THE STORY OF THE BUILDING OF THE VATICAN

The beginnings of the Vatican Palace are almost lost in antiquity. But they may be traced back historically to the Episcopia which Pope Symmachus (498-514) erected. The buildings were much enlarged by Innocent III. (1198-1216), and, of course, by Nicholas III. (1277-1280), who, Gregorovius says, may be regarded as “the earliest founder of the Vatican residence in its historic form.” As early as the beginning of the sixth century the Vatican basilica was surrounded by a mass of buildings, chiefly chapels and mausoleums, but including one or two monasteries. In the time of Stephen II. (752) these were largely increased, and mingled with houses for pilgrims and a multitude of people who made a living by ministering to their wants. As early as the days of S. Gregory III. (731-741) there were three monasteries; and Stephen II., in 752, added a fourth, and built the bell-tower of the _atrium_ of the basilica, which he overlaid with gold and silver. Gregorovius considers that the belfry towers which form such a feature of the basilicas of Rome began in the eighth century. Stephen also restored the ruined tomb of the wives of the Emperor Honorius, which stood outside St. Peter’s by the present Sacristy, into a chapel which he dedicated to S. Petronilla, who is supposed to have been the daughter of St. Peter. He left at any rate one of the graves undisturbed, of which the contents were discovered and ruthlessly destroyed under Paul III., as related elsewhere. Innocent III., one of the greatest men who ever sat on the throne of St. Peter, and who reigned from 1198-1216, continued the buildings at the Vatican begun by his predecessor, Celestine III. He not only enlarged it, but surrounded it with walls and gate towers.

The Vatican, standing on a hill beside the Tiber, and within strong walls erected by S. Leo IV. (a magnificent fragment of which still remains in the Vatican Gardens), was a much safer residence for the Popes, when rioting was going on, than the Lateran. So the Popes, from this time onwards, made the Vatican their principal residence. Innocent IV. (1243-1254), the arch-enemy of the Emperor Frederick II., also enlarged the Vatican. But the conception of the Vatican, as we have it, must be attributed to Nicholas III., Gian Gaetani Orsini (1277-1280), and Nicholas V., Thomas of Sarzana (1447-1455). The Orsini’s architects were two Florentines named Fra Sisto and Fra Ristori. Gregorovius tells us how “he made the approach to the Vatican free, and planned the gardens, surrounding them with walls and towers. His foundation was called the _Viridarium Novum_, from which the gate beside St. Peter’s received the name of the _Porta Viridaria_. The feeling for nature thus again woke, and for the first time for centuries the Romans saw a park laid out.”

Soon after the removal of the Popes to Avignon in 1308, the Lateran, which has always been considered the Mother Church of the Papacy, was destroyed by fire. Consequently, when the Popes returned from their seventy years’ exile at Avignon they took up their residence at the Vatican, which has been their principal residence ever since. Gregory XII. (1406-1409), who had fortified himself in the Vatican against Louis of Anjou and John XXIII., united the Vatican with Sant’ Angelo by a walled-in passage. In the same year five large wolves were killed in the Vatican Gardens.

Nicholas V., the simple scholar of humble birth, who founded the Vatican Library and was the first of all the Popes to appreciate and try and preserve the glorious buildings which they had inherited from ancient Rome, also conceived the magnificent idea of making the Vatican Hill rival the Palatine with its Imperial Palaces and gardens. “The ruinous Borgo,” says Gregorovius, “was to become a gigantic Papal city. From a piazza in front of Sant’ Angelo, three streets forming the _Vicus Curialis_ were to lead to the Piazza of St. Peter’s, with six great porticoes, covered markets, workshops for artists, and banks of exchange. He contemplated the Pope and the entire Curia dwelling in the most magnificent of palaces, a combination of sumptuous buildings and parks. The palace was not to have its equal on the earth. He would even construct a theatre for the Imperial coronations, a hall of Conclave, and a theatre for spectacles. The Papal fortress was to be entered through a splendid triumphal gate. A new cathedral with a lofty cupola, in the form of a Latin cross, with two towers in front of the vestibule and spacious buildings at each side for the clergy, was to be erected in the place of the ancient basilica.”

It is difficult to gather from the documents hitherto available how much Nicholas actually built. None of his buildings remain except the exquisite little chapel frescoed by Fra Angelico with the story of S. Lorenzo, and part of the wing which now bears the name of the Borgias.

