OLD ST. PETER’S

“From the Ælian bridge over the Tiber they traversed the long colonnade which led to the _atrium_ of St. Peter’s, with its fountain and its tombs of the Popes. There they witnessed the Pope, John XIII., and his Cardinals receive the Imperial party on the thirty-five steps of the entrance. With martial surroundings and sacerdotal pomp, the mighty Otto, his wife and son, were conducted into the basilica of Constantine, which had then been the venerated temple of Rome for six centuries and a half.

“The Vatican Basilica of the tenth century was, of course, wholly unlike the St. Peter’s we see to-day. It was quite similar to the restored Church of St. Paul’s _fuori le Murà_, as we now see it, but it was some twenty feet longer and a little wider, and had five naves divided off by four rows of vast monolith columns. There were ninety-six in all, of various marbles, different in style and even in size, for they had been the first hasty spoils of antique palaces and temples. The walls, above the order of columns, were decorated with mosaics, such as no Roman hand could then produce or ever restore. A grand arch, such as we see at the older basilicas to-day, enriched with silver plates and adorned with mosaic, separated the nave from the chancel, below which was the tribune, an inheritance from the prætor’s court of old. It now contained the high altar and the _sedile_ of the Vicar of Christ. Before the high altar stood the _Confessio_, the vault wherein lay the bones of St. Peter, with a screen of silver such as the Greeks called _iconostasis_, crowded with silver images of saints and virgins. And the whole was illuminated by a gigantic candelabra holding more than a thousand lighted tapers.

“The Byzantine visitors were amazed to find the Cathedral of Old Rome so utterly different from their own Hagia Sophia at home. It was nearly one hundred feet longer and not much less in width. Its mosaics, its monoliths, and its tribune resembled those of the great temple of Justinian; but its flat roof, long aisles, rude workmanship, and want of symmetry roused contempt and pity from the cultivated taste of the Greek artist. The basilica of St. Peter’s was, indeed, but a crude adaptation of the law courts of the Cæsars, whilst the Church of the Holy Wisdom was one of the most original creations in the whole record of human art” (Frederic Harrison in _Theophano: The Crusade of the Tenth Century: a Romantic Monograph_).

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I have it on the authority of the most influential of the Cardinals that the Pope is thinking of establishing a St. Peter’s Museum, like the Opera del Duomo at Florence and Siena. As this Museum must consist chiefly of the remains of Old St. Peter’s, I shall endeavour to recall all that is known of Old St. Peter’s, and to give the best list I can of the remains of it which are to be found in the crypt of the present church and elsewhere. The most important paintings of it are preserved in a little German capital, where a Royal Abbess, who was too infirm to make the pilgrimage to Rome, was accorded the privilege of substituting visits to the church or convent embellished with these paintings. Various pictures of it, of course, exist in Rome; and there is a contemporary model of it preserved in the Vatican. But the chief recruiting-ground we have for ideas for a Museum of Old St. Peter’s is the crypt of the present church.

Until the present Pope’s reign the crypt of St. Peter’s was to the ordinary traveller _terra incognita_. It was as difficult to see as the museum of the Torlonias, who, unlike the old Roman nobility, rigidly exclude the public from studying their art treasures. Leo XIII. for a long time would allow no one to visit it without his personal permission. He believed that dynamiters wished to blow up St. Peter’s, though it is difficult to think that so holy a place would not be sacred even to a criminal in search of advertisement. And a criminal, though regardless of sacrilege, might be deterred by the superstition, universally accredited, that some stupendous misfortune would happen to him who disturbed the grave of St. Peter.[5]

So firm is the belief, that no attempt has ever been made to restore to public view the glorious cross, weighing one hundred and fifty pounds, and of the height of a man, made of pure gold, which the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, erected at the head of the tomb, and which Clement VIII. (died 1605) saw lying there, when a portion of the vault fell in. Accompanied by Cardinals Bellarmin and Antoniano, he examined it. He found that it bore the inscription: “_Constantinus Aug. et Helena Aug. hanc domum regalem (auro decorant quam) simili fulgore coruscans aula circumdat._” He entertained at first the idea of clearing away the ruins and exposing the tomb, but was deterred, possibly by the superstition which is now so universal at Rome, that even if the Pope were to order the cross to be removed into the projected Museum, no Roman would take part in the work. Clement had the opening hurriedly closed and covered with a thick layer of masonry. This cross is the most valuable example of its kind known to survive.

In Leo XIII.’s day the crypt could only be seen by torchlight, and it would have been easy for a miscreant to have concealed himself in its dark recesses; but the Vatican authorities have now very wisely had it illuminated with electric light, like the ancient Roman house of S. Cecilia, preserved under her church, and one, at least, of the catacombs. Only, though proper persons are allowed to visit it, the regulations are so puzzling that few people ever achieve admission except under the wing of a high ecclesiastic or a guide who lectures on the crypt.[6]

Sarcophagus of the Old Pretender on the extreme right and the urn containing the præcordia of Pius IX. next to it.]

