R. A. Scotti (23 page)

By Christmas, the cupola was more than forty feet high and still rising. Romans were astonished. The oldest had lived their entire lives with the unfinished Basilica silhouetted against the western sky. It had become a dream with no reality. Children had grown up, had children of their own, and grown old, and still the Basilica stood unfinished. Now, all of Rome watched with mounting excitement and unconcealed wonder as the vista changed. Waking up each morning, they scanned the skyline. Sixtus watched with the rest of the city and received regular progress reports. As long as the dome was proceeding, he didn't meddle.

In the rush to meet the pope's schedule, della Porta pressed forward in fair weather and foul. His men labored through the summer, working at heights of more than two hundred feet, exposed to the broiling sun. Ingenious time-saving measures were sometimes called for. Once when an extra container was needed for water, a mason commandeered the sarcophagus of Innocent VI and used it as a trough. Rather than waste time descending and ascending again, the workmen took their midday meal high in the air, and some days were so hot that the cheese in their meal bags melted on the bread and the wine mulled in their kidskin flasks.

In autumn, they huddled in the passageways within the walls of the drum and waited out the rains that come in sudden, short drenchings in Rome, then went back to work. When lightning flashed, it seemed close enough to singe their beards, and when winter blustered in, the wind at such a height was a slashing knife. Scaffold castles rocked, and the men hung on, fingers stiff and blue, and in the blue distance they looked out on the Sabine mountains, and beyond to the
campagna
, the Alban Hills, and the sweet vineyards of Frascati. They looked out so as not to look down.

The men and stone and furnaces below were blurred spots before their eyes, and they tried not to remember the iron band that had snapped on a scaffold, setting in motion a fatal chain of cause and effect—the scaffold castle tilting, one triangular leg slipping off the attic, and a mason dangling over the vast construction, his mouth wide open, the wind swallowing his voice. He floated over the Basilica, caught on a thermal, before tumbling in free fall, gathering speed. Against all odds, the men kept climbing the infinite height each day, and each month the cupola rose another seven feet.

 

Conceived in the fall of 1505, the dome of St. Peter's was completed eighty-five years later. Such a magnificent architectural achievement would seem to require calm deliberation and slow, careful construction. But the dome was raised in a hurry—or more precisely, in several intense, often incautious bursts of feverish work by old men racing against their own mortality—Bramante setting the foundation piers that made the Basilica his own, Michelangelo approaching his eighty-ninth year and staving off death to assure that his dome would crown the mother church, Sixtus V holding his architects to a frenzied schedule, twenty-four hours a day seven days a week, only allowing a break for Sunday mass.

Finally, on May 14, 1590, as the Basilica choir sang the
Te Deum
and Sixtus gave thanksgiving, the final stone, carved with his name, was set. A week later, on May 21, the indomitable pontiff issued a formal announcement: “To the perpetual glory of His Blessedness and the discomfiture of his predecessors, Our Holy Father Pope Sixtus V has completed the vaulting of the cupola.”

The dome of St. Peter's was raised at last, not to the design of Bramante or Michelangelo but to the specifications of the unsung hero of the Basilica story, Giacomo della Porta.

In architectural renderings, Bramante's hemisphere feels earthbound, flattened over a vast diameter. Michelangelo's globe seems aspiring, as if it is reaching toward heaven, recalling the hope of salvation. Della Porta's dome seems not to rise from below but to be suspended from on high, brick and mortar and iron rings freed from the gravity that holds us earthbound. Visible from every point in the city, his dome is inescapable. It is the symbol of both the city and the Church of Rome, dominating the Roman skyline and proclaiming the faith:
Cristos aristos.

