Raphael’s Liberation of St Peter

The feast of St Peter’s Chains which we keep today originated as the dedication feast of a Roman basilica on the Esquiline hill, within sight of the Colosseum. We do not know precisely when it was first built, but according to a surviving dedicatory inscription, it was already considered old when Pope Sixtus III restored it in the 430s. Apart from the Vatican basilica, it is the only ancient church of note in Rome dedicated to the Prince of the Apostles, and has custody of one of the city’s most important relics, the two chains by which Peter was held in prison.

As such, it was historically one of the most prestigious cardinalitial titles. In 1467, it was conferred upon the 37th Franciscan minister general, Francesco Maria della Rovere, who continued to hold it after his term expired less than two years later, until his election to the papacy with the name Sixtus IV in 1471. A few months later, in the finest traditional of papal nepotism, he bestowed it upon his nephew Giuliano, who held it for almost 32 years, until he was elected pope in 1503, taking the name Julius II. The building owes much of its current appearance, including its façade, to renovation work done at Giuliano’s behest. (It remained in the della Rovere family continually until 1520; 28 years later, it was given to his 13-year old grand-nephew Giulio, who held it for 22 years.)

Sixtus and Julius were major protagonists of the almost unfathomably chaotic political events that took place in Italy in the later 15th and early 16th centuries, but are certainly best known today as the patrons of some of the finest artists of the later Italian Renaissance. In 1508, Julius commissioned Michelangelo to repaint the ceiling of his uncle’s famous chapel, which had originally been just blue with stars.

A 19th-century reconstruction of the Sistine Chapel as it would have appeared when it was first dedicated in 1481.

The Creation of Adam, the central panel of the new images added to the ceiling by Michelangelo from 1508 to 1512. 

He also brought in several other notable artists to decorate a new set of staterooms, among them, Raphael Sanzio, a native of the little town of Urbino, and a distant relative of his chief architect, Donatello Bramante. But when Raphael had painted a single wall, the pope was so impressed with his work that he fired all the others so that the whole project could be given to him. Raphael was therefore working on his first room, the Stanza della Segnatura, at the very same time that Michelangelo was working on the Sistine chapel ceiling; he finished his project, which was much smaller, first, in 1511.

Raphael’s first painting in the Stanza della Segnatura, the so-called Disputation of the Blessed Sacrament, which would be more properly called The Triumph of Theology.

When Michelangelo was about half-way done with the ceiling, Pope Julius prevailed upon him, though much against his will, to offer a sneak preview. In an age in which imitation, that is to say, imitation of the classical past, had become the very definition of art, there was no one who had a sharper eye than Raphael for seeing what was good about another artist’s work, taking it into his own, and improving upon it. In his second room, therefore, he immediately revised his style in imitation of Michelangelo’s, not just improving upon it, but making a challenge to his rival; a challenge which, however, would go unanswered.

In the following description, it must be remembered that the first three paintings in the room are in part the work of assistants, as was normally the case in those days. The piece de resistance, however, The Liberation of St Peter from Prison, is basically all Raphael.

The first painting is the one that has given its name to the room, the Stanza of Heliodorus, the agent of the emperor Antiochus who in II Maccabees 3 is sent to Jerusalem to plunder the temple. On the far left, Pope Julius II is carried into the scene on the sedes gestatoria by Swiss guards. (The company was instituted by Julius in 1506, and this is the oldest picture of them as papal guards.) Next to them is a group of citizens of the holy city, anxiously looking on as the high priest in the middle prays for the safety of the temple, and of the treasures that keep it running, and are used to care for the poor.

Notice the very different style of these two group of figures. The pope and the Swiss guards look like they were painted 20 years earlier, by artists of the generation that trained Raphael. The onlookers, on the other hand, are very much in the style of Michelangelo, both in terms of color scheme and pose. The great Florentine was first and foremost a sculptor, and when he was constrained to paint, he painted his human figures (the only subject he was interested in) as if they were sculptures in the sunlight. The woman in the foreground, and the father and son who have climbed up on the pillar to get a better view, are very similar to many of the artfully posed figures in Michelangelo’s ceiling.

