NEW DOORS FOR SAINT PETER'S

ONE of Christendom's greatest monuments--St. Peter's in Rome--is never quite completed. Among the best present-day artists working to finish it is a self-taught, 45-year-old sculptor from Milan named Giacomo Manzu. Four years ago, Manzu won a competition to do bronze bas-reliefs for the "Doorway of Death" (opened only for funerals) at one side of the Basilica. Now his scale study is at last complete (see cut), and he hopes that by devoting all his working time to the project he will have the doors themselves done in two more years.

The eight lower panels show the deaths of heroes of the Old and New Testaments. In the upper panels, death gives way to holy triumphs. Italian saints are ranged below the Ascension of Christ, and such heroic martyrs as Joan of Arc witness the Assumption of the Virgin into Heaven.

The over-all conception of the doors is conservative enough to be appropriate for their setting, but avoids the slavish traditionalism that stultifies most contemporary ecclesiastical art. Manzu's ambition is to create something worthy not only of St. Peter's but also "of the time in which we live." The incisive yet graceful style of the bas-reliefs is distinctly his own. Perhaps no other living sculptor could have put so much sense of space and air into such deliberately low relief. His art, as one Italian critic put it, "is like a veil of poetry breathed over a bronze background."

Sculptor Manzu, who began his career as a stucco worker, is as direct as his work is subtle. "I am religious, yes," Manzu says with feeling, "but I'm not a religious artist--I expect to carve all kinds of things. You can't limit art to religion any more than you can limit religion itself, or life . . . In sculpture my greatest inspiration is the ancient Greeks." Drawing a deep breath, he adds: "I wish I could be as big as they!"

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