approaches from the bridge of Sant' Angelo. But his attention is from
the first drawn to the front of the church, and he but vaguely realizes
that a lofty, unsymmetrical building rises on his right. He pauses,
perhaps, and looks in that direction as he ascends the long, low steps
of the basilica, and wonders in what part of the palace the Pope's
apartments may be, while the itinerant vender of photographs shakes
yards of poor little views out of their gaudy red bindings, very much as
Leporello unrolls the list of Don Giovanni's conquests. If the picture
peddler sees that the stranger glances at the Vatican, he forthwith
points out the corner windows of the second story and informs his victim
that 'Sua Santita' inhabits those rooms, and promptly offers photographs
of any other interior part of the Vatican but that. The tourist looks up
curiously, and finally gets rid of the fellow by buying what he does not
want, with the charitable intention of giving it to some dear but
tiresome relative at home. And ever afterward, perhaps, he associates
with his first impression of the Vatican the eager, cunning, scapegrace
features of the man who sold him the photographs.
To fix a general scheme of the buildings in the mind one must climb to
the top of the dome of the church and look down from the balcony which
surrounds the lantern. The height is so great that even the great
dimensions of the biggest palace in the world are dwarfed in the deep
perspective, and the wide gardens look small and almost insignificant.
But the relative proportions of the buildings and grounds appear
correctly, and measure each other, as it were. Moreover, it is now so
hard to obtain access to the gardens at all that the usual way of seeing
them is from the top of Saint Peter's, from an elevation of four hundred
feet.
To the average stranger 'the Vatican' suggests only the museum of
sculpture, the picture-galleries and the Loggie. He remembers, besides
the works of art which he has seen, the fact of having walked a great
distance through straight corridors, up and down short flights of marble
steps, and through irregularly shaped and unsymmetrically disposed
halls. If he had any idea of the points of the compass when he entered,
he is completely confused in five minutes, and comes out at last with
the sensation of having been walking in a labyrinth. He will find it
hard to give anyone an impression of the sort of building in which he
has been, and certainly he cannot have any knowledge of the
topographical relations of its parts. Yet in his passage through the
museums and galleries he has seen but a very small part of the whole,
and, excepting when in the Loggie, he probably could not once have stood
still and pointed in the direction of the main part of the palace.
[Illustration: BELVEDERE COURT OF THE VATICAN GALLERY
From a print of the last century]
In order to speak even superficially of it all, it is indispensable to
classify its parts in some way. Vast and irregular it is at its two
ends, toward the colonnade and toward the bastions of the city, but the
intervening length consists of two perfectly parallel buildings, each
over three hundred and fifty yards long, about eighty yards apart, and
yoked in the middle by the Braccio Nuovo of the Museum and a part of
the library, so as to enclose two vast courts, the one known as
Belvedere,--not to be confused with the Belvedere in the Museum,--and
the other called the Garden of the Pigna, from the pine-cone which
stands at one end of it.
Across the ends of these parallel buildings, and toward the city, a huge
pile is erected, about two hundred yards long, very irregular, and
containing the papal residence and the apartments of several cardinals,
the Sixtine Chapel, the Pauline Chapel, the Borgia Tower, the Stanze and
Loggie of Raphael, and the Court of Saint Damasus. At the other end of
the parallelogram are grouped the equally irregular but more beautiful
buildings of the old Museum, of which the windows look out over the
walls of the city, and which originally bore the name of Belvedere, on
account of the lovely view. This is said to have been a sort of
summer-house of the Borgia, not then connected with the palace by the
long galleries.
It would be a hopeless and a weary task to attempt to trace the history
of the buildings. Some account of the Pope's private apartments has
already been given in these pages. They occupy the eastern wing of the
part built round the Court of Damasus; that is to say, they are at the
extreme end of the Vatican, nearest the city, and over the colonnade,
and the windows of the Pope's rooms are visible from the square. The
vast mass which rises above the columns to the right of Saint Peter's is
only a small part of the whole palace, but is not the most modern, by
any means. It contains, for instance, the Sixtine Chapel, which is
considerably older than the present church, having been built by Sixtus
the Fourth, whose beautiful bronze monument is in the Chapel of the
Sacrament, in Saint Peter's. It contains, too, Raphael's Stanze, or
halls, and Bramante's famous Loggie, the beautiful architecture of which
is a frame for some of Raphael's best work.
