Restoring the Stones of St. Peter’s

ROME — As archeologists and architects have long known, stones speak. The language of stones is one of hidden and visible messages. Stones speak of the cultures that shaped them – the clear lines of a Greek temple, the curves and ornamentation of Italian baroque. They hint in whispers to the quiet listener of other matters: of the optimism or pessimism of an age, of long ago battles between architects and their patrons, of funds running short – or running out. These whispers are the siren song art historians tilt their heads to hear as they regard buildings, vaults, materials, color schemes.

The intricate beauty of the battle scenes on Rome’s Column of Trajan (about 100 AD) speaks of the vigor of the ancient empire at its height of wealth and power; two centuries later, Constantine’s Arch (about 315 AD), with its monotonous rendering of legions of soldiers, all sculpted with identical heads, whispers of the coming decline of Rome.

The art of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome – tomb of saints, seat of popes, treasure of art and sculpture — speaks of the power, pride and religious fervor of the great Renaissance popes who built it, and of the new life which came with the rediscovery of classical architectural models in the Renaissance.

But stones convey other messages. When they are worn down by time, they “wrinkle,” as humans do, their surfaces losing their resilience and drying out, resulting in cracks. When they become arthritic, pivotal joints and internal balancing points lose their structural soundness. If such damaged stone is not cared for, it faces tragic consequences. Thirty years ago, the figures on Trajan’s Column were sharp and clear, as photos from the 1950s show. Today many are almost worn away. What ravages once took rain one thousand years to accomplish now seems to take only a decade or so with modern pollution.

Like all the other old buildings and monuments packed inside the crowded walls of what Augustine terms “the city of man” and what Augustus Caesar dubbed the cultural hub of a world he believed his empire to have nearly reached the physical limits of, St. Peter’s had grown old and wrinkled. The message it spoke was that for centuries it had struggled against wind and rain, and for decades against man-made acids and corrosive pollution. The stones of St. Peter’s needed help. The same deterioration which had deformed Trajan’s Column and the 115 soot-blackened church in Rome’s historic center (recently listed as critically in need of repair) also blighted St. Peter’s.

The Vatican, like the Italian government, financially struggling to fund restoration projects, was in the unenviable position of being the appointed caretaker of a debilitated monument it could ill afford to medicate.

The major problem, pinpointed by the branch of the Vatican in charge of St. Peter’s architectural and artistic upkeep, the Reverenda Fabbrica di San Pietro, was St. Peter’s façade. This architectural “face” – as critical to the visual identity and anatomical integrity of the building as a human face is to a human body – was so beaten by climatic and chemical elements that large chips or chunks of stone might fall.

The architectural historian and restorer who would head the project to restore the façade saw the potential danger.

“The menace existed that over the next 30 to 40 years, big pieces might start falling down,” said Professor Giuseppe Zander, technical director of the Reverenda Fabbrica. “Even stone chips falling 40 meters are dangerous. If the façade were not repaired now, the situation would get a lot worse and cost a lot more. Now is the best time,” said the 65-year-old professor.

Aesthetically, the façade was also suffering. Travertine, the stone of which the façade is made, is considered to be a relative hard stone in architectural terms, but this has not prevented it from assuming over the years a tired, soiled look, as tiny fractures have marred the 20 variously sized and styled columns of the façade, and airborne carbons and pollutants have added the sooty coating that now ubiquitously disfigures Roman outdoor monuments.

In the worst shape were the 13 stone statues that topped the façade like welcoming sentinels. The central figure of Christ, with his arm raised as if in a greeting, had, like the figure of John the Baptist at his side, become as much a hapless visual catalogue of past partial restorations as an inspiring religious symbol. Examined up close, these two statues and flanking 11 apostles – St. Peter is symbolically absent, since this is his “house” – had taken on a semblance of ailing patients.