Continue Reading this Article. . .

The Feast of St Petronilla

Long before either the Visitation or the Queenship of the Virgin Mary were celebrated on this day, and before those, St Angela Merici, the founder of the Ursulines, May 31st was the feast day of St Petronilla. Although she is missing from the oldest Roman liturgical books, she is seen in a painting of the mid-4th century in the catacomb of Domitilla, where she was buried, and her name appears on lists of the venerated tombs of martyrs in the sixth and seventh centuries. In the reign of Pope St Paul I (757-67), an ancient sarcophagus containing her remains was translated from the catacomb to the basilica of St Peter, the treasury of which still preserves a large metal reliquary with her skull inside it.

Fresco of the mid-4th century, with the martyr Petronilla on the right, leading a young woman named Veneranda into the garden of Paradise. (Image source.)

The true history of her life and martyrdom has long since been lost, but she was for many centuries believed to be the daughter of St Peter. This idea seems to have come partly from her name and the location of her relics, partly from a Gnostic “Acts of St Peter”, which speaks of a daughter of St Peter, without giving her a name. (In the Middle Ages, this apocryphal document would not have been understood as a work of heretical origin.)

The first edition of the Breviary of St Pius V carried over from its late medieval predecessors two brief Matins lessons of her life, which state that she was miraculously healed of paralysis by her father, relapsed, and while she was recovering again, a “count” named Flaccus conceived a wish to marry her sight unseen. Petronilla, “understanding that the human race’s most bitter enemy was readying an assault on her virginity, which she had dedicated to Jesus Christ”, prayed and fasted for three days, and then, after receiving the Eucharist, died. When St Robert Bellarmine and Cardinal Cesare Baronio revised the Saints’ lives for a new edition of the Breviary, published in 1602, these lessons were replaced with a generic one from the common of Virgins, a clear sign that the traditional story was considered wholly unreliable.

A reconstruction and partial cross-section view of old St Peter’s Basilica, with the mausoleum mentioned below on the far left. This structure was round on the outside, but octagonal on the inside. A narthex was later constructed between the left transept of the basilica and the rotunda, and doors opened up to form a passage from the church into the mausoleum. Another passage connected the mausoleum with its twin next door, also demolished by Vignola in the 1570s.

In the middle of the 5th century, a large mausoleum was built next to the left transept of the Constantinian basilica of St Peter. Six of its eight internal niches later became chapels, with that opposite the door being dedicated to St Petronilla; for a long time, this chapel was under the patronage of the kings of France. In 1498, Cardinal Jean Bilhères de Lagraulas, the French ambassador to the Papal court, commissioned his own funerary monument to be added to the chapel, from a 23-year-old Florentine sculptor named Michelangelo Buonarroti. This is, of course, one of the most loved and admired sculptures in the entire world, the Pietà.

Michelangelo did not know, of course, that only 7 years after the sculpture’s completion and the Cardinal’s death, both in 1499, Pope Julius II and the architect Donatello Bramante would begin (though just barely) the process of replacing the ancient basilica, then in a pitiable state. Much less did he know that, after decades of delays, he himself would take the project in hand in 1545, at the age of 70, and spend the last 19 years of his life working on the monumental church which we have today. Although he lived to an extraordinary age for that era, dying 2 weeks before his 89th birthday, he did know full well that he would not live to see the project finished. It fell to his successor as chief architect of St Peter’s, Giacomo Vignola, to demolish the mausoleum where the Pietà originally stood, in order to make way for the left transept of the vastly larger new basilica.

The Pietà now stands in its own chapel at the back of St Peter’s, and most of the thousands of people who come to see it every day never visit the chapel dedicated to St Petronilla on the opposite end of the building. (The new church is so much larger than the old one that this chapel in the northwest corner stands entirely outside the former footprint of the Constantinian structure.) Around the year 1623, the painter Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666), known by the nickname “Guercino” (“squinty” in the dialect of his native region, the Emilia Romagna), was commissioned to do a painting of the Burial of St Petronilla for this chapel.

