Culture in the Papal Manner

By ROBERT HUGHES

The Vatican comes to the Met, but was the journey necessary?

A sampling of 237 paintings, sculptures and other objects from the Vatican will open to the public at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art on Feb. 26. Previews have been running for weeks already. Later, "The Vatican Collections: The Papacy and Art" will travel to Chicago and San Francisco. It is the most expensive art exhibition ever put on in America. It cost $8 million to prepare, ship, insure and mount, and involved the largest single grant ever laid out by a corporate sponsor: $3 million from Philip Morris, which is to museums what Mobil and Exxon are to TV.

The exhibition's presence here has evoked anguished protest in Italy. Some of this is political (for in the wake of the Sindona and Calvi banking scandals, people are unsurprisingly skeptical of Vatican motives); but much of it comes from art historians of impeccable credentials, like the former mayor of Rome Giulio Carlo Argan, who holds that works like the Belvedere Torso, Caravaggio's Deposition and Leonardo's St. Jerome--all included in the exhibition--should not be exposed to the risks of travel, particularly for a show that has no scholarly purpose. But the Vatican does what it wants to do. It was determined to have an Event. If ever an exhibition was passively dedicated to the glamour of organized religion, this is it.

The exhibition comes to us with the vox humana stop full out. Its aim, the catalogue tells us, is to reflect the present Pope's will "to foster man's spiritual growth and aspirations to artistic greatness ... to give our visitors joy in the appreciation of the creative spirit in man's nature that transcends his worldly ambitions." The bottom line of this fund-raising show is a little more concrete: the Met had to give the Vatican $580,000 for restoration work and 10% of catalogue sales, plus a cut on the replicas and souvenirs; the museum, in turn, gets 10% of the catalogue and all of the admission revenues from a hoped-for audience of 7,000 people a day, or 750,000 during the 3 1/2-month New York run, at $4 a head. So far, the market in tickets has not been very brisk. Better one Egyptian boy-king, apparently, than any number of dead Popes.

The show tries to give an overview of papal commissioning and collecting. The papacy is, in fact, the world's oldest continuous art collector, and the history of its museums goes back to 1503, when Julius II set up a courtyard for connoisseurs, the Belvedere, stocked with a collection of antique statuary. Above its entrance was engraved a Vergilian tag, "Procul este, profani, "which freely translates as "Closed to non-experts." Turnstile tallies were not a concern of Renaissance Popes. In the past 1,500 years or so, the Vatican has amassed vast amounts of art in a way that has oscillated between the ravenous and the haphazard. There is a vague popular belief--which this show is careful not to disturb--that the Popes were always keen patrons of the best art of their time. It is quite untrue.

The high plateau of papal collecting and patronage came in the 16th and 17th centuries. It lasted from the pontificate of Julius II (1503-13)--who commissioned the frescoes in the Stanze from Raphael and the Sistine frescoes from Michelangelo--through the reign of Clement VIII (1592-1605). In those years the most vivid and impressive aspects of papal taste came to their highest pitch, sometimes nearly bankrupting the papacy with the mania for the Antique, the demand for vast fresco cycles, fountains and pharaonic tombs, and the general love of lapis lazuli and gold.

This phase of patronage is represented in the show by some striking works: the Flemish tapestry of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, designed by Raphael, all limpid air, august figures and delicious feats of natural observation; the huge and crushingly elaborate Farnese altar cross and candlesticks, finished in 1582 by Antonio Gentili; a sumptuous set of gold-ground vestments embroidered for Clement VIII; and some newly cleaned terra cotta studies by Bernini, along with his bronze portrait bust of his main patron, Urban VIII (1623-44), the man who did more than any other Pope to reshape the appearance of Rome (and who had all the nightingales in the Vatican gardens killed because their warbling disturbed his sleep).

In the 18th century the Popes began to lose their enthusiasm for live art, and the men who transformed painting in the 19th century--Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Cezanne--excited not a flicker of interest in the Vatican. In the 20th century papal patronage guttered out, except for a few ornamental mediocrities like Giacomo Manzii's door for St. Peter's. Modern Popes disliked modern art because they associated it with liberalism. Eventually the problem vanished: John Paul II would learn to use television as his predecessors had used fresco.

Just how complete the break now is between the papacy and art may be judged from the roomful of uncomfortably "religious" paintings by Andre Derain, Graham Sutherland and Ben Shahn, enlivened only by a Matisse design for a large stained-glass window that gives the exhibition its feeble coda. Owing in part to the zeal of an association called the Friends of American Art in Religion, run by an art dealer named Lawrence Fleischman under the benign presidency of Terence Cardinal Cooke, masses of otherwise unsalable modern religious art have been decanted into the Vatican since the late '60s. The result, the Collezione d'Arte Religiosa Moderna, amounts to something between a pork barrel and a junk pile.

