MATTER & SPIRIT AT THE VATICAN

MASTERPIECES of art are matter and spirit fused; thus they can have particular appeal to religious men. The Popes of Rome especially have been lovers of art, and in Renaissance times their power as temporal princes made it possible to amass art treasure on a grand scale. On public view at the Vatican, that treasure has become one of Rome's crowning glories.

The Renaissance Popes did not stick at theological points in art matters, but avidly built up one of the world's richest collections of classical religious works, both,Roman and Greek. More courageous was their patronage of living masters for the greater glory of God. Among hundreds of other artists, the Popes had the wisdom to commission Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo. These three, as devout and exalted artists as ever lived, vied with one another in service to the Vatican. Among them they exemplified and gave the highest expression to the three facets of beauty as articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas: wholeness, harmony, radiance.

Wholeness might not seem the first quality to ascribe to Leonardo, since he left most of his work unfinished. In fact, when Leo X commissioned him to paint a picture. Leonardo at once set to work distilling herbs for the varnish, and Leo complained that the painter would accomplish "nothing at all, since he is thinking of the end before he has made a beginning." Yet, though Leonardo did leave his St. Jerome unfinished, the whole range of human virtue, from leonine passion to saintly devotion, is here made manifest. Animal and intellectual interlock. The gold of dusk suffuses an image of human reverence that remains, for all its seeming tentativeness, wondrously whole, complete as it was thought.

Harmony was Raphael's blessing, both in himself and in his art. The golden boy at the Vatican while still in his 20s, he was loved even by the older painters he displaced and adored by those who came after. Freeing of St. Peter from Prison, completed for Leo X in 1514, surrounds the top of a window overlooking a Vatican garden, and, until the window was blocked off (see cut), the picture looked dark by contrast with the light flooding in. Raphael took advantage of this apparent difficulty by making the saving angel the picture's chief vehicle of light. The angel comes as a refulgent minister of grace in darkness, dimly perceived, yet perfect.

Radiance, fierce-burning, superhuman intensity of human passion, shines and pours through the torment of Michelangelo's art. His Conversion of St. Paul, commissioned by Pope Paul III in 1542, has lightning in it. The lightning streams down from God's hand upon Paul, to reshape him utterly. This was the work of an artist who would do anything for his work but nothing for reward--a man inspired as St. Paul had been, and forever conscious of the lightning from above that would blaze through him.

Great religious art demands no less than wholeness, harmony and radiance. If these virtues are generally far to seek, they do come together at moments in art history, and places on earth. The Renaissance masterpieces at the Vatican Museum are just such a coming together.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.