The buildings of Paul II. (1464-1471), the magnificent Venetian Pope who erected the Palazzo di Venezia, have entirely disappeared. But Sixtus IV. (1471-1484), the first of the two della Rovere Popes, whose conceptions were smaller, immortalized himself by his contributions to the Vatican, for he built the Sistine Chapel, whose walls he had frescoed by the greatest masters of his day, Perugino, Pinturicchio, Ghirlandajo, Botticelli, Cosimo Rosselli, and Luca Signorelli.

It must be borne in mind that the end wall over the High Altar now occupied by Michel Angelo’s Last Judgment was originally filled with three frescoes by Perugino. The Last Judgment was not painted till more than half a century after Pope Sixtus’s death, and Michel Angelo did not begin the ceiling to which the chapel owes its fame until twenty-four years after that Pope’s death. But the exquisite screen by Bregno, in the manner of Mino da Fiesole, was executed for him. Gregorovius is right in saying that this chapel, built in 1473, is “more a hall than a chapel; simple to barrenness, it seems nothing more than the beautifully decorated scene for Papal functions. It breathes no air of religious feeling. And only to its purpose, and to Michel Angelo’s paintings, does the Sistina owe the fact that it has become the most celebrated chapel in the world.” Raffaelle designed the tapestries, which bear his name, to fill the bare spaces on the walls below the Fifteenth-Century frescoes. When these, the most impressive of all tapestries, were in their places, the _tout ensemble_ must have been almost beyond rivalry. Sixtus IV. also built under his chapel a library which was afterwards converted into a storehouse, though it was considered, when he built it, the most sumptuous in the world. Innocent VIII. (1484-1492) had a beautiful villa constructed for his use in the Vatican Gardens, as Pius IV. and Leo XIII. did after him. Their casinos are still used for their original purpose: this, which was called the Villa Belvedere, was constructed for him by Antonio Pollaiuolo about 1490, and decorated with frescoes by Mantegna, which have perished. It was about a quarter of a mile from the Vatican Palace until Julius II. connected them. Gregorovius calls it Innocent’s finest work, and Innocent was a man of taste, and built a good deal. His successor, the execrated Borgia Pope, Alexander VI. (1492-1503), in the midst of all his ambitions and excesses, found the time and money to embellish the Vatican with one of its greatest glories, the _Appartamenti Borgia_, the suite of rooms embellished by Pinturicchio with frescoes, which, as chamber decorations, have no superiors, except the same artist’s glorious frescoes illustrating the career of Pius II. in the library of the Cathedral of Siena. His successor, Pius III., survived his elevation for less than a month, and then came the magnificent megalomaniac, Julius II. (1503-1513), who packed all the gigantic works of his Pontificate into a brief ten years.

Peter’s Crypt. The carvings of Mino da Fiesole in the Crypt belonged to the Mausoleum over it.]

In the period from the accession of Nicholas V. to the death of Leo X. (1447-1521), a space of seventy-four years, there were ten Popes, and all except three of them had generous ambitions for the extension and embellishment of the Vatican. Pius III., Francesco Piccolomini, who was only Pope for twenty-six days, cannot be counted. Calixtus III., the first Borgia Pope, and Pius II., Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, had an honourable reason for suspending their building operations, for the capture of Constantinople by the Turk under Mahomet II. a few years before filled them with apprehensions for the fate of Christendom, unless fresh crusades could be organized by leaguing all the Christian Princes. But the spectre soon diminished when the Papacy entered into a not very honourable treaty with the Sultan Bajazet II. for detaining his brother and rival for the throne, Prince Djem, as a sort of state captive in the Vatican, in consideration of a huge annual sum. Djem, when he was defeated by Bajazet, fled to the Knights of St. John at Rhodes, who had distinguished themselves by defying the assaults of his brother. The crafty Knights would not surrender him, but undertook to keep him a prisoner if the Sultan paid thirty-five thousand ducats a year and promised to maintain a lasting peace with Christendom. For greater safety the Knights sent him to France, where he remained imprisoned for nearly seven years, when Innocent VIII. secured the custody of his person and the money paid by his brother, in return for facilitating the marriage of the King of France with the heiress of Brittany, which did not up till then belong to the French Crown, and by making the Grand Master of the Knights a Cardinal. The Sultan also presented to the Pope the Lance (head) which claimed to be the actual weapon with which the Side of Our Lord was pierced, and was considered to be the genuine relic rather than those previously shown at Paris and Nüremberg.

