Vatican III: This Time It's Personal

A series of clown events attended my efforts to visit the Vatican Museum--from booking the pensione room for the first trip before learning that the museum would be closed for All Saints Day, to oversleeping and missing several trains for the second trip, and then watching a train enter and leave the station while I was trying to get the ticket machine to take my card. So yesterday was my last chance, and dammit, I was not going to miss it. I hauled myself out of bed early, and stumbled through Arezzo in the predawn rain.


In Rome I promptly got lost, despite having walked to the Vatican before. I was afraid that this would be the crowning clown moment: that I'd arrive too late to get in. Fortunately Rome was also pretty dreary and wet, and though there was a long line of tourists with umbrellas outside St. Peter's, none of them seemed all that interested in the art around the corner. So I got in with no wait--no wait! at the Vatican Museum!--and went wandering through halls that were so empty I kept expecting someone to tell me the place was closed.

I hit the Pinacoteca first. I sneezed very loudly in a medieval gallery, and thereby struck up a conversation with a friendly guard (does the "bless you" count extra at the Vatican Museum, do you think?). He showed me the Forli angels, and the cracked plaster on one face that had always reminded him of cigarette smoke. It was true--among all these lute-playing cherubs was one who clearly had a future in jazz. This is apparently a you-had-to-be-there moment; that's the one angel whose image I can't find on line. (It tells you everything you need to know about my personal theology that I will take photos in a cathedral but not in an art museum.)

The Guido Reni paintings were among my favorites, not least because I'm not as familiar with Reni as with other artists. His depiction of a wild-haired St. Matthew receiving the gospel as divine dictation is lovely.

Of course, anyone who's ever written knows that the inclusion of the angel is an act of supreme mercy on Reni's part. Replace the angel with a coffee mug and the painting becoes far more realistic. But Matthew's face is just perfect; and evidently I'm not the first to realize it, because the same image adorns a bunch of notebooks in the gift shop.

Quite a lot of tourists have no qualms about taking snapshots, even with flash, in an art gallery. The Vatican Museum seems fairly resigned to this; I suppose it's more of an issue for a typical not-for-profit institution that derives much of its income from reproductions of the art. But it was still jarring, once I encountered the tourists, to see them pose in front of, say, Raphael's Transfiguration, with a hip thrust out and lips pursed into a campy kiss. I think the snapshot impulse is something akin to the graffiti impulse, the desire to say, Look, I did this, I saw this, I was here. (I could get into the longer discussion of how we as a society tend to view the photographic media as conferring legitimacy and importance upon people, but I should probably save it for the actual philosophy paper I have to write today.)

I went on through the halls of maps and tapestries. There's also probably a lot more to be written about Maria de Rivera, the weaver who executed all those giant tapestries from the life of Urban. Hers was one of the few female names I saw in the course of the day, with, of course, the exception of the other Maria. (In one of the Baroque galleries there's even a painting by Ortensio Gentilleschi, but none by his rather more talented daughter.)

Of course the whole thing ends with the Sistine Chapel. This was where all the tourists were, it turned out. Ceding to the inevitable, the museum now plays a booming recording requesting silence in six different languages. It doesn't work. It's splendidly ironic, of course, but between the irony and the throngs of people the chapel has lost something of its capacity for spiritual might.

As at St. Peter's, what struck me more than anything else was the sheer dogged ability of Michelangelo. I think he might have sensed something of this too, from his self-portrait as the flayed, empty skin in the Last Judgment; amid all that grand scope is one exhausted man. The image reminds me of Marcello's proverb, which he'd repeat whenever one of us finished a scene gasping and sweaty: "The mask begins to live when the actor begins to die." Maybe we all, ultimately, sacrifice ourselves in order to create; maybe that's the only way to make something bigger than ourselves. Michelangelo, more than most of us, knew that this wasn't poetic exaltation but simple workaday fact. I think if you asked him he'd acknowledge it with a nod and a grunt and then go back to painting. That's what the self-portrait hisses to the attuned ear: This is what one person can achieve. Get to work.