a scaffolding would leave when removed. He then went on to design his own, a scheme Bramante would later reuse for St. Peters. He started off with the half closest to the entrance and took him two years to complete. Unlike the myth that he painted lying on his back, an image romanticized by Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, he painted standing up with his head thrown back. He worked meticulously and methodically.  In August 1511, half the completed ceiling was thrown open to the public. It was also the first time Michelangelo got a chance to inspect his work from the floor, more than 60 feet away from where he was used to seeing it. (Do you get it?). His corrections are evident as he threw himself into completing the second half of the Chapel. He uncluttered his panels. He focused on gigantic figures in fluid motion, twisted in extreme emotion, using his mastery in depicting anatomy.

By October 1512, he was done and back in Florence where he felt the most belonged. He thought he was done with Rome, not knowing that he would be called back 23 years later to take the Chapel to a new height for a pope as different as one could be from Julius II.

Pope Paul III dragged Michelangelo back to Rome, this time to decorate the wall behind the altar. Michelangelo, 65 years old by now, built a new wall to get the right ventilation for his fresco, unwilling to paint in oil, which he maintained was a medium for lazy people and women. (Stay on, we are not here for what Michelangelo thought or believed in). He then uncorked another masterpiece.

Freely using nudes, his belief that physical beauty reflected spiritual and moral beauty, would haunt him to his deathbed. In the Last Judgment, he depicted salvation the way Catholicism would. No one deserves to be saved because all are sinners. The ones saved looks scared and confused. The ones damned look surprised and sad.

As if he was not in trouble enough, he left a lot of nuanced Easter eggs in his work. He used his painting to openly castigate people who criticized him. Biagio de Cesna is painted as Minos in Hell. He has donkey ears, and his testicles are being chewed by a snake. Biagio disapproved of all the nudity, he got nailed for life. Pietro Arentino was made into St. Bartholomew. The acid that Arentino threw at Michelangelo singed his own skin. His letter never being read by the public, Michelangelo’s art never ignored. He is shown skinned alive, carrying his own skin. his penis flopping around.

Michelangelo was kind to people he liked. Cavalieri gets to be St. Sebastian. Urbino got casted as St. James. Pope Paul III, himself, got the role of St. Peters. Renaissance casting couch, lets say. Only after Michelangelo died, did Pius IV dare to revisit the nudes, getting Daniela de Volterra, Michelangelo’s trusted student to paint cloth over the genitals. Volterra was gentle. Minimalistic. He did his bit, without taking away what his master intended.

I had finally seen it. Taken what I could. What I deserved. There are places I do not bid goodbye. This was another. I left a piece of me here. I took with me a piece of the place.

Symbolically, it takes a beautiful spiral staircase build by Bramante to bring people down to terra firma - gently.

 

(Read on. We are headed to Piazza de San Pietro)

 

Piazza de San Pietro

(Earlier today, we were at the Musei Vaticani  and the Sistine Chapel )

May 26th, 2009

After the Sistine Chapel  and a long lunch, we walked along the periphery of the Vatican wall to reach the St. Peter’s Basilica.

The church is built right atop the necropolis where the saint, the very first pope is buried. The turn of century church was rebuilt in 1506 by Pope Julius II using Bramante as the architect, Over the next 170 years several artists – Michelangelo, Maderno, and Bernini added to the original structure.

Before the Church, you take in the Piazza de St. Pietro (St. Peter’s Square), a cobbled courtyard enclosed by two rows of colonnades – the famous Baroque embrace.   When Bernini designed this master piece in 1667, he had to consider several things. He needed to make sure that no part of the enclosure hid even the tiniest bit of the facade. Plus he needed to create an enclosure as large as he could to accommodate the sea of people who turned out for the pope. Not to forget the 13th century obelisk to consider.

His design is simple. He has two rows of colonnades jutting straight starting at the end of the facade, then dramatically spreading out, encircling the courtyard, using the Obelisk as the center. He then added a fountain to balance Maderno’s, the obelisk forming a beautiful serendipitous sundial. The view from the cupola unlocks a Bernini Easter egg that is not apparent from the Piazza level. The courtyard is shapes like a key hole to go with St. Peter’s Keys. The breathtaking piazza itself is worth a prayer.

I wish we had come here early in the morning. Piazza at 8:00. The church at 10:00 and museum after lunch is the ideal order.

 

(Read on. We are headed to the Dome of St. Peter’s Basilica)