For the moment I am not speaking of St. Peter’s, but of the Vatican Palace; but Julius II., Giuliano della Rovere, was responsible for the gigantic features of both. It was he who joined Innocent VIII.’s Villa Belvedere to the Vatican by the Cortile of the Belvedere, which, before it was intersected by the Library and the Braccio Nuovo, was twelve hundred feet long. Bramante was the architect: he designed the upper part for a garden terrace, the lower for a tournament ground. One cannot help being reminded of the neighbouring Circus of Caligula and Nero, out of which, as the place of St. Peter’s execution, the whole Vatican group of buildings grew. “The Piazza,” says Gregorovius, “was to be surrounded with a beautiful portico with three rows of pilasters, one above the other, and to end in huge niches, an upper one for the Belvedere, and a lower one with rows of seats for the spectators of the games. Nicholas V. had already entertained the idea of a secular theatre in the Vatican, and would have had classic comedies represented there. Julius II. would probably instead have given the Romans combats with animals and tournaments. Even later Popes had games of chivalry celebrated in the courtyard of the Belvedere, although not in the theatre, as Julius II. had intended.”

Julius was so impatient to see this magnificent conception carried out that he ordered the work to be continued day and night, but he died when only one portico was finished. And the masonry had been so badly executed that in less than thirty years the walls required a support, and, half a century after that, the completion of Bramante’s idea was rendered impossible by Sixtus V. building the great hall of his library right across the quadrangle.

But Julius also commissioned, and Bramante built, the Cortile of S. Damaso, one of the most wonderful in the world, for it is of vast size and is surrounded on three sides by the triple arcades of the Loggie, which Gregorovius calls the “most successful imitation of the antique ... an unequalled example of vigour, lightness, and grace.” Some of them were frescoed by Raffaelle, and he was the architect who completed them after Bramante’s death. Julius II. is hailed as the founder of the Vatican Museum; for not only did he commence the collection in the Belvedere, the converted Villa of Innocent VIII., but he enriched it with his own statue of Apollo, named after the Belvedere, with the Laocoön, with the Torso of Hercules, and with the Ariadne. It was for Julius that Michel Angelo executed his immortal paintings on the roof of the Sistine Chapel, which made it the most celebrated chapel in the world. This was a task of almost filial piety, for it put a finishing touch on the chapel of the uncle, born Francesco della Rovere, to whom Julius owed his elevation.

glazed by Pius IX. Drawn and engraved by G. Fontana. The apartments of the Pope occupy the right wing. _From Pistolesi’s “Il Vaticano.”_]

arcades. The Pope’s apartments are to the right, where the carriage is standing.]

Leo X., Giovanni de’ Medici, had the same magnificent and Mæcenatic tastes; it was he who completed the Loggie of S. Damaso under the direction of Raffaelle. It was he who had ten of the designs intended for these Loggie not executed in the Loggie, but in the Vatican tapestries woven at Arras in 1514. They were to hang on the walls of the Sistine Chapel below the frescoes: they are now kept in the Galleria degli Arazzi. Of them Gregorovius wrote: “In these Raffaelle ascends from the idyl to the drama in its loftiest and most exalted conception. In artistic unity of treatment and vigour of action, these designs surpass any of his works in the Stanze, and are his most consummate and grandest creations.” Raffaelle’s Stanze were originally commissioned by Julius II., and completed under Leo X. Raffaelle himself did not live to complete his task.