The crypt of St. Peter’s (known to Italians as the _Grotte Vaticane_) is amazingly interesting, for the _Grotte Vecchie_ (old crypt), which extend below St. Peter’s from the tomb to the entrance, are actually part of the original basilica of Constantine. You stand on the very pavement trodden by the feet of Popes and Kings, and millions of the faithful, for a thousand years. In it are preserved the grand old Gothic tombs of some of the greatest of the Popes, and in it, fragrant with white roses laid on them by the adherents of the lost cause, are the tombs of the last three Stuart Kings,--James III., better known as the Old Pretender; Charles III., better known as the Young Pretender, or Bonnie Prince Charlie; and Henry IX., better known as the Cardinal of York,--unwieldy sarcophagi of painted plaster. These unhappy and--with the exception of the Cardinal of York--unworthy princes rest here, and not beneath the elegant monument by Canova of an angel with tired wings, which George IV. had the good grace to erect to their memory on the first pier of the nave of St. Peter’s. When I say unworthy, I must record this in James III.’s favour, that had he seen fit to change his religion for the Crown of England, he would have reigned longer than any of our Sovereigns, not excepting Queen Victoria, for he survived his father by more than sixty-four years. Not many in the history of the world have given up so much for their faith.

The _Grotte Vecchie_, which fill the space between the floor of Old St. Peter’s and the present church, will hardly allow a tall man to stand upright. Here are buried the brilliant young Emperor Otto II., and such famous Popes as Boniface VIII. (died 1303), Hadrian IV. (died 1159), Nicholas V. (died 1455), and Paul II. (died 1471). The fine sarcophagi of Pius II. (Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini), the most courtly of the Popes (died 1464), and of Alexander VI., the fierce Borgia Pope (died 1503), do not hold their bones; the latter never did. Hadrian IV. (died 1159), the only Englishman who ever grasped the keys of St. Peter, lies in a mighty sarcophagus of Oriental granite. Paul II., who had the finest tomb of all the Middle Ages, fragments of which, carved with incomparable grace by Mino da Fiesole, fill up half the _Grotte Nuove_ (new crypt), lies in a plain sarcophagus, with its front quite overwhelmed by the recumbent effigy on its lid, and covered by an inscription as close as a column of a newspaper. A very simple grave holds the greatest of the patrons of literature, Nicholas V. The Emperor Otto II. lies in a plaster leviathan. Christina of Sweden, who gave up her crown to be converted, and Charlotte of Cyprus, who had been spoiled by the Egyptians and an unnatural natural brother, and naïvely asked the Pope to make them disgorge her kingdom, lie under plain incised slabs. Only one woman not a queen rests in Old St. Peter’s, Madame Agnes, the Colonna who married a Caetani.

The _Grotte Nuove_ form the substructures of the dome, and are more in the nature of a museum than a cemetery. Most important in them are the frescoes of the old basilica, and some of its glories, like the shrine of the Holy Lance. But there is a statue of St. Peter, older and more beautiful than the statue worshipped above. Its body was a Roman Consul, and its head was changed in the early days of Christianity. Near by are a beautiful inscription of Pope Saint Damasus about the drainage of the Vatican Hill;[7] and the exquisite bas-reliefs from Nero’s Garden, which may have been the inspiration of Mino da Fiesole, whose glorious sculptures, executed for the vast mausoleum of Paul II., fill, with the screen made by Matteo Pollaiuolo for the Old Confessio, half these _Grotte Nuove_. Mino never excelled his figure of Faith, holding a chalice on Paul II.’s tomb. Matteo, in his inspired moments, approached Mino; in his uninspired moments he was no better than his baroque successors. Beautiful, too, are the mosaics on Otto’s tomb, and the noble throne on which St. Peter sits in the chapel of S. Maria della Bocciata.

What you can see of the tomb of St. Peter in the crypt requires scant mention. You look upon nothing ancient, hardly anything mediæval, or worth remembering. It was inevitable that all its ancient features should be sacrificed to wealth and piety. Pope Clement VIII., to whom it had been vouchsafed to see the Apostolic tomb, lavished both upon the chapel which he built over it in his gratitude.

I must say no more, till a later chapter, about this rich museum of Old St. Peter’s; I must now try and draw a picture of the basilica itself.

Like the Lateran, St. Paul’s Without the Walls, S. Lorenzo Without the Walls, S. Agnese Without the Walls, and SS. Pietro e Marcellino, it was one of the six basilicas attributed to Constantine the Great. No one of them has been suffered to continue in anything like its original state, and Gregorovius will not admit that the evidence in favour of any of them except the Lateran is more than presumptive. He says, in