The imposing six-meter tall statues, exposed for centuries to high winds and lightning, were externally bolstered by freestanding iron rods. Their arms and legs, marred in places with large and small cracks, had been mended internally with long iron “pins,” visible from the outside, which were inserted in the stone, much as metal “pins” are inserted surgically into broken bones. These “pins” had done as much damage as good, however, because they had swollen during rainfall, causing the stone to expand and crack even further. The tonal quality of the stone had also been spoiled by stains left by rust deposits on the iron which flowed down in long streaks. Besides damaging the stone aesthetically, the rust had corroded the pins so badly that the iron was structurally useless. The statues, moreover, were covered by unsightly lightning-conducting wires and drain pipes.

The statues’ faces were in even worse condition. These were disfigured by deposits of “black acids” – a term used generally to refer to corrupting atmospheric deposits. The four stone angels floating over the ends of the basilica, who frame in pairs the basilica’s two handsome mosaic clocks, were also disfigured.

Ruin lay ahead for St. Peter’s “face.” A change was essential. It was at this point that the American Catholic fraternal order the Knights of Columbus stepped in.

For years Count Enrico Galeazzi had been the Knights’ representative in Rome. Galeazzi had also served for 30 years as the governor of Vatican City. In that post he had held the ultimate responsibility for the maintenance of all the Vatican buildings. Keeping in close contact with the current director of the Reverenda Fabbrica, Archbishop Lino Zanini, Galeazzi had been informed of the results of the survey of St. Peter’s maintenance needs. Galeazzi had brought the matter to the attention of the Knights’ Supreme Office in New Haven. The board of directors, weighing the evidence, decided to offer financial support for a complete refurbishing of St. Peter’s façade that would give new structural and aesthetic life to the building front. In March 1985, Supreme Knight Virgil Dechant met with Pope John Paul II to advise the pope of the Knights’ decision: the Knights would fund the entire project.

Within a month, one of the most comprehensive and important restoration projects ever undertaken by the Vatican was underway.

“In importance, this restoration might be compared to the restoration of Michelangelo’s Pieta a decade ago,” said Archbishop Zanini. The Pieta, thought by many to be the most breathtaking sculpture ever rendered of the Virgin Mary and Christ, depicts Jesus in the arms of Mary after Christ’s removal from the cross. A decade ago the marble sculpture was severely damaged when a crazed man among tourists viewing the work started to hack at it with a hammer, an incident that shocked people around the world. A long, delicate repair process reattached Mary’s chipped nose, and the sculpture was put on display again – now behind a protective glass wall.

The restoration of the façade is without precedent.

“There have been partial restorations over the centuries,” said the Venetian-born archbishop, who has held his key position for eleven years. “But no thorough restoration has been been attempted.”

The story of St. Peter’s begins in the century following the death of Peter in Rome in approximately 65 AD. It is actually the story of three churches, each built on the same site over a period of one and a half millennia. Long before the construction of the present Renaissance cathedral, an unobtrusive shrine was built over the site where St. Peter was believed to have been buried. This first St. Peter’s was built about 160 AD. The tradition that Peter was buried here would inspire the first Christian emperor of Rome, Constantine, to build a proper cathedral on the spot.

Constantine, a tall athletic soldier whose physical prowess was matched by his adept management of the tools of power, converted to Christianity in about 312 AD. This incident that provoked his conversion marks a critical turning point in Christian history. Constantine was the son of one of the two Caesars appointed by the great soldier-emperor Diocletian (284-305 AD). After Diocletian’s death, his system of cooperating Caesars broke down and a vicious power struggle ensued. While on military duty in Britain, the western limit of the empire, Constantine’s father died. Constantine was proclaimed emperor by his soldiers. He then set out for Italy to contest his power with his rival, Maxentius. While crossing the Alps, Constantine had a vision of the cross over the midday sun. He also saw the Greek words which, translated, mean, “In this sign, conquer!” The next day, Constantine ordered that the Christian sign Chi-Rho, representing the first two Greek letters of Christ’s name, be inscribed on the shields and standards of his soldiers. Believing himself fortified by divine will, he marched on Rome, where he destroyed his rival Maxentius and assumed command of the empire.