[Illustration: MICHELANGELO'S "LAST JUDGMENT"]
But any good guide book will furnish all such information, which it
would be fruitless to give in such a work as this. In the pages of
Murray the traveller will find, set down in order and accurately, the
ages, the dimensions, and the exact positions of all the parts of the
building, with the names of the famous artists who decorated each. He
will not find set down there, however, what one may call the atmosphere
of the place, which is something as peculiar and unforgettable, though
in a different way, as that of Saint Peter's. It is quite unlike
anything else, for it is part of the development of churchmen's
administration to an ultimate limit in the high centre of churchmanism.
No doubt there was much of that sort of thing in various parts of Europe
long ago, and in England before Henry the Eighth, and it is to be found
in a small degree in Vienna to this day, where the traditions of the
departed Holy Roman Empire are not quite dead. It is hard to define it,
but it is in everything; in the uniforms of the attendants, in their
old-fashioned faces, in the spotless cleanliness of all the
Vatican--though no one is ever to be seen handling a broom--in the
noiselessly methodical manner of doing everything that is to be done, in
the scholarly rather than scientific arrangement of the objects in the
museum and galleries--above all, in the visitor's own sensations. No one
talks loudly among the statues of the Vatican, and there is a feeling of
being in church, so that one is disagreeably shocked when a guide,
conducting a party of tourists, occasionally raises his voice in order
to be heard. It is all very hard to define, while it is quite impossible
to escape feeling it, and it must ultimately be due to the dominating
influence of the churchmen, who arrange the whole place as though it
were a church. An American lady, on hearing that the Vatican is said to
contain eleven thousand rooms, threw up her hands and laughingly
exclaimed, 'Think of the housemaids!' But there are no housemaids in the
Vatican, and perhaps the total absence of even the humblest feminine
influence has something to do with the austere impression which
everything produces.
On the whole, the Vatican may be divided into seven portions. These are
the pontifical residence, the Sixtine and Pauline chapels, the picture
galleries, the library, the museums of sculpture and archaeology, the
outbuildings, including the barracks of the Swiss Guards, and, lastly,
the gardens with the Pope's Casino. Of these the Sixtine Chapel, the
galleries and museums, and the library, are incomparably the most
important.
The name Sixtine is derived from Sixtus the Fourth, as has been said,
and is usually, but not correctly, spelled 'Sistine.' The library was
founded by Nicholas the Fifth, whose love of books was almost equal to
his passion for building. The galleries are representative of Raphael's
work, which predominates to such an extent that the paintings of almost
all other artists are of secondary importance, precisely as Michelangelo
filled the Sixtine Chapel with himself. As for the museums, the objects
they contain have been accumulated by many popes, but their existence
ought, perhaps, to be chiefly attributed to Julius the Second and Leo
the Tenth, the principal representatives of the Rovere and Medici
families.
On the walls of the Sixtine Chapel there are paintings by such men as
Perugino, Luca Signorelli, Botticelli, and Ghirlandajo, as well as by a
number of others; but Michelangelo overshadows them all with his ceiling
and his 'Last Judgment.' There is something overpowering about him, and
there is no escaping from his influence. He not only covers great spaces
with his brush, but he fills them with his masterful drawing, and makes
them alive with a life at once profound and restless. One does not feel,
as with other painters, that a vision has been projected upon a flat
surface; one rather has the impression that a mysterious reality of life
has been called up out of senseless material. What we see is not
imaginary motion represented, but real motion arrested, as it were, in
its very act, and ready to move again. Many have said that the man's
work was monstrous. It was monstrously alive, monstrously vigorous; at
times over-strong and over-vital, exaggerative of nature, but never
really unnatural, and he never once overreached himself in an effort. No
matter how enormous the conception might be, he never lacked the means
of carrying it to the concrete. No giantism of limb and feature was
beyond the ability of his brush; no astounding foreshortening was too
much for his unerring point; no vast perspective was too deep for his
knowledge and strength. His production was limited only by the length of
his life. Great genius means before all things great and constant
creative power; it means wealth of resource and invention; it means
quantity as well as quality. No truly great genius, unless cut short by
early death, has left little of itself. Besides a man's one great
masterpiece, there are always a hundred works of the same hand, far
beyond the powers of ordinary men; and the men of Michelangelo's day
worked harder than we work. Perhaps they thought harder, too, being more
occupied with creation, at a time when there was little, than we are
with the difficult task of avoiding the unintentional reinvention of
things already invented, now that there is so much. The latter is a real
difficulty in our century, when almost every mine of thought has been
worked to a normal depth by minds of normal power, and it needs all the
ruthless strength of original genius to go deeper, and hew and blast a
way through the bedrock of men's limitations to new veins of treasure
below.