Leo X. appointed Raffaelle architect of St. Peter’s, and custodian of all the antiquities of Rome and the city territory. It was in these capacities that Raffaelle, who had a passion for the monuments of antiquity, conceived the famous scheme for making an illustrated plan of the city, in which he was engaged at the time of his death. He sets it forth in the letter long attributed to that Conte Baldassare Castiglione whose portrait painted by him is one of the _chefs d’œuvre_ of the Louvre. “There are many persons,” says he, “Holy Father, who, estimating great things by their own narrow judgment, esteem the military exploits of the ancient Romans, and the skill which they have displayed in their buildings, so spacious, and so richly ornamented, as rather fabulous than true. With me, however, it is widely different; for when I perceive, in what yet remains of Rome, the divinity of mind which the ancients possessed, it seems to me not unreasonable to conclude that many things were to them easy which to us appear impossible. Having, therefore, under this conviction, always been studious of the remains of antiquity, and having with no small labour investigated and accurately measured such as have occurred to me, and compared them with the writings of the best authors on this subject, I conceive that I have obtained some acquaintance with the architecture of the ancients. This acquisition, whilst it gives me great pleasure, has also affected me with no small concern, in observing the inanimate remains, as it were, of this once noble city, the queen of the universe, thus lacerated and dispersed. As there is a duty from every child towards his parents and his country, so I find myself called upon to exert what little ability I possess, in perpetuating somewhat of the image, or rather the shadow, of that which is in fact the universal country of all Christians, and at one time was so elevated and so powerful, that mankind began to believe that she was raised beyond the efforts of fortune and destined to perpetual duration. Hence it would seem that time, envious of the glory of mortals, but not fully confiding in his own strength, had combined with fortune, and with the profane and unsparing barbarians, that to his corroding file and consuming tooth they might add their destructive fury; and by fire, by sword, and every other mode of devastation, might complete the ruin of Rome. Thus those famous works, which might otherwise have remained to the present day in full splendour and beauty, were, by the rage and ferocity of these merciless men, or rather wild beasts, overthrown and destroyed; yet not so entirely as not to leave a sort of mechanism of the whole, without ornament indeed; or, so to express it, the skeleton of the body without the flesh. But why should we complain of the Goths, the Vandals, or other perfidious enemies, whilst they who ought, like fathers and guardians, to have protected the defenceless remains of Rome, have themselves contributed towards their destruction. How many have there been, who having enjoyed the same office as your Holiness, but not the same knowledge, nor the same greatness of mind, nor that clemency in which you resemble the Deity; how many have there been who have employed themselves in the demolition of ancient temples, statues, arches, and other glorious works! How many who have allowed these edifices to be undermined, for the sole purpose of obtaining the _pozzolana_ from their foundations; in consequence of which they have fallen in ruins! What materials for building have been formed from statues and other antique sculptures! Insomuch, that I might venture to assert that the new Rome which we now see, as large as it may appear, so beautiful and so ornamented with palaces, churches, and other buildings, is wholly composed of the remains of ancient marble. Nor can I reflect without sorrow, that even since I have been in Rome, which is not yet eleven years, so many beautiful monuments have been destroyed; as the obelisk which stood in the Alexandrian road, the unfortunate arch, and so many columns and temples, chiefly demolished by M. Bartolommeo della Rovere. It ought not, therefore, Holy Father, to be the last object of your attention, to take care that the little which now remains of this the ancient mother of Italian glory and magnificence, be not, by means of the ignorant and malicious, wholly extirpated and destroyed; but may be preserved as a testimony of the worth and excellence of those divine minds, by whose example we of the present day are incited to great and laudable undertakings. Your object, however, is rather to leave the examples of the ancients to speak for themselves, and to equal or surpass them by the erection of splendid edifices, by the encouragement and remuneration of talents and of genius, and by dispensing among the Princes of Christendom the blessed seeds of peace. For as the ruin of all discipline and of all arts is the consequence of the calamities of war, so from peace and public tranquillity is derived that desirable leisure, which carries them to the highest pitch of excellence.” After this introduction, the author proceeds: “Having, then, been commanded by your Holiness to make a design of ancient Rome, as far as it can be discovered from what now remains, with all the edifices of which such ruins yet appear as may enable us infallibly to ascertain what they originally were, and to supply such parts as are wholly destroyed by making them correspond with those that yet exist, I have used every possible exertion, that I might give you full satisfaction, and convey a perfect idea of the subject.”

Hadrian VI. (1522-1523), who succeeded Leo X., was not an Italian at all; but he only lived a year, and was succeeded by another Medici, Clement VII. (1523-1534). It was in his reign that the devastating sack of Rome under the command of the Duc du Bourbon took place, which did more damage to the precious monuments of art and antiquity than any other catastrophe which ever befell the city. For the invading army included many Protestants. “The Protestant Germans, under Fründesberg, considered the smashing of images, the ransacking of churches, the tearing of priestly vestments, and the razing of convent and monastery as part of their religious duty. They felt to the elaborate paraphernalia of the Roman Church much as the Early Christians did to the stone and marble gods and temples of the heathen. In each case the loss to art has been the same.”

