Michelangelo, Donatello, Rafael & Leonardo .. Not the TMNT the artists

Tuesday 22 November The Vatican, Rome – Day II

We left a note for Franco asking for brekky at 8 if he was in that early, and took the croissants and bananas out with us as snacks. Straight to Ottaviano by train and the short walk to the Vatican City, all the way fending off would-be guides.

Tiananmen Square is bigger but it is unwalled and the impact of St Peter’s is much stronger. The huge Dome (designed by Michelangelo) above the Basilica dominates the Square and the great wings to either side reach forward and almost encircle the forecourt with the great Obelisk at the centre. Jesus looks down from the middle of the front edge, flanked by 12 apostles, and some 140 Saints command the forecourt from the wings. You are well and truly being watched from on high.

Sometimes I do wish that people would stay out of my perfectly proportioned photographs. lol

Swiss Guard have just performed some kind of changing of the guards.  Checkout the size of the doors and portico into this outter wing of the Vatican. Awesome

There was hardly any queue to get into the Basilica and the immediate impression was of a massive cavernous space, abuzz with thousands of whispers, fringed with numerous alcoves, a dome towering overhead at the far end, not many other sources of light, everything clean and bright and a multitude of statues and paintings. Veering off to the right, we were immediately attracted straight to the huge, shining white marble of Michelangelo’s Pieta. We knew what it was and that it was famous but immediately after that it was obviously beautiful in itself as an artwork. Was there an overwhelming impact of the Mother and crucified Son? Honestly . . no, but we were somewhat stagestruck.

There was a very large bank of chairs barricaded off in the centre of the room but they were inaccessible and the only seating was in a couple of the chapels along the side. I would have liked to be able to sit and gaze at the Pieta and the high altar and some of the other features and absorb the atmosphere and contemplate for a while. As it was, there was no pressure to move on but we passed around as somewhat isolated bystanders separated from the spirituality of the place. If anything, there was a sense that the Pope and his predecessors had worked there, rather the same as the realisation that Nero and the Caesars had walked the Roman Forum thousands of years earlier.

I only took a few pics inside St Peter's as it quickly became apparent that my camera was not going to capture the scale and grandeur of this place.  I just wandered around trying to take in the details of all this timeless treasure.  Here are a few pics just to prove I was there really.  For better pics google.

Main altar - all glittering gold

All gold, the 2 statues above the arch are huge

People's heads give an idea of the size of the cherubs, but these are small in comparison to the other statue/reliefs.  So much marble.

Baptism font - enormous and gold.  Note Christ's feet above in mosiac

Mosaic of Christ being Baptised by John the Baptist - above font.  All these huge mosiacs had such depth of colour and detail they looked like paintings.  Breathtaking.

We squeezed in between the throng in the souvenir shop and bought a few items. We chose not to pay to go into the Treasury and headed back outside the Basilica and the Square and the City to re-enter the Vatican Museums round the side. There you faced a selection of rooms, chambers, corridors, collections, museums . . . a vast accumulation of centuries of beautiful, rare and extraordinarily valuable items from all round the world. They suggest that you could select up to 5.5 hours worth of rooms to examine, but in truth you could spend years entranced by the contents.

Last year we spent 5 weeks in the Middle East, particularly Egypt, and had a good look at most of the major museums and ancient sites. But the Egyptian section of the Vatican left it all for dead. We had grown accustomed to incomplete, scarred, broken, scruffy looking pieces but here were giant, complete, gleaming works collected over thousands of years. The modern trend is for the countries where these artefacts originated to be demanding their return, but I do not want to take sides. One also cannot avoid wondering just how the Church justifies the accumulation of such priceless items, when the sale of just a handful that cannot be displayed for lack of space would generate enough money to make a major step towards alleviating disease, starvation and hardship in the Third World.

The Nile

Artemis to the Greeks - Diana to the Romans

Asclepeion who I learnt about recently in Pergamon, Greece

Huge bronze statue, but look at the size of the marble candy dish. WOW.

We must have spent about 4 hours in the Museums. There were seemingly endless corridors lined on both sides with busts, statues, paintings and tapestries from so many cultures and ages. We finished up in the Rafael rooms, which somewhat pre-empted the Sistine Chapel. The walls and ceilings were totally taken up by frescoes detailing Biblical stories and theological principles. There was a heavy component of Church politics included.

And so on to the Sistine Chapel. To be honest, what I came away with more than anything else was a need for a chiropractor. It is just not practical to gaze vertically upwards and try to make out the details and meaning of so many panels, some of which are necessarily upside down. In our travels we have encountered many different versions of The Last Judgement from many religions and cultures. The concept is familiar -  good guys go upwards to Heaven where they sit around looking happy and bad guys are dragged downwards to Hell where fearsome devils torture them in ways appropriate to their carnal sins. Surely the detail and ingenuity that the artists devote to dreaming up and depicting these practices must leave room to doubt their own piety?

If that were not enough, we embarked on a route march from the Vatican to the Castel Sant Angelo, home of the Swiss Guards who protect the Pope and the Vatican.

Thence to the Pantheon,

Huge columns. It is dusk and I am surprised any of these pics turned out at all.

Another obelisk in a fountain.

The extraordinary dome open to the sky, this is the only remaining ancient building in Rome still standing intact.

The alter at the rear with the roped off 'wet' area under the dome.

the Trevi Fountain

 and finally the Spanish Steps.

(Night pics did not turn out, so went back next day for this one, note another obelisk at the top of the stairs.)