So although the adjective papal casts an aura over any noun it touches, and is one of the favorite words of cultural coercion in the Midcult lexicon (like masterpiece and treasure), one should use it with reserve. The papacy may be infallible in dogma, but not in taste. And although the exhibition claims to show us in detail just what the changing relations of the Popes to art were, it does not deliver the goods. It contains only routine information and no fresh ideas about the liturgical, propagandist, doctrinal and decorative purposes of Vatican collecting, or the effect of that collecting on taste.

Instead, it sets out to drench the visitor in lulling, disconnected experiences. The installation, designed by Stuart Silver, compounds this by fixing every small object, from a champleve enamel to an ivory plaque, in its own shaft of light to punch up its "star quality," its isolation. Hence everything looks as though it were for sale. The problem is not an absence of remarkable works. Some are there, although to the unhyped eye, the general level could easily be matched or excelled by the Met's own collections. Rather it is the shortage of connective tissue. What we see is an array of samples but not an exhibition.

Given the need to pull in a mass audience, what kind of works do you choose? The answer is fairly obvious: revered emblems, things so famous (like the Apollo Belvedere) or so opulent (like the Farnese altar setting) that everyone will want to see them regardless of context. The rule for telling a Masterpiece from a Treasure is that Treasures have gold in them and Masterpieces do not. However, most Vatican art in the Masterpiece category is fresco, and nobody is lunatic enough (so far) to detach Raphael's School of Athens and fly it across the Atlantic. Indeed, the unrivaled magnificence of the Vatican's ensembles of High Renaissance architecture and fresco may have compounded the weakness of its congregation of paintings.

The collection of the Vatican's museum of paintings, the Pinacoteca, is generally dull, with some things of high interest and perhaps ten of real greatness. Paramount among these is Caravaggio's Deposition, which represents the 17th century master at his fullest stretch. Cleaned at last, with all manner of detail freshly visible--marble grain in the tomb slab, traces of landscape in the darkness behind--it is the centerpiece of the Vatican show and would be worth coming from Rome to see. With its flickering quadrant of hands and mourning faces slowly turning, like spokes, on the hub of Nicodemus' knee as he lowers the pallid body of the dead Christ into darkness, the canvas is at once gravely schematic and affectingly real, one of the most sustained and eloquent lamentations in Western art.

Then there is the Leonardo St. Jerome--the grubby wreck of an unfinished painting, but still a piercing study in the pathos of old age. There is a dark, solid Magdalen by Guercino, dense as a marble relief but much sexier; a good Sassetta; an opulent Veronese; a few minor paintings by major names, such as the predella of Raphael's Oddi altarpiece. Most delightful of all, the Vatican has sent two sets of panels depicting the legend of St. Nicholas of Bari, by Gentile da Fabriano and Fra Angelico. They offer, in capsule form, the most limpid pleasures of the early quattrocento, with its vernal freshness of pictorial impulse and enthusiasm about the new-found powers of perspective.

The center of gravity of the Vatican collections, apart from fresco, is antique sculpture. The papacy had no trouble collecting it; it lay in the Roman earth like raisins in a cake. At the tip of the Vatican's immense archaeological collection are three masculine sculptures which up to a century ago exerted tremendous influence on the history of style and were considered to be the supreme survivors of antiquity: the Laocoon, the Belvedere Torso and the Apollo Belvedere. By the 18th century their cult had become so intense that they were seen as the tripod on which Western art stood. They were taken to embody the fundamental modes of feeling in sculpture--the Apollo calm grace, the Torso a smoldering, heroic inward strength, the Laocoon pathetic energy. The Torso and the Apollo have now come to America, but what a modern audience will see in them, particularly in the Apollo, is less certain. Greco-Roman marbles, even if they were once more famous than the Mona Lisa and more visited than the Sistine, suffer because the continuity of classical tradition, on which their meaning depended, is now lost.

Inevitably, one thinks of the Apollo as a statue rather than a sculpture. Lofted on its pedestal, scrubbed to the purest funereal whiteness by the Vatican's conservators, stripped of its old restorations and bathed in pinkish light, it is quite a spectacle; one can even walk round it and gaze on the god's bare backside, invisible in its niche in the Belvedere.