Instead of the thirty months allowed by Sixtus, della Porta and Fontana had achieved the impossible with time to spare. They had raised the highest dome ever built in just twenty-two months. Dwarfing every other construction, it soared 438 feet and spanned a 138-foot diameter. The dome of St. Peter's is three times the height of the Pantheon dome, more than twice the height of the Hagia Sophia dome, and 100 feet higher than the Duomo in Florence.
*

Three months later, Sixtus V died. True to his name, he was a happy man, his deepest desire fulfilled. Inscribed around the eye of the cupola that he pressed to completion is the legend: “This dome was built for the glory of St. Peter by Sixtus V.”

Over the course of his five-year pontificate, Sixtus spent one million ducats on building. Unlike other popes who were big spenders, he left a city and a church to show for it.

 

Sixtus was so formidable that perhaps no one could fill his shoes. The three popes who followed him—Urban VII, Gregory XIV, and Innocent IX—each died within a few months of their election. Unaffected by their presence or their passing, della Porta persevered.

He faced the cupola with thin slabs of travertine, coated it with a protective lead covering, and bronzed the ribs. In 1591, he completed the lantern. Although it carried through the pattern of windows and buttresses from the dome, in concept and proportion it was very different from Michelangelo's design. Della Porta's lantern was low, to conform to the elevated cupola, and surrounded with a row of candles, or finials. A copper ball and bronze cross were added in successive years.

Forged in the Vatican foundry, each is immense. The ball, or
palla,
is eight feet in diameter and weighs 5,493 pounds—sixteen people can stand inside it. The cross is sixteen feet high and holds two lead caskets within its arms, one filled with relics, the other with Agnus Deis, wax medallions made after Easter from the paschal candles and imprinted with the image of the Lamb of God.

Palla
and cross were hoisted to the acme of the Basilica by a series of pulleys and positioned on top of the lantern. The cross was raised in a single day—November 18, 1593. Including the cross, ball, and lantern, more than 616,000 tons rest on Michelangelo's drum, and the height from the ground to the tip of the cross is 452 feet.

When each element of the dome was finished, della Porta redesigned the two minor domes to correspond with the central cupola. By then, he was working for his sixth pope—Clement VIII. In his first years as
capomaestro,
della Porta had built the large northeast corner chapel for Gregory XIII. Now, in his final years, he built the corresponding southeast corner chapel for Clement. At the same time, work began on the interior decoration of his dome.

Given its extraordinary height, every element had to be enormous to be visible. A frieze of purple-blue letters, each six feet high, circles the lower rim of the cupola on a broad band of gold, spelling out the words:
Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam et tibi dabo claves regni caelorum
—“Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church and I will give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” To fill the interior of the dome, Giuseppe Ce-sari, an extraordinary mosaic artist known as Cavaliere d'Arpino, began a series of cartoons. His mosaics are so huge that the pen that St. Luke holds in one of the panels is eight feet long.

Although it would take many more years for d'Arpino to complete the mosaics than it had taken della Porta to raise the dome, the tumultuous century of construction was over. Giacomo della Porta died in 1602, believing that he had brought the new Basilica of St. Peter to the point of completion.

B
attered but unbowed, cleansed of the brilliant, scandalous excesses of the Renaissance, the Church of Rome entered its sixteen hundredth year sanitized and set on a straight and narrow road. Its housecleaning complete, the edifice buffed and gleaming, the Church recast itself. What it had lost in political power, it gained in moral authority.

The Counter-Reformation Church had slowed the momentum of Protestantism and reaffirmed its mission, creating a new Church for a new century. Three million pilgrims thronged Rome for the Jubilee of 1600. A reorganized and reformed Curia set the standard for efficient government. Moral and ethical standards were demanded of the clergy, and missionaries brought the faith to Asia and the Americas.

In the new century, the Holy Father emerged as the exemplar of the new and improved Church. No more mistresses in the papal apartments, illegitimate children showered with benefices, or families made wealthy. No more war parties or papal bulls discharged like cannon fire. The pope became the model of the blameless Christian life. It was quite a change from the Renaissance popes and even from Peter, the flawed Everyman.