When the Imperial army withdrew, Clement VII. came out of the Castle of Sant’ Angelo, behind whose impregnable walls he had taken refuge, and had Raffaelle’s Stanze finished by his pupils. Clement VII. was succeeded by Paul III., Alessandro Farnese (1534-1549), who commissioned Michel Angelo to paint the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, for which three famous frescoes by Perugino were destroyed. This was unveiled in 1541. For the same Pontiff Michel Angelo also painted the two great frescoes in the Paoline Chapel, which, like that noble but baroquely painted chamber, the Sala Regia, was built for Paul by Antonio da Sangallo. Julius III. (1550-1555) had a stately flight of steps made for the Belvedere by Michel Angelo. Marcellus II. was elected and died in that same year, 1555. Paul IV. (1555-1559), Gian Pietro Caraffa, notorious as the Pope who took the most active part in the cruelties of the Inquisition, is also notorious for having had clothes painted round the figures of Michel Angelo’s Last Judgment during Michel Angelo’s lifetime. In delightful contrast to him was his successor, Pius IV., Giovanni Angelo de’ Medici (1559-1565); he ordered the great Court of the Belvedere to be finished after the plans of Bramante by Michel Angelo, who loathed the very name of Bramante; for him was built the exquisite garden-house of the Vatican, Pirro Ligorio’s masterpiece, the Villa Pia, the nearest to a classical building of any work of the Renaissance.

Gardens.]

Pius V. was the last Pope canonized as a saint; he was too much taken up with the Turks to build much. It was in his reign that the great battle of Lepanto was fought, which so pervades the Gargantuan frescoes of sixteenth-century Rome. In it the Venetian and Spanish fleet, commanded by Don John of Austria, and the Papal fleet, commanded by Mark Antonio Colonna, sank ninety Turkish galleys and captured one hundred and eighty, killed thirty thousand Turks, and took ten thousand prisoners, and freed fifteen thousand Christian slaves, with the loss of only fifteen galleys and eight thousand men. Gregory XIII., the Buoncompagni Pope (1572-1585), was more than a maker of Calendars, though it is for the Gregorian Calendar, which we still use, more than three centuries later, that his name is a household word. He built the Loggie which connect the Loggie of Raffaelle with the apartments occupied by the Pope, and was a great patron of painters--Federigo Zucchero, whom he employed on the Paoline Chapel; Vasari, whom he employed on the Sala Regia, and others. But his fame as an embellisher of the Vatican is utterly eclipsed by that of his successor, the famous Sixtus V., Felice Peretti (1585-1590), the building Pope, with whom, in his brief reign of five years, the Romans thought that the Renaissance was beginning again. Nothing pleased Sixtus V.; he wished to move the obelisk near the Sacristy of St. Peter’s which marked the site where St. Peter was crucified into the centre of the Piazza in front of St. Peter’s. It weighed nearly a million Roman pounds, but Fontana, the architect, was given _carte blanche_, and set about his task with eight hundred men, one hundred and fifty horses, and forty-six cranes. The story of its removal is one of the most famous passages in Hare: “The obelisk was first exorcised as a pagan idol, and then dedicated to the Cross. Its removal was preceded by High Mass in St. Peter’s, after which Pope Sixtus bestowed a solemn benediction upon Fontana and his workmen, and ordered that none should speak, on pain of death, during the raising of the obelisk. The immense mass was slowly rising upon its base, when suddenly it ceased to move, and it became suspected that the ropes were giving way. An awful moment of suspense ensued, when the breathless silence was broken by a cry of ‘_Acqua alle funi!_’ (‘Wet the ropes!’), and the workmen, acting upon the advice so unexpectedly received, again saw the monster move, and gradually settle on to its base. The man who saved the obelisk was Bresca, a sailor of Bordighera, a village of the Riviera di Ponente, and Sixtus V., in his gratitude, promised him that his native village should ever henceforth have the privilege of furnishing the Easter palms to St. Peter’s. A vessel laden with palm-branches, which abound in Bordighera, is annually sent to the Tiber in the week before Palm Sunday, and the palms, after being prepared and plaited by the nuns of S. Antonio Abbate, are used in the ceremonial in St. Peter’s. The obelisk was formerly called ‘St. Peter’s Needle’ (‘_Aguglia di S. Pietro_’). In the Middle Ages it was believed that the bronze globe on the summit contained the ashes of Julius Cæsar.”