It is not true, as the catalogue says, that this late Roman copy of a lost 4th century Greek bronze "embodies the Apollonian ideal of the Greeks." Rather it distantly reflects that ideal, just as a copy after Donatello made 450 years later by a Victorian sculptor in London might say something, but not a lot, about the Renaissance figure. What is certain, however, is that connoisseurs 200 years ago thought it was the archetype of Apollonian form. And by the 1840s the Apollo was more than a myth: it was part of the standard furniture of the "genteel" mind.

Naturally this killed it in the end.

Nothing could be further from modern sculptural taste than the Apollo. It is a cliche, as the Torso or the Elgin Marbles, in their far greater expressive vitality, are not. Before the Torso, one can readily see why Michelangelo and Rubens found inspiration in its twisting bulk and knots of somber muscle. It is the deepest object in the show, as the Caravaggio is the deepest painting. There are some other stone celebrities--notably the Augustus of Prima Porta, one of the canonical images of Roman authority--but one may think that the most affecting antique sculpture here, after the Torso, is an effigy of a Roman and his wife made around 25 B.C. It is ex quisitely carved and, in its gravely restrained embodiment of love and trust, a striking portrait.

What, in the end, is one to make of this show? The problem is to decide the grounds for judgment, since it is so frank about its "populist" aims. Met Director Philippe de Montebello makes no bones about this. "The prime moving purpose of the assembly of these works," he says, "is not to make a contribution to scholarship. We have tried to make a distillation, to save the public exhaustion. How many late Roman family portrait busts do most people want to see?" Fair enough, but to lug (for instance) tons of Egyptian sculpture from the Vatican to the Met, whose own Egyptian collection is one of the wonders of museology, is not distillation but excess. The Met insists that the sole aim of the show is aesthetic pleasure for a wide public. "Is the ultimate purpose of a work of art to advance art history or delight the eye?" De Montebello asks. "Art history is secondary to aesthetic delectation. We do not exist for scholars alone." True again--up to a point. But the issue here is not why works of art exist, but why exhibitions do.

An exhibition is an argument: it is art plus thought. It means sorting, ordering, categorizing, imagining, combining--the whole process of cultural criticism and understanding to which museums must address themselves if they are not to be mere storehouses. A collection shows us art, but an exhibition tries to make sense of the sight. Or else, as here, it fails to; at which point the press is filled with obnubilatory chants about Masterpieces and Treasures, the organizers start talking about self-sufficient aesthetic pleasure, and the Met's well-wishers start wondering uncomfortably whether it was really such a good idea after all.

For a big, black question mark hangs over this show. Old art cannot go anywhere by boat or train (too much jarring); to travel at all, it must fly, and nothing survives a plane crash. To take the nightmare by the ears, suppose the Caravaggio Deposition ends up distributed, in a thousand charred shreds, across a Midwestern wheat field. What then? It would put an end to international loans of major works of art, and the exhibition programs of all museums (though not necessarily art scholarship itself) would be halted or hobbled for a generation.

All loans risk damage; it is one of the donnees of museum practice, and the Met has been scrupulously vigilant in its precautions. But one must balance out the benefits against the risks. How necessary, really, is the Vatican show, apart from fund raising? It is a queer fantasy of American education that some good must come of flying works of art, some irreplaceable and others mediocre, 13,000 miles at some risk so that a million curious people can look at them for about two minutes each, under coercively promotional conditions. Such brief and zipless encounters are thought to be beneficial for the public, like fluoride. If museums were not strapped for cash they would drop this hypocrisy at once. Anyone who wants to learn about art can spend years in the Met without exhausting its resources, and many thousands do.

Historically important works of art have always traveled, and many have been lost to history in the process. But it is time to abandon the primitive reasons for sending them round the world--political display, promotion, show biz--and move them only if their presence in another country is likely to make a real difference to historical understanding.

Nobody seeks to abolish the exchanges for serious surveys, definitive retrospectives and similar events. How one would like to see the Deposition as the climax of a Caravaggio retrospective, or the Apollo Belvedere as the focus of a show that intelligently explored the workings of the neoclassical ideal! But it is time for the international museum community to give a lot more thought to which journeys are really necessary, which shows justify great loans, and which ones are merely totemic.

Otherwise we will have governments cynically dispatching their national treasures all over the world, like greeting cards. France sent the Mona Lisa to Japan; Los Angeles is asking Italy for the Riace bronzes to promote the 1984 Olympics. "We must have the courage," declared the former Italian Minister for Arts and the Environment Vincenzo Scotti in a speech in New York last November, "to send our most precious masterpieces out of the country." It would be better to pray for the divine gift of cowardice and fly the audience to Italy instead.

--By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.