A mere fifty years after its unity fractured, the Catholic Church was reborn, more confident than ever, but increasingly closed. The resurgent Church became cautious, not humble. Orthodoxy became paramount. What was lost was not munificence but magnanimity—that largeness of spirit that made anything possible, that allowed every voice and every cockamamie idea to be aired. The church that had invented the term
devil's advocate
to raise intellectual challenges became leery of open debate. That is, perhaps, one of the lasting legacies of Protestantism.

Still, the Church flourished, and the city flourished with it. By 1600, Rome was the third-largest city in Europe, surpassed only by Paris and London, and the Church of Christ was more distinctly than ever the Church of Rome. Although its embrace was universal, its soul was Latin, and it was expressed in an exultant new art. The resurgent Church gave Rome the Baroque. It was a heavenly marriage.

Like the city and its people, the new art was emotional, sensual, and unrestrained. Renaissance art was intellectual, intended to be appreciated by the ennobled few and instructive to the rest. It taught but it didn't touch the illiterate masses of faithful Christians. The romance of the Baroque was an unabashed appeal to the emotions. In its graphic displays, the agonies and ecstasies of saints and martyrs and the sorrow and sweet solace of the Virgin Mother, deplored by Luther, became potent visual narratives that everyone could read.

Where the Protestants rejected Mary, the Church of Rome made devotion to her a cult. Where the Protestants attacked miracles as hogwash and black magic, the Roman Church enshrined relics in the four piers of the new Basilica. The Protestants had denied the authority of the pope and chastised Rome for its ostentatious wealth, and the Church had countered by forging ahead with the most audacious statement of its supremacy, the new Basilica of St. Peter. In the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, the Fabbrica reconstituted itself. Once Sixtus made it a congregation, it accrued greater authority and greater accountability. Vastly different from the committee that Michelangelo had deplored and steamrolled, the Fabbrica now established offices in many cities to collect and handle contributions and legacies earmarked for the Basilica. It arbitrated disputes relating to the building—settled legal issues, probated wills, and the like—and supervised the final phase of construction.

 

Today, the Fabbrica is housed in the upper realms of the Basilica, far above the tomb of Peter, in two spacious octagonal offices, each with a graceful cupola. Known as the
ottagoni,
they were probably the workrooms of the last great architect of St. Peter's, Gianlorenzo Bernini. Equipped with recessed lighting, climate control, and computer banks, the
ottagoni
are lined with more than 2,400 feet of glass-fronted metal cabinets containing the full archival history of the Basilica.

Stored in bound volumes, boxes, folders, and packs of documents are a day-to-day record of the gradual destruction of Constantine's basilica and the often agonizingly slow progress of the new construction. Registers and receipts detail expenditures for material. Account books, contracts, and bills of authorization spell out the payments to architects, artists, and workmen. Other files contain reports and legal documents pertaining to wills, disputes, gifts, and the like. There are lead and wax seals used to stamp papal bulls, edicts, decrees, parchments, and letters from the architects.

The Fabbrica not only preserves the history of the Basilica, it maintains the physical building with all its art and treasure, and oversees a unique corps of maintenance workers. Known as the Sampietrini, the corps was conceived as the Basilica neared completion. At the start of the new century, realizing that maintaining such an immense construction could not be left in the hands of casual laborers, an illiterate mason recruited thirty workers skilled in the various building trades and decorative arts. They made St. Peter's their lifework, and in turn, trained their sons.

Over time, the Sampietrini became a unique hereditary force with particular rules and customs. Still operating today from shops concealed in the depths of St. Peter's, they travel through the cavernous chambers and narrow twisting stairways within the walls to reach the most dizzying heights. Like circus acrobats, they balance on cornices and capitals, run along the dome and lantern, squat on the heads of the giant statues, and hang from the soaring vaults.

Their ancestors, the original Sampietrini, were the masons, carpenters, painters, stuccoists, glaziers, and gilders who worked with the master of the Baroque to transform the very stones and mortar that had sparked the Reformation into the transcendent symbol of the Roman Church.