It was Sixtus who built the wing of the Courtyard of S. Damaso, which has been the residence of the Popes ever since. It was Sixtus who built the great hall of the Vatican Library, two hundred and twenty feet long, which, with its brilliant decorations in Pompeian style, is one of the finest chambers in Rome. But it destroyed the finest cortile in the world, the Courtyard of the Belvedere built by Bramante to connect the Villa Belvedere with the Vatican, which it cut clean in half. It is the actual palace of the Popes, built by Sixtus, though finally completed by Clement VIII., Ippolito Aldobrandini (1592-1605) (who condemned poor Beatrice Cenci to death), and succeeded him after the brief reigns of Urban VII. (1590), Gregory XIV. (1590-1591), and Innocent IX. (1591)--it is that palace which dominates the attention of the spectator as he lifts up his eyes to the hill of the Vatican from the Piazza of St. Peter’s. Clement VIII. was also the Pontiff whose chance it was to gaze upon the tomb of the Apostle when its vaulting fell in while they were building the New St. Peter’s. It was he who built the chapel in the crypt in front of the tomb in the form of an inverted cross, and erected the altar in that most sacred place. He was succeeded for a few months by another Medici, Leo XI. (1605), and then by Paul V., Camillo Borghese (1605-1621), who built the two great fountains in the Vatican Gardens and cared for the fortunes of his family in a more than usually open way. His successor, Gregory XV., Alessandro Ludovisi (1621-1623), did nothing for the Vatican; he devoted his energies to promoting the Order of Jesus. He canonized St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Francis Xavier, and founded the Propaganda, which Gregorovius, in his _Tombs of the Popes_, calls the largest institution in the world. His name has been given to the mushroom quarter of Rome, in which new hotels and boarding-houses spring up every day. But it was called, not after him, but his nephew, Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi. It was he who founded the Ludovisi collection, including the famous Juno, which has found its way to the National Museum in the Baths of Diocletian. Nor did he, as might have been imagined, found the Università Gregoriana in the Collegio Romano. That was founded by Gregory XIII. in 1582. The next two Popes, Urban VIII. and Innocent X., distanced all their predecessors in their zeal for the endowment of their families. Urban VIII., Maffeo Barberini (1623-1644), was not only a nepotist; he was such a vandal in tearing down ancient buildings to use their materials in his own constructions, that Roman wit coined the proverb, “_Quod non fecerunt Barbari, fecerunt Barberini_,” which may roughly be translated, “What the barbarians would not do, the Barberini did.” But Urban VIII. may be forgiven something for the magnificence of his ideas. For he built the Barberini Palace, the greatest ornament to Rome of all the vast buildings erected by Popes or Cardinals, except St. Peter’s itself. And he repaired the walls of Rome, especially that part which surrounds the Vatican Hill, with tremendous bastions, more like the rocks of nature than the works of man. And it was he who gave the original commission for that hill of stone, the Scala Regia, the enormous State staircase designed by Bernini for the Vatican. Also the Barberini Library, collected principally by his nephew, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, purchased by Leo XIII. for the Vatican Library, is worthy of mention among the greatest collections which have gone to form the Vatican Library. It was Urban VIII., too, not Clement VIII., according to some, who put the finishing touches on the apartments founded by Sixtus V., which are the residence of the Popes. At all events, he added to Sixtus V.’s great work, the Vatican Library, in order to house the Biblioteca Palatina, which had lately been bequeathed to it. And it was he who established the armoury in the rooms above the library to keep his army properly fitted out, just as he restored the walls of his capital against invaders.

