Vatican City, Sistine Chapel, St. Peter's Basilica

The Vatican Museum

Greek and Roman statue

The Belvedere Torso

The Halls of Tapestries and Maps

Raphael Rooms

 School of Athens fresco honoring Aristotle, Plato and the ret of their company.  Raphael put Leonardo da Vinci in Plato's role.  Michelangelo was added to the foreground later.

Sistine Chapel

(They are really, really, really strict about pictures so I am very limited because I was caught once be had to delete them all so this is what I could get the second time.)

The Sistine Chapel is famous for Michelangelo's four years worth of work, painting the story of creation.  The ceiling shows the history of the world before the birth of Jesus.  

Behind the alter is the Last Judgement.  Revealed to the public in 1541, entroducing Baroque art to the world.

St. Peter's Basilica

St. Peter’s is the greatest church in Christendom. Built on the memory and grave of the first pope, St. Peter, this is where the grandeur of ancient Rome became the grandeur of Christianity. Nearly 2,000 years ago, this area was the site of Nero’s Circus — a huge, cigar-shaped Roman chariot racecourse. The tall obelisk you see in the middle of the square was the centerpiece of Nero's race track, with chariots doing laps around it.

The Romans had no marching bands, so for halftime entertainment they killed Christians. This persecuted minority was forced to fight wild animals and gladiators, or they were simply crucified. Some were tarred up, tied to posts, and burned — human torches to light up the evening races.

Many believe that one of those killed here, in about 65 A.D., was Peter, Jesus’ right-hand man. 

According to early accounts, Peter had come to Rome to spread Jesus' message of love, but his outspoken practice of a forbidden religion landed him here. At his own request, Peter was crucified upside-down, because he felt unworthy to die as his master had. After the crowds dispersed, his friends buried his remains in a nearby cemetery on what was called “the Vatican Hill.” For 250 years, these relics were quietly and secretly revered. The altar and dome of today’s massive basilica mark that exact spot of Peter’s grave. Peter had been recognized as the first “pope,” or bishop of Rome, from whom all later popes claimed their authority as head of the Church. When Christianity was finally legalized in 313, the Christian emperor Constantine built a church on the site of Peter’s martyrdom. This earlier church, now known as “Old" St. Peter’s, lasted 1,200 years. 

By the year 1500 — the time of the Renaissance — Old St. Peter’s was falling apart and considered unfit to be the center of the Western Church. Pope Julius II — the same man who hired Michelangelo to do the Sistine Ceiling — laid the cornerstone in 1506 for a brand new church to be built by the architect Bramante. He was succeeded by a number of other architects, each with his own designs, including Michelangelo who began the magnificent dome. As construction proceeded, they actually built the new church around the old one. 120 years later, the church we see today was finally finished, and Old St. Peter’s was dismantled and carried out the doors. Today, only a few columns and statues remain from that first church.

St. Peter's Square

St. Peter’s Square, with its ring of columns, symbolizes the arms of the church welcoming everyone — believers and non-believers — with its motherly embrace. It was designed a century after Michelangelo, in the mid-1600s, by the Baroque architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who also did a lot of the work that is inside. There are 284 columns, each 56 feet high, in stern Doric style. On top of them are Bernini’s 140 favorite saints, each 10 feet tall. The so-called “square” is actually elliptical, 660 by 500 feet. Even though it is large, it’s designed like a saucer, a little higher around the edges, so that even when full of crowds, it lets those on the periphery see above the others.

The obelisk in the center is 90 feet of solid granite weighing more than 300 tons. Obelisks, four-sided columns that taper to a pyramid, were Egyptian symbols of their sun god. Romans decorated the city with them to underscore how they had triumphed over the enlightened Egyptians. 

The Pope's World

As you face the church, the gray building to the right is where the pope lives. His apartment is on the top floor. The last window on the right is his bedroom. To the left of that window is the window of his study, where he appears occasionally to greet the masses. The windows are what is referenced above.

On more formal occasions the pope appears from the church itself, on the small balcony above the central door.

Now find the Sistine Chapel. It's just to the right of the church’s facade — the small gray-brown building with the triangular roof, topped by an antenna. That tiny pimple along the roofline midway up the left side is a chimney, where the famous smoke signals announce the election of each new pope.

Vatican City

Vatican City is an independent country, consisting of about 100 acres — most of it lies behind and to the right of St. Peter's. 

The tiny, powerful Vatican has its own security force, helipad, mini-train station, euro coin (with a picture of the pope — so rare they're snatched up right from the mint by collectors), and a radio station.  The Vatican also has its own postal service and stamps.