It has been said of Titian by a great French critic that 'he absorbed
his predecessors and ruined his successors.' Michelangelo absorbed no
one and ruined no one; for no painter, sculptor or architect ever
attempted what he accomplished, either before him or after him. No sane
person ever tried to produce anything like the 'Last Judgment,' the
marble 'Moses,' or the dome of Saint Peter's. Michelangelo stood alone
as a creator, as he lived a lonely man throughout the eighty-nine years
of his life. He had envy but not competition to deal with. There is no
rivalry between his paintings in the Sixtine Chapel and those of the
many great artists who have left their work beside his on the same
walls.
The chapel is a beautiful place in itself, by its simple and noble
proportions, as well as by the wonderful architectural decorations of
the ceiling, conceived by Michelangelo as a series of frames for his
paintings. Beautiful beyond description, too, is the exquisite marble
screen. No one can say certainly who made it; it was perhaps designed by
the architect of the chapel himself, Baccio Pintelli. There are a few
such marvels of unknown hands in the world, and a sort of romance clings
to them, with an element of mystery that stirs the imagination, in a
dreamy way, far more than the gilded oak tree in the arms of Sixtus the
Fourth, by which the name of Rovere is symbolized. Sixtus commanded,
and the chapel was built. But who knows where Baccio Pintelli lies? Or
who shall find the grave where the hand that carved the lovely marble
screen is laid at rest?
[Illustration: SIXTINE CHAPEL]
It is often dark in the Sixtine Chapel. The tourist can rarely choose
his day, and not often his hour, and, in the weary traveller's
hard-driven appreciation, Michelangelo may lose his effect by the
accident of a thunder shower. Yet of all sights in Rome, the Sixtine
Chapel most needs sunshine. If in any way possible, go there at noon on
a bright winter's day, when the sun is streaming in through the high
windows at the left of the 'Last Judgment.' Everyone has heard of the
picture before seeing it, and almost everybody is surprised or
disappointed on seeing it for the first time. Then, too, the world's
ideas about the terrific subject of the painting have changed since
Michelangelo's day. Religious belief can no more be judged by the
standard of realism. It is wiser to look at the fresco as a work of art
alone, as the most surprising masterpiece of a master draughtsman, and
as a marvellous piece of composition.
In the lower part of the picture, there is a woman rising from her grave
in a shroud. It has been suggested that Michelangelo meant to represent
by this figure the Renascence of Italy, still struggling with darkness.
The whole work brings the times before us. There is the Christian Heaven
above, and the heathen Styx below. Charon ferries the souls across the
dark stream; they are first judged by Minos, and Minos is a portrait of
a cardinal who had ventured to judge the rest of the picture before it
was finished. There is in the picture all the whirling confusion of
ideas which made that age terrible and beautiful by turns, devout and
unbelieving, strong and weak, scholarly upon a foundation of barbarism,
and most realistic when most religious. You may see the reflected
confusion in the puzzled faces of most tourists who look at the 'Last
Judgment' for the first time. A young American girl smiles vaguely at
it; an Englishman glares, expressionless, at it through an eyeglass,
with a sort of cold inquiry--'Oh! is that all?' he might say; a German
begins at Paradise at the upper left-hand corner, and works his way
through the details to hell below, at the right. But all are inwardly
disturbed, or puzzled, or profoundly interested, and when they go away
this is the great picture which, of all they have seen, they remember
with the most clearness.