To honor the God whom he believed protected him, Constantine built churches throughout the empire, most notably the churches of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. In Rome, to honor the saint who brought who brought Christianity to his ruling city, Constantine erected in about 322 AD a basilica to house the small shrine he believed covered Peter’s remains. To build this second “St. Peter’s,” the ruler daringly violated Roman law and custom, and committed sacrilege. The shrine stood in the midst of a rocky and uneven Roman burial ground. To build over it, and to level the surrounding hilly ground, Constantine destroyed the tombs of pagan, and possibly some Christian, families.

The beautiful basilica that rose over the damp “mons Vaticanus” – Vatican hill – would stand as testimony to the emperor’s devotion for another eleven centuries. In the early centuries of this period, St. Peter’s would be spared some of the ravages of invading tribes from northern Europe, who turned away from the basilica out of respect for the dead it enshrined, while they pillaged the rest of the city.

Four hundred years after Constantine laid the foundation for the “second” St. Peter’s, Charlemagne arrived to receive the crown of the new Holy Roman Empire from Pope Leo III. Today’s basilica still preserves a token of that historic encounter between Leo and Charlemagne, bringing the viewer through time closer to the millennia-old historical drama. Set inside the central doors of the basilica’s façade is the huge circle of maroon-colored stone (porphory) where Charlemagne is said to have knelt at the moment of his coronation.

With the passage of another four hundred years, in 846 AD, the Saracens arrived and raided St. Peter’s. The evidence of recent excavations suggests that the Moslems from the East penetrated to the traditional grave of the saint, and stole what treasures they could find, possibly desecrating if not dispersing the saint’s alleged remains, according to archeologists today.

Between 1000 and 1400, St. Peter’s saw its nadir. Two bits of historical detail capture the morale of the time and the shocking neglect into which the cathedral had fallen: during Pope Gregory XI’s reign (1227-41), stone was quarried so often from the basilica’s walls that the pope threatened excommunication to all who dared continue. A similarly tragic picture emerged one hundred years later: When Pope Urban V (1362-70) returned to Rome from Avignon, he found St. Peter’s so abandoned that cattle grazed on weeds in front of the cathedral and nuzzled the altars within the church. At a later point, wolves were seen foraging in the night for dead bodies near the basilica, at the Campo Santo (“holy grounds”).

The story of the basilica that followed relates directly to one of the great ironies in Christian history. In the early 1500s, when Pope Julius II and Leo X decided to restore the central Christian shrine of the West to its former prominence, their efforts proved a catalyst for Christianity’s split, and for the rise of an iron-willed Augustinian monk in Germany named Martin Luther.

Julius dreamed of replacing the old Constantinian basilica at the Vatican with a third and final – and ultimately most magnificent – “St. Peter’s.” But funds were short. The Church faced financial crisis. In Germany, a fundraising scheme was devised. “Indulgences,” papal certificates which assured the buyer that some of the penalties incurred by him for sin would be remitted, were to be sold there on an unprecedented scale. The brusque manner in which some of these indulgences were sold, and the contributions of poor peasants to a project they would never see, infuriated Luke and other German Catholics. “The pope has wealth far beyond all other men,” the monk declared. “Why does he not build St. Peter’s church with his own money instead of the money of poor Christians?” The schism that gave rise to Protestantism was born.

But the time line of St. Peter’s did not end here. Slowly, painstakingly, the new St. Peter’s rose. One towering figure among the many involved in the almost two-century long building of the church was the artist, sculptor and architect Michelangelo, who restlessly moved back and forth between the basilica and the workshop he set up nearby to create some of the world’s greatest art, now housed in or around St. Peter’s.

