Only a few pages into R. A. Scotti’s new book, Basilica, I started feeling thoroughly disappointed; after finishing the book, I felt betrayed. Scotti had led me on with her subtitle: The Splendor and the Scandal: Building St. Peter’s. Smearing the Catholic Church under the guise of art history is hot these days and I assumed that R.A. Scotti was another Dan Brown.
In short, I was hoping for a good fight, but Scotti barely laces up her gloves.
The Catholic Church is one of the most meticulously documented institutions in history; precious little information about it remains hidden. Still, scandal seekers and conspiracy theorists remain fascinated. In Washington, D.C., the National Geographic Museum is now exhibiting The Gospel of Judas, a text that portrays Judas not as the betrayer of Christ, but as his favored apostle, to whom He revealed the true mysteries of the faith. Though the recent rediscovery of these documents is a significant historical find, it’s yesterday’s news in terms of Church theology. It was formally condemned as heresy by St. Irenaeus in the 2nd century A.D.
Basilica takes a modern glance back into Church history, but it is neither a Gospel of Judas nor a DaVinci Code. Instead, it is a fair and fascinating examination of the splendorous and scandalous events that occurred from 1505 to 1667, during the building of St. Peter’s Basilica — an edifice of paradox, Scotti argues, that sparked the Protestant Reformation and, later, became a focus of unity for the Roman Catholic Church.
Though a dramatic storyteller — her experience as a novelist clearly influences the narrative — Scotti understands that the story of the Church needs no excessive dramatization: no cast of sinners and saints to create, no comic or tragic moments to force. The true story of St. Peter’s and the colorful lives of the people who shaped it — such as Pope Julius II, Michelangelo, Bramante, Raphael, Pope Sixtus V, and Bernini — are sufficiently captivating.
Scotti does, however, sate our baser appetite for scandal. The reader discovers that one cardinal and patron of Leonardo da Vinci “paid one hundred ducats, three times the average yearly salary, for a parrot that could recite the Apostle’s Creed,” and that Pope Alexander VI had a mistress by whom he fathered several illegitimate children. In a chapter Scotti titles “Salvation for Sale,” she describes how the Medici pope Leo X kept his promise to “enjoy the papacy” by funding lavish parties with the Vatican treasury–which he emptied in only two years. In order to remedy this financial crisis he instituted the sale of indulgences; this abuse was one of the major grievances that sparked Martin Luther’s revolution.
Scotti also draws attention to the great achievements of Renaissance and Baroque Catholicism. The Papal States were reclaimed, the Council of Trent took place, the Jesuit order was created, and the Church’s hierarchical structure became more defined. This same Church commissioned artists, architects, and engineers to restore Rome’s former splendor–rebuilding the damaged sewers, aqueducts, buildings, and roads of the city, all of which suffered from neglect and ravage.
The two figures whose accomplishments Scotti finds most noteworthy were also two of the Church’s most unruly members.
Despite having the nickname papa terribile (he was rumored to have poisoned his predecessor), Julius II built a Church that “administered the city of Rome, maintained an army, ran numerous charities, social services, and universities, and funded the arts and sciences.” He also brought imperialism — of a spiritual kind — back to Rome. The same man who dared to demolish Constantine’s basilica, the original basilica of the Catholic Church, also dared to transform St. Peter’s into an edifice meant to reveal both metaphorically and literally the magnificence of the Roman Catholic Church: “San Pietro in Vaticano lifted Rome from the rubble of its lost grandeur and made it the Eternal City. Gothic cathedrals reach up to heaven. St. Peter’s — muscular, sublime, irrevocable — brings heaven to earth.”
The unruly sculptor Michelangelo also brought heaven to earth. His agonizing 59 years of patronage under several very different popes is the most interesting story one can follow through the book. The first commission he received–in 1505, to build a tomb for Julius II–was one he dreamed of sculpting and one that ultimately never would be built. The second commission–in 1508, also for Julius II–was more like a condemnation for the sculptor: painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. In 1534, he would paint The Last Judgment, also in the Sistine Chapel, for the first Counter-Reformation pope, Paul III. At age 70 he took on the task of re-designing the floor plan of St. Peter’s into a Latin cross; at 86, crippled by age and years of hammering marble, he devoted the year 1564, his last on earth, to starting construction of the mighty dome first imagined by Bramante in 1505. While previous architects “had corrupted a glorious expression of Christian faith into an ostentatious display of vanity . . . [Michelangelo] would make it once again a work of faith, affirming again the words on the foundation-stone medal — ‘Not for ours, Lord, but for your glory.’” Scotti argues that Michelangelo’s art–along with the efforts of the Counter-Reformation popes–saved the Church.
The basilica was often, however, a crippling expense to the Church, and popes employed different means of financing its construction. In Basilica, Scotti reveals how each papacy brought new architectural designs, ideas, and adjustments to the basilica’s structure; she also reveals how each pope’s choices shaped the papacy. The abuses of a few, like Leo X, had lasting consequences.
Perhaps what people find most scandalous about the Roman Catholic Church is its endurance in spite of such corruption. Scotti writes: “A communion of sinners who would be saints, led by the most mortal of men — such is the enduring strength of the Roman Catholic Church. That boundless acceptance of a willing spirit foiled time and again by weak flesh has confounded those who have prematurely prophesied its end, from the unforgiving Luther to the unyielding evangelicals.”
It seems there are only two conclusions to be drawn from the corruption that took place in the Renaissance Catholic Church: Either this corruption is evidence of the faith’s inherent folly or it is the surest testament of its divine provenance. Scotti herself never explicitly voices a conclusion; she calls the Church “controversial and convoluted” yet “magnificent and mighty.” Her preference is to focus on the historical, not the theological, aspect of the events she describes. But perhaps her personal view is suggested by the Goethe quote that prefaces her book: “If they were great enough to invent such legends, we at least should be great enough to believe them.”
— Elizabeth Fisher is an NR editorial associate.
http://www.nationalreview.com/redirect/amazon.p?j=0670037761