His successor, Innocent X., Giambattista Pamfili (1644-1655), did little for the Vatican; his designing sister-in-law, Olimpia Maldaichini, who founded the gigantic wealth of the Pamfili family, saw to that. His successor, Alexander VII., the Chigi Pope (1655-1667), was public-spirited enough. He will always be remembered as the patron for whom Bernini erected the glorious colonnade of the Piazza of St. Peter’s, one of the very few works with which the megalomaniac Popes succeeded in rivalling the megalomaniac Emperors of Rome. It was he, too, who completed the superb Scala Regia, where he re-erected the famous bronze doors of Innocent VIII., which had already been adapted by Paul V. Another commission which he gave to Bernini, the Sala Ducale, cannot be accorded equal commendation--it is vulgar even for its age. Clement IX., Giulio Rospigliosi, reigned from 1667-1669; Clement X., Emilio Altieri (1670-1676), Innocent XI., Benedetto Odescalchi (1676-1689), Alexander VIII., Pietro Ottoboni (1689-1691), Innocent XII., Antonio Pignatelli (1691-1700), Clement XI., Giovanni Francesco Albani (1700-1721), Innocent XIII., Michel Angelo de’ Conti (1721-1724), Benedict XIII., Vincenzo Maria Orsini (1724-1730), Clement XII., Lorenzo Corsini (1730-1740), Benedict XIV., Prospero Lambertini (1740-1758), Clement XIII., Carlo Rezzonico (1758-1769); though these and others of the Popes added to the Vatican collections, none of them made any substantial additions to the buildings till Clement XIV., Lorenzo Francesco Ganganelli (1769-1774), who with his successor, Pius VI., Angelo Braschi (1775-1799), converted the gardens of Innocent VIII.’s Belvedere Villa into the Museo Pio-Clementino.

Portico.

_From Pistolesi’s “Il Vaticano.”_]

Pius VI. built from their foundations the Sala degli Animali, the Galleria delle Muse, the Rotonda, the Sala a Croce Greca, the Sala della Biga, and the superb staircase that leads up to it. Gregorovius, in his _Tombs of the Popes_, draws dramatic attention to the tragic ends of these two Popes: “In the year 1773 he (Clement XIV.) annulled the Order of Jesus. As men hinted, this was as good as if he had taken poison. Soon afterwards his appearance altered, he complained of pains in his vitals, he wasted away like a shadow. ‘I am passing into eternity,’ he said, ‘and I know the reason why.’ On September 22, 1774, he died at the age of sixty-nine. His body became black immediately, and decayed so rapidly that it was impossible to lay out the body for the ceremony of kissing his feet. And yet he had possessed an iron constitution, such as seemed capable of lasting till a hundred.

“But still more unfortunate than Clement XIV. was his successor, Pius VI., Braschi. In his reign occurred the dreadful catastrophe of the French Revolution.

“Pius VI. reigned twenty-four years, from 1775 to 1799, seeing many changes and enduring much. He has no tomb in St. Peter’s. His body rests in the Grotte Vaticane, his heart at Valence, where Napoleon raised a monument to his memory. Only his statue--by Canova--kneels upon the floor of the ‘Confession,’ and will kneel there so long as St. Peter’s dome endures above it. Gazing into its sombre depths beyond the circle of ever-burning lamps, one beholds in vague outline the figure of this luckless old man. Who does not know how Pius VI., in the days of the Franco-Roman Republic, was carried off forcibly from the Vatican, how place after place received the friendless exile, and how at length he died in a foreign land? And of the many who wander to-day through the gorgeous halls of the Museum Pio-Clementinum how few remember, amid the endless profusion of ancient masterpieces, the tragic fate of the two Popes who reared it there as an eternal delight for mankind!

“Thus the eighteenth century closed upon the Papacy in exile and despair.”

It is for poetical outbursts like this, as well as for his vast erudition, that one haunts the beloved pages of Gregorovius.

A much later writer, Mr. J. E. C. Bodley, in his able little book on the great Vatican question of our own day, _The Church in France_, talking of this Pope, says: “The constitution was never accepted by the Holy See. It was repudiated by Pius VI., who was destined to die on French soil, the victim of the Revolution. At Valence, a picturesque city on the Rhone, which thousands of English people rush past every winter without stopping, the register of his death may still be seen in the municipal archives, where it is inscribed, after the manner of the time, as of one, ‘Jean Braschi,’ who followed the profession of ‘Pontiff.’”

Pius VI. not only established new ideals with these beautiful halls of the Vatican Sculpture Gallery, which were designed by Sermonetti; he enriched them with two thousand fine specimens. Hardly, Miss Mary Knight Potter reminds us, had Pius got his collection into his museum before the Treaty of Tolentino, 1797, gave Napoleon the right of carrying them off to France, where they were deposited in the Louvre. And just a year later, on his refusal to renounce his temporal authority, when General Berthier entered Rome, he was taken prisoner and carried to Siena, Florence, Parma, Piacenza, Turin, Grenoble, and Valence, where he died a year and a half after his deposition. Pius VII., the Chiaramonti Pope (1800-1823), was also one of the great embellishers of the Vatican. He founded the vast Museo Chiaramonti, in one of the two great galleries which connect the transformed Villa Belvedere with the original Vatican Palace.