And as Michelangelo set his great mark upon the Sixtine, so Raphael took
the Stanze and the Loggie for himself--and some of the halls of the
picture-galleries too. Raphael represented the feminine element in
contrast with Michelangelo's rude masculinity. There hangs the great
'Transfiguration,' which, all but finished, was set up by the young
painter's body when he lay in state--a picture too large for the
sentiment it should express, while far too small for the subject it
presents--yet, in its way, a masterpiece of composition. For in a
measure Raphael succeeded in detaching the transfigured Christ from the
crowded foreground, and in creating two distinct centres of interest.
The frescoes in the Stanze represent subjects of less artistic
impossibility, and in painting them Raphael expended in beauty of design
the genius which, in the 'Transfiguration,' he squandered in attempting
to overcome insuperable difficulties. Watch the faces of your
fellow-tourists now, and you will see that the puzzled expression is
gone. They are less interested than they were before the 'Last
Judgment,' but they are infinitely better pleased.
Follow them on, to the library. They will enter with a look of
expectation, and presently you will see disappointment and weariness in
their eyes. Libraries are for the learned, and there are but a handful
of scholars in a million. Besides, the most interesting rooms, the
Borgia apartments, have been closed for many years and have only
recently been opened again after being wisely and well restored under
the direction of Leo the Thirteenth.
Two or three bad men are responsible for almost all the evil that has
been said and written against the characters of the Popes in the Middle
Age. John the Twelfth, of the race of Theodora Senatrix, Farnese of
Naples and Rodrigo Borgia, a Spaniard, who was Alexander the Sixth, are
the chief instances. There were, indeed, many popes who were not
perfect, who were more or less ambitious, avaricious, warlike, timid,
headstrong, weak, according to their several characters; but it can
hardly be said that any of them were, like those I have mentioned,
really bad men through and through, vicious, unscrupulous and daringly
criminal.
According to Guicciardini, Alexander the Sixth knew nothing of Caesar
Borgia's intention of poisoning their rich friend, the Cardinal of
Corneto, with whom they were both to sup in a villa on August 17, 1503.
The Pope arrived at the place first, was thirsty, asked for drink, and
by a mistake was given wine from a flask prepared and sent by Caesar for
the Cardinal. Caesar himself came in next, and drank likewise. The Pope
died the next day, but Caesar recovered, though badly poisoned, to find
himself a ruined man and ultimately a fugitive. The Cardinal did not
touch the wine. This event ended an epoch and a reign of terror, and it
pilloried the name of Borgia for ever. Alexander expired in the third
room of the Borgia apartments, in the raving of a terrible delirium,
during which the superstitious bystanders believed that he was
conversing with Satan, to whom he had sold his soul for the papacy, and
some were ready to swear that they actually saw seven devils in the room
when he was dying. The fact that these witnesses were able to count the
fiends speaks well for their coolness, and for the credibility of their
testimony.
It has been much the fashion of late years to cry down the Vatican
collection of statues, and to say that, with the exception of the
'Torso' it does not contain a single one of the few great masterpieces
known to exist, such as the 'Hermes of Olympia,' the 'Venus of Medici,'
the 'Borghese Gladiator,' the 'Dying Gaul.' We are told that the
'Apollo' of the Belvedere is a bad copy, and that the 'Laocoon' is no
better, in spite of the signatures of the three Greek artists, one on
each of the figures; that the 'Antinous' is a bad Hermes; and so on to
the end of the collection, it being an easy matter to demolish the more
insignificant statues after proving the worthlessness of the principal
ones. Much of this criticism comes to us from Germany. But a German can
criticise and yet admire, whereas an Anglo-Saxon usually despises what
he criticises at all. Isaac D'Israeli says somewhere that certain
opinions, like certain statues, require to be regarded from a proper
distance. Probably none of the statues in the Vatican is placed as the
sculptor would have placed it to be seen to advantage. Michelangelo
believed in the 'Laocoon,' and he was at least as good a judge as most
modern critics, and he roughed out the arm that was missing,--his sketch
lies on the floor in the corner,--and devoted much time to studying the
group. It is true that he is said to have preferred the torso of the
'Hercules,' but he did not withhold his admiration of the other good
things. Of the 'Apollo' it is argued that it is insufficiently modelled.