Guercino was especially admired for a remarkably vivid blue paint of his own invention, which he uses for two figures in this painting, as well as the sky in the background. In the upper part, it clothes Christ as He receives St Petronilla into heaven. Although the historical St Petronilla was certainly honored as a martyr, as the legendary daughter of St Peter, she is honored as a virgin, but not as a martyr, and here she is shown receiving the crown of virginity, but not the palm of martyrdom.

Below, notice the intense realism of the scene of her burial; we see the hands of a man standing in her grave, but only his hands, reaching up to help lower her body into it. The fellow dressed in blue on the left is the painter’s tribute to Michelangelo, whose most famous sculpture formerly graced the chapel of the same Saint for whom Guercino himself made this painting. The face of this man is taken from a bust of Michelangelo carved by the latter’s disciple Daniele da Volterra, and his massive forearm is very much that of a sculptor. (Even as a very elderly man, Michelangelo never ceased to work in his favorite medium, sculpture in white marble, a labor-intensive and muscle-building activity.) Surely by design and not coincidence, the chapel immediately next to that of St Petronilla in the modern basilica is dedicated to Michelangelo’s name-saint, the Archangel Michael.

Portrait of Michelangelo by Marco Venusti, one of his friends and colleagues, ca. 1535. (Public domain image from Wikipedia.)

The Feast of St Petronilla

Long before either the Visitation or the Queenship of the Virgin Mary were celebrated on this day, and before those, St Angela Merici, the founder of the Ursulines, May 31st was the feast day of St Petronilla. Although she is missing from the oldest Roman liturgical books, she is seen in a painting of the mid-4th century in the catacomb of Domitilla, where she was buried, and her name appears on lists of the venerated tombs of martyrs in the sixth and seventh centuries. In the reign of Pope St Paul I (757-67), an ancient sarcophagus containing her remains was translated from the catacomb to the basilica of St Peter, the treasury of which still preserves a large metal reliquary with her skull inside it.

Fresco of the mid-4th century, with the martyr Petronilla on the right, leading a young woman named Veneranda into the garden of Paradise. (Image source.)

The true history of her life and martyrdom has long since been lost, but she was for many centuries believed to be the daughter of St Peter. This idea seems to have come partly from her name and the location of her relics, partly from a Gnostic “Acts of St Peter”, which speaks of a daughter of St Peter, without giving her a name. (In the Middle Ages, this apocryphal document would not have been understood as a work of heretical origin.)

The first edition of the Breviary of St Pius V carried over from its late medieval predecessors two brief Matins lessons of her life, which state that she was miraculously healed of paralysis by her father, relapsed, and while she was recovering again, a “count” named Flaccus conceived a wish to marry her sight unseen. Petronilla, “understanding that the human race’s most bitter enemy was readying an assault on her virginity, which she had dedicated to Jesus Christ”, prayed and fasted for three days, and then, after receiving the Eucharist, died. When St Robert Bellarmine and Cardinal Cesare Baronio revised the Saints’ lives for a new edition of the Breviary, published in 1602, these lessons were replaced with a generic one from the common of Virgins, a clear sign that the traditional story was considered wholly unreliable.

A reconstruction and partial cross-section view of old St Peter’s Basilica, with the mausoleum mentioned below on the far left. This structure was round on the outside, but octagonal on the inside. A narthex was later constructed between the left transept of the basilica and the rotunda, and doors opened up to form a passage from the church into the mausoleum. Another passage connected the mausoleum with its twin next door, also demolished by Vignola in the 1570s.

In the middle of the 5th century, a large mausoleum was built next to the left transept of the Constantinian basilica of St Peter. Six of its eight internal niches later became chapels, with that opposite the door being dedicated to St Petronilla; for a long time, this chapel was under the patronage of the kings of France. In 1498, Cardinal Jean Bilhères de Lagraulas, the French ambassador to the Papal court, commissioned his own funerary monument to be added to the chapel, from a 23-year-old Florentine sculptor named Michelangelo Buonarroti. This is, of course, one of the most loved and admired sculptures in the entire world, the Pietà.