Here we have a vista, seemingly unending, of statuary; the statues are not equal to those of the Museo Pio-Clementino, but they are a monument of his courage and love of art, for they are what he collected to replace the depredations of Napoleon. His also is the Gallery of Inscriptions and the Egyptian Museum. It was he who gave ten thousand scudi for the famous antique fresco called the Nozze Aldobrandini, now shown in the Vatican Library. And it was for him that Raffael Stern built, in 1817, the Braccio Nuovo, the plain gallery, more than two hundred feet long, so admirably designed for its purpose, which houses some of the best statuary in the Vatican.

Like his predecessor, Pius VII. was carried off a prisoner to France: he had asserted the independence and neutrality of his dominions, when ordered to expel the enemies of France from his territory and their ships from his ports. He refused to resign, and excommunicated the invaders sent to compel him. He was taken prisoner on July 5, 1809, and kept in France till the 2nd of January 1814. He had already, in 1804, visited France, under strong pressure, to crown Napoleon. After the French armies had been driven from Germany, Napoleon endeavoured to purchase a new Concordat, offering the Pope the Papal possessions south of the Apennines, but Pius refused to treat with him except from Rome, which he entered on the 24th of May 1814. It must have been with peculiar satisfaction that, owing to the firmness of the English, he saw all the magnificent statuary taken from the Vatican to the Louvre by Napoleon restored with the exception of a few minor statues, the value of which was more than compensated by the magnificent pictures which were sent back from Paris to him, though they had been taken not from him, but from various Italian churches. With them he founded the famous Vatican Gallery.

Pius VII. was succeeded by Leo XII., Annibale della Genga (1823-1829), and Pius VIII., Francesco Saverio Castiglione (1829-1831). Gregory XVI., Mauro Capellari (1831-1846), distinguished his reign by two great works. He saved the ancient town and monuments of Tivoli by creating a tunnel and the most majestic of artificial waterfalls to divert the waters of the Anio, which threatened the Tibur of Horace with destruction, and, by his patronage of the brothers Campanari, and his establishment of the _Museo Etrusco_ in the Vatican, he did much for preserving the memory of one of the most extraordinary peoples who have perished off the face of the earth--the Etruscans. Gregory was succeeded by Pius IX., Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, who reigned longer than any other Pope, and was the first “to pass the years of St. Peter.”

No Pope has impressed himself more on the imagination of the Romans, for he loved the splendid pageants which passed away with the temporal power nearly forty years ago. And he loved his capital, and did much for its monuments, though he restored sometimes not wisely but too well. His principal addition to the Vatican was the completion of the Cortile of S. Damaso, and the magnificent Scala Pia, which leads up to the actual palace of the Pope.

Leo XIII., Gioacchino Pecci (1878-1903), made one supreme contribution to the glories of the Vatican by restoring the Borgia Apartments, whose frescoes are, after those of the Cathedral Library at Siena, the masterpieces of Pinturicchio. These had for many years been almost invisible owing to the tall bookcases in which the whole of the printed books of the Vatican Library were crowded. Leo XIII., as related in the chapter on the subject, cleared out and entirely reconstituted the apartments under the great hall of the Vatican Library and various adjoining rooms to form the new Leonine Library, which now contains all the printed books. In conjunction with this work he had the Borgia Apartments restored by the art director of the Vatican, Commendatore Ludovico Seitz, who must be allowed to have carried out the work with singular success. He showed such good taste, such a laudable desire to alter as little as possible, so much knowledge and delicacy in removing whitewash and re-backing the frescoes. Pope Leo also converted the Hall of Canonizations into a chapel, and spent a great deal of money on beautifying the floors and ceilings of the _Galleria degli Arazzi_ and the _Galleria dei Candelabri_.

The present Pope succeeded too recently for his work to show much, but his broad-minded and enlightened régime is certain to result in important and permanent improvements, among which he is contemplating a Museum of Old St. Peter’s.

permission from the British Museum Guide to the Early Christian and Byzantine Antiquities.]