In retrospect, it seems surprising now that the genius accomplished as much as he did for his church sponsors in Rome, given his often explosive relationship wit them, as well as the other artists commissioned by them. “The more I sweat and show my skill, the less you seem to care for what I’ve done,” wrote Michelangelo in a poem in the early 1500s, addressed to Pope Julius II. The incident that gave rise to the words reveals that Michelangelo’s work for the Roman Church was threatened by feelings of abuse and neglect long before Michelangelo began his design for St. Peter’s dome.

In 1505, Julius II commissioned the young sculptor to build a huge and elaborate tomb for himself, which he planned to place directly over St. Peter’s tomb. In effect, the cathedral was to serve as the pope’s mausoleum. The sculptor agreed. Excited, Michelangelo spent the next eight months selecting 110 tons of the finest marble in nearby quarries, and setting up a workshop next to the cathedral. But Julius now had his mind set on another project: painting the Sistine Chapel. When Michelangelo came to complain that he had fallen in debt buying the marble and equipping his workshop, the pope refused him interviews. Finally in 1506, Julius agreed to see him. Michelangelo griped. Julius raged. The pontiff had the artist driven from the room, and Michelangelo headed back to Florence, determined never to return.

Before leaving Rome, Michelangelo dashed off a note to Julius: “Most Blessed Father, this morning I was turned out of the palace by your orders; therefore, I give you notice that from now on, if you want me, you will have to look for me elsewhere than in Rome.” Julius sent five horsemen in pursuit of the artist. He could not be convinced to return. The pope then tried political pressure. He demanded Michelangelo’s extradition from the city of Florence. The signatory of the city urged Michelangelo to return to Rome. Florence, after all, did not want to go to war with the pope. Michelangelo, still enraged, replied that he would rather go to Turkey and work for the Sultan. Finally he yielded. If the pope agreed to a five-year contract with advance payment, me might consent to carve the papal tomb in Florence, but not Rome. He succumbed further. By 1508, he was back in Rome and had agreed to paint the Sistine Chapel.

In later years Michelangelo undertook the design for St. Peter’s dome. A still energetic man in his eighties, he obsessed over the dimensions of the dome which he would not see completed before his death in 1564. It would rival all others in the Christian world for scale and magnificence.

Decades later, the Baroque sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini arrived to transform the basilica’s interior with his own art. This profoundly religious artist created both St. Peter’s Square, judged one of the most beautiful piazzas in the world, and the square’s colonnade, its series of semi-circular columns, which with the piazza was deemed to be one of the most successful compositions of the baroque age. Bernini would also create the huge bronze “baldacchino,” a monumental bronze and gilded canopy that now tops the high altar intended to crown the apostle Peter’s tomb. At the base of the baldacchino, which spectacularly combined architecture and sculpture with its towering swirling columns, Bernini incorporated one of western art’s most whimsical visual asides. He inconspicuously carved a series of seven faces of a woman, followed by a concluding face of a newborn baby. The woman was Pope Urban VIII’s niece, the baby, her newborn. When Urban commissioned Bernini to create the bronze canopy, his niece was in the midst of a difficult pregnancy. The worried pope hoped that the execution of the commission would win divine favor for her. If the testimony carved into the stone can be trusted, it appears that all turned out well.

The scene jumps to modern times. Before the turn of the twentieth century, six hundred prelates dressed in silver copes and linen mitres, sealed themselves off in the right transept of the basilica to deliberate on the issues of the First Vatican Council. Almost a century later, John XXIII’s rotund figure stood over the nave of St. Peter’s, where 2,816 bishops attending the Second Vatican Council met during four sessions between 1962 and 1965. In May 1981 Pope John Paul II collapsed into the arms of his personal secretary while greeting crowds on the square outside the basilica, after being shot by Mehmet Ali Agca.