Michelangelo did not know, of course, that only 7 years after the sculpture’s completion and the Cardinal’s death, both in 1499, Pope Julius II and the architect Donatello Bramante would begin (though just barely) the process of replacing the ancient basilica, then in a pitiable state. Much less did he know that, after decades of delays, he himself would take the project in hand in 1545, at the age of 70, and spend the last 19 years of his life working on the monumental church which we have today. Although he lived to an extraordinary age for that era, dying 2 weeks before his 89th birthday, he did know full well that he would not live to see the project finished. It fell to his successor as chief architect of St Peter’s, Giacomo Vignola, to demolish the mausoleum where the Pietà originally stood, in order to make way for the left transept of the vastly larger new basilica.

The Pietà now stands in its own chapel at the back of St Peter’s, and most of the thousands of people who come to see it every day never visit the chapel dedicated to St Petronilla on the opposite end of the building. (The new church is so much larger than the old one that this chapel in the northwest corner stands entirely outside the former footprint of the Constantinian structure.) Around the year 1623, the painter Francesco Barbieri (1591-1666), known by the nickname “Guercino” (“squinty” in the dialect of his native region, the Emilia Romagna), was commissioned to do a painting of the Burial of St Petronilla for this chapel.

Guercino was especially admired for a remarkably vivid blue paint of his own invention, which he uses for two figures in this painting, as well as the sky in the background. In the upper part, it clothes Christ as He receives St Petronilla into heaven. Although the historical St Petronilla was certainly honored as a martyr, as the legendary daughter of St Peter, she is honored as a virgin, but not as a martyr, and here she is shown receiving the crown of virginity, but not the palm of martyrdom.

Below, notice the intense realism of the scene of her burial; we see the hands of a man standing in her grave, but only his hands, reaching up to help lower her body into it. The fellow dressed in blue on the left is the painter’s tribute to Michelangelo, whose most famous sculpture formerly graced the chapel of the same Saint for whom Guercino himself made this painting. The face of this man is taken from a bust of Michelangelo carved by the latter’s disciple Daniele da Volterra, and his massive forearm is very much that of a sculptor. (Even as a very elderly man, Michelangelo never ceased to work in his favorite medium, sculpture in white marble, a labor-intensive and muscle-building activity.) Surely by design and not coincidence, the chapel immediately next to that of St Petronilla in the modern basilica is dedicated to Michelangelo’s name-saint, the Archangel Michael.

Portrait of Michelangelo by Marco Venusti, one of his friends and colleagues, ca. 1535. (Public domain image from Wikipedia.)

The Conversion of St Paul

Called by Christ from heaven, and laid low upon the earth, from a persecutor, he became a chosen vessel, and, laboring more than all others, sowed the grace of the Word more broadly among all, * and completed the teaching of the Gospel by his preaching. V. Last in his calling among the Apostles, but first in preaching, he made the name of Christ manifest to the peoples of many nations. And completed the teaching of the Gospel by his preaching. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. And completed.... (The third responsory of Matins of the Conversion of St Paul, according to the Dominican Breviary.)

The Conversion of St Paul, by Michelangelo Buonarroti, in the Pauline Chapel, (also known as the Farnese Chapel) in the Vatican, 1542-45. (This fresco, one of the artist’s vary last, was magnificently restored in the reign of Pope Benedict XVI, and is now cleaner, sharper in line and richer in color than is shown in this photograph, especially in the parts of the sky that here appear white.)

R. A Christo de caelo vocátus, et in terra prostrátus, ex persecutóre effectus est vas electiónis: et plus ómnibus labórans, multo latius inter omnes verbi gratiam seminávit * atque doctrínam evangélicam sua praedicatióne complévit. V. Inter Apóstolos vocatióne novíssimus, praedicatióne primus, nomen Christi multárum manifestávit gentium pópulis. Atque. Gloria Patri et Filio, et Spirítui Sancto. Atque.