The pope is both the religious and secular leader of Vatican City. For centuries, locals referred to him as “King Pope.” Italy and the Vatican didn’t always have good relations. After Italian unification in 1870, the Holy See didn’t recognize it as a country until 1929, when the pope and Mussolini signed the Lateran Pact, which agreed that the Vatican was an independent nation…including a few territories which were outlying churches.

The Nave

The church is huge. Tons of marble, gold, stucco, mosaics; columns of stone, and pillars of light. As the symbol of global Catholicism, this church is appropriately big. Size before beauty: The golden window at the far end is two football fields away. The dove in the window has the wingspan of a 747 The bronze canopy over the altar is seven stories tall. The church covers six acres.

Overhead, the lettering in the gold band along the top of the pillars is seven feet high.  The church has a capacity of 60,000 standing worshippers (or 1,200 tour groups). 

Looking down the nave, think of all the history.  The floor plan is based on the ancient Roman basilica, or law-court building, with a central aisle (or nave) flanked by two side aisles. In fact, many of the stones used to build St. Peter’s were scavenged from the ruined law courts of ancient Rome.

  The Dome

The dome soars higher than a football field on end, 430 feet from the floor of the cathedral to the top of the lantern. It glows with light from its windows, and the blue and gold mosaics create a cool, solemn atmosphere. In this majestic vision of heaven (which, by the way, was not painted by Michelangelo), we see Jesus, Mary, and saints — they're in the ring just above the windows. Rising above them are more rings of angels, and, way up in the ozone, is God the Father — just a blur of blue and red, without binoculars.

Michelangelo began work on the dome in 1546. When he died nearly twenty years later, he’d completed only the drum of the dome — that is, the cylindrical base, up to the windows flanked by half-columns. The next generation of architects completed Michelangelo's vision, guided by his blueprints.

Peter's Tomb

The base of the dome is ringed with a gold banner telling us in massive blue letters why this church is so important. According to Catholics, Peter was selected by Jesus to head the church. The banner in Latin quotes from the Bible where Jesus says to him, “Tu es Petrus... You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church, and to you I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 16:18. 

Peter was the first bishop of Rome. His prestige and that of the city itself made this bishopric more illustrious than all others, and Peter’s authority has supposedly passed in an unbroken chain to each succeeding bishop of Rome, the 250-or so popes that followed.

Under the dome, under the bronze canopy, under the altar, some 23 feet under the church's marble floor, rest the bones of St. Peter, the “rock” upon which this particular church was built. 

The Blesses Sacrament Chapel

 

Michelangelo's Pietà (1499)

Michelangelo was 24 years old when he completed this Pietà of Mary with the dead body of Christ taken from the cross. It was Michelangelo’s first major commission, the French ambassador to the Vatican, done for the Holy Year in 1500.

Pietà means “pity.” Michelangelo, with his total mastery of the real world, captures the sadness of the moment. Mary cradles her crucified son in her lap. Christ’s lifeless right arm drooping down lets us know how heavy this corpse is. His smooth skin is accented by the rough folds of Mary’s robe. Mary tilts her head down, looking at her dead son with sad tenderness. Her left hand turns upward, asking, “How could they do this to you?”

Michelangelo didn’t think of sculpting as creating a figure, but as simply freeing the God-made figure from the prison of marble around it. He’d launch himself into a project like this with an inspired passion, chipping away to find what God put inside.

Christ's bunched-up shoulder and rigor-mortis legs show that Michelangelo learned well from his studies of cadavers. But realistic as this work is, its true power lies in the subtle “unreal” features. Life-size Christ looks childlike compared with larger-than-life Mary. Unnoticed at first, this makes a subconscious impression of Mary enfolding Jesus in her maternal love. Mary, the mother of a 33-year-old man,  looks like a teenager, emphasizing how Mary was the eternally youthful “handmaiden” of the Lord, always serving him, even at this moment of supreme sacrifice. Mary always accepts God’s will, even if it means giving up her son.

The statue is a solid pyramid of maternal tenderness. Yet within this, Christ’s body tilts diagonally down to the right and Mary’s hem flows with it. Subconsciously, we feel the weight of this dead God sliding from her lap to the ground.

This is Michelangelo’s only signed work. The story goes that he overheard some pilgrims praising his finished Pietà, but attributing it to a second-rate sculptor from a lesser city. He was so enraged he grabbed his chisel and chipped “Michelangelo Buonarroti of Florence did this” in the ribbon running down Mary’s chest.