The time line fades. The drone of drills and soft tapping of chisels bring the present back into view. Looking towards the front of St. Peter’s from a distance a dozen workmen appear to crawl like ants across the top of the façade. Black- and gold-colored scaffolding, consisting of thousands of narrow beams, crisscross the façade. Puffs of smoke rise where the ants move and drill. Wheelbarrows rise and fall on taut ropes up the sides of the 53-meter high façade. They carry blocks of travertine, used to patch the rough surfaces now being smoothed down. Bright green strips of protective netting billow out from the façade, carried on the wind. The restoration is underway.

The work already done on the façade’s statues shows a huge improvement. Faces are clean. The angels who stand at the end of the basilica, their wings once mottled with ugly black stains, seem like enough to fly. The effect has been to return a lost dignity to the lifelike statues, and to restore a subtle grace to the façade’s surface and columns.

To one who has watched the restoration over a period of months, the stones seem to “breathe.” They are poised, collected, healed from illness.

Pilgrims visiting St. Peter’s appreciate the effort.

“As a Catholic, I want to see St. Peter’s look as magnificent as possible,” said Mary Toland, a volunteer worker on tour in Rome from Philadelphia. “When you see what time has done to some of the churches here, it makes you sad. I want St. Peter’s to be beautiful. It is, after all, the seat of Catholicism.”

The restoration also has been praised by residents for not “going overboard,” a charge leveled at some restoration projects that have left monuments so transformed, so pristine, that they do not resemble the monument whose original aesthetic attributes they were intended to restore.

“The work has been very delicately done, very well done,” said an elderly shop owner whose store faces on to the street leading to the basilica, the Via della Conciliazione.

Restorations often have been mired in controversy because restorers, archeologists, and art historians battle over what they consider to be the best restoring methods and, more importantly, the aims of their work. While some maintain that the restored object should be made as aesthetically pristine and structurally invulnerable as possible, others think these goals can transform appearances too drastically. The aim, for moderates, is to find a compromise between “perfectionist” ideals and the original aesthetic intention of the object.

The conservative approach used on St. Peter’s façade has prevented it from being marred by such controversy.

“This is not a conventional ‘restoration,’ but rather a ‘consolidation’ of badly worn and cracked stone,” said Professor Zander, who has traveled all over the world “fixing” stone.

For Zander, there is a personal aspect of restoration that eludes most people.

“This is romantic work,” he said in the office of the Reverenda Fabbrica next to St. Peter’s. “Stones talk of history.”

The façade, independent of the basilica, has its own story. Construction began in 1608. To get enough stone to build the huge structure, carts were so heavily loaded with travertine that the roads to the Vatican were worn into deep ruts. By 1612, the façade was finished. For the next four centuries, up to the present day, popes would address crowds from its central window.

Designed by Italian architect Carlo Maderno, the façade that emerged did not please all who saw it. Critics condemned it – as critics still do – as being too long, too tall, too ornate. Above all, the façade has been criticized for diminishing the grandeur of the dome above it, since the dome could no longer be seen by viewers in the piazza below.

Almost miraculously, the façade was transformed shortly afterwards by the work of a genius who appeared on the scene shortly before Maderno’s death. Bernini, who was appointed architect of St. Peter’s in 1629, transformed the exterior proportions of St. Peter’s by an ingenious optical illusion.

Designing the curving columns and piazza in front of the church, Bernini connected the basilica to the colonnade by means of a long stone corridors. The walls of these corridors, which faced the basilica, splayed outwards. Visually, the effect was to create an illusion which made the long façade appear shortened.

“It was Bernini’s genius to put everything in proportion,” said Sister Jean Rae of the Order of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. “If you are a strict art historian, then the façade is out of proportion,” she said. “But by tucking in the walls leading up to the façade as Bernini did, the error is corrected.”

For posterity, the meaning of the restoration is summed up in words voiced by the restoration’s director Zander: “We must do this for our children and our grandchildren, so they may see the civilization that came before them.”

Columbia
August 1986