Possibly it stood in a very high place and did not need much modelling,
for the ancients never wasted work, nor bestowed it where it could not
be seen. However that may be, it is a far better statue, excepting the
bad restorations, than it is now generally admitted to be, though it is
not so good as people used to believe that it was. Apparently there are
two ways of looking at objects of art. The one way is to look for the
faults; the other way is to look for the beauties. It is plain that it
must be the discovery of the beauty which gives pleasure, while the
criticism of shortcomings can only flatter the individual's vanity.
There cannot be much doubt but that Alcibiades got more enjoyment out of
life than Diogenes.
The oldest decorated walls in the palace are those by Fra Angelico in
the Chapel of Nicholas. For some reason or other this chapel at one time
ceased to be used, the door was walled up and the very existence of the
place was forgotten. In the last century Bottari, having read about it
in Vasari, set to work to find it, and at last got into it through the
window which looks upon the roof of the Sixtine Chapel. The story, which
is undoubtedly true, gives an idea of the vastness of the palace, and
certainly suggests the probability of more forgotten treasures of art
shut up in forgotten rooms.
One other such at least there is. High up in the Borgia Tower, above the
Stanze of Raphael, is a suite of rooms once inhabited by Cardinal
Bibbiena, of the Chigi family, and used since then by more than one
Assistant Secretary of State. There is a small chapel there, with a
window looking upon an inner court. This was once the luxurious
cardinal's bath-room, and was beautifully painted by Raphael in fresco,
with mythological subjects. In 1835, according to Crowe and
Cavalcaselle, Passavant saw it as it had originally been, with frescoes
still beautiful, though much damaged, and the marble bath still in its
place in a niche painted with river gods. In one of the Vatican's
periodical fits of prudery the frescoes were completely hidden with a
wooden wainscot, the bath-tub was taken away and the room was turned
into a chapel. It is believed, however, that the paintings still exist
behind their present covering.
The walk through the Museum is certainly one of the most wonderful in
the world. There are more masterpieces, perhaps, in Florence; possibly
objects of greater value may be accumulated in the British Museum; but
nowhere in the world are statues and antiquities so well arranged as in
the Vatican, and perhaps the orderly beauty of arrangement has as much
to do as anything else with the charm which pervades the whole. One is
brought into direct communication with Rome at its best, brilliant with
the last reflections of Hellenic light; and again one is brought into
contact with Rome at its worst, and beyond its worst, in its decay and
destruction. Amid the ruin, too, there is the visible sign of a new
growth in the beginnings of Christianity, from which a new power, a new
history, a new literature and a new art were to spring up and blossom,
and in the rude sculpture of the Shepherd, the Lamb and the Fishes lies
the origin of Michelangelo's 'Moses' and 'Pieta.' There, too, one may
read, as in a book, the whole history of death in Rome, graven in the
long lines of ancient inscriptions, the tale of death when there was no
hope, and its story when hope had begun in the belief in the
resurrection of the dead. There the sadness of the sorrowing Roman
contrasts with the gentle hopefulness of the bereaved Christian, and the
sentiment and sentimentality of mankind during the greatest of the
world's developments are told in the very words which men and women
dictated to the stone-cutter. To those who can read the inscriptions the
impression of direct communication with antiquity is very strong. For
those who cannot there is still a special charm in the long succession
of corridors, in the occasional glimpses of the gardens, in the
magnificence of the decorations, as well as in the statues and fragments
which line the endless straight walls. One returns at last to the outer
chambers, one lingers here and there, to look again at something one has
liked, and in the end one goes out remembering the place rather than the
objects it contains, and desiring to return again for the sake of the
whole sensation one has had rather than for any defined purpose.