A reflection from my recent Rome pilgrimage.
The Vatican is called the Vatican because it is built on a small hill beside the Tiber that the Ancients Romans called Mons Vaticanus, after the vates, the poets and seers who used to live there, looking into the future. The word vates comes from vi mentis, meaning “force of the mind,” or, as Ross King says, the creative imagination, so that in a very real way the Church can be seen to come first not from Reason, from dogma and doctrine, but from somewhere deeper, somewhere only poets and artists can reach.
The medieval churches were the Bibles of the Poor, because the poor couldn’t read the Bible on their own. Even into the nineteenth century most of Europe was illiterate. The only way that the people could receive the stories of the Bible was through the preaching they heard and from the statues and paintings covering the walls of their churches—the chunky little angels of Giotto, for example, with their wings the color of popsicles, cherry and orange and grape.
I love those chubby faces. I love how you can never tell if they’re laughing or crying, even when they’re hovering in the dark air around the cross.
We 21st century people can almost all of us read, of course, but I think we’re impoverished in other ways. We think too much. We’re too much in our heads.
The long day we spent in the Vatican Museum, one of the great museums of the world, it was terribly crowded and hot—we were there at the height of the season—but we got to see an odd little painting of the infant John the Baptist, like a small, haloed man, standing at the foot of a forested hill; and the enormous Transfiguration of Raphael, Jesus floating in a cloud of light and various philosophers and people arguing in the dark foreground below him about what it all means.
I love those chubby faces. I love how you can never tell if they’re laughing or crying, even when they’re hovering in the dark air around the cross.
And at the top of a stairs near the end, when we were overwhelmed and exhausted and fed up with being jostled and pushed, we looked up to see three plaster models by Bernini of the angels he sculpted into the great canopy that covers the papal altar in St. Peter’s—not the shining bronzes themselves, twisting and hard, but the original plaster models, life-sized and recognizable but chalky and dull and with pieces of the plaster missing, big gaps in the surface of a wing or a face, the wire of the underlying structure showing through like rebar. In one of the angels a bundle of straw pokes through the missing part of an arm at just the point where the upper arm would enter the shoulder socket, a stiff yellow bundle of straw, tied with string, as if the straw were the musculature and the straw were the bone, bristling and sharp.
I didn’t think then of those figures as symbols of the flawed church I love, or even of us, in our complicated humanity. I thought of my own shoulders. For a moment I could feel the structure of my shoulders underneath the skin, like sticks. Like hard, tightly-wrapped bundles of sticks.