An Ever-growing Mystery of Beauty and Faith

Built precisely over the tomb of Saint Peter, above a necropolis on the slope of the Vatican hill, the first Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome began to be erected in the 330s by the first Christian emperor, Constantine the Great (272–337). On either side of the façade of the basilica two sumptuous imperial mausoleums were preserved. In a most fitting way, they were, over the following centuries, transformed into chapels: one dedicated to Saint Petronilla, the eldest daughter of Saint Peter, and the other to his brother, Saint Andrew. That Saint Peter was married and had children is attested by the Gospels: Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law (Mt 8:14–15); and in Peter’s house at Capernaum, Jesus takes a child, embraces him, sets him forth as an example and identifies him with himself (Mk 9:33–37). Saint Paul, for his part, clearly suggests that, like the other apostles, after Pentecost Saint Peter set out on mission with his family (1 Cor 9:5). That said, some hagiographers maintain that Saint Petronilla was only the spiritual daughter of Saint Peter.

When, in 756, central Italy was conquered by the Lombards and Rome besieged, the king of the Franks, Pepin the Short (714–768), sent an army which defeated the invaders. In order to guarantee the Pope’s security and independence, Pepin donated to the Holy See the lands that fell to him by right of war. These would form the Papal States until 1870. In gratitude, the Pope bestowed on France the title of “Eldest Daughter of the Church” and gave her Saint Petronilla, the eldest daughter of Saint Peter, as patroness. To attest this, the Pope granted to France the inalienable ownership of the mausoleum-chapel of Saint Petronilla.

450 Gold Ducats

Like Charlemagne (c. 742–814), Louis XII (1462–1515), “the Father of the People,” had the greatest devotion to Saint Petronilla. He conceived the plan of adorning the mausoleum-chapel in Rome with a Pietà. To this end, he asked his ambassador to the Holy See, Cardinal de Lagraulas, to recruit the best possible artist to execute the work. However, he required that the chosen sculptor agree to renounce the Italian style in order to adopt the French style, all simplicity, without putti or other ornamentation. The artists approached refused this condition, and the cardinal had to fall back on a young Florentine sculptor of twenty‑three who did not disdain the 450 gold ducats that were offered him. He adhered so faithfully to the stylistic conditions laid down by Louis XII that he produced (in 1499) an unsurpassable masterpiece: his name was Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564).

Henry II on the Brink of Schism

In 1554, in the context of the redevelopment of the new Saint Peter’s Basilica, Pope Julius III had the two mausoleum-chapels demolished, without regard for the king of France, Henry II (1519–1559), with whom relations had deteriorated to the point that he had hurled an anathema against him, driving him to the brink of a Henry VIII–style schism (1491–1547) like that of England. Once relations had calmed, Saint Petronilla and France were granted a chapel in the new basilica: the first chapel to the right of the high altar, which rises above the tomb of Saint Peter. This chapel is French territory, and to this day the French Republic is responsible for its upkeep. One may go there to pray before the sarcophagus of the eldest daughter of Saint Peter, that the Eldest Daughter of the Church may remain faithful to the promises of her baptism. The Pietà, for its part, was placed in the first chapel to the right of the entrance to the basilica. Let us note that, in law, it still belongs to France.

The Vow of Louis XIII

Saint Petronilla remained the principal patroness of France until the vow of Louis XIII (1638), when she ceded place to the Virgin Mary, to whom the king promised to consecrate his kingdom. It is no accident that he also promised to raise a new high altar in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, with beneath the Cross a monumental Pietà. His son Louis-Dieudonné would begin to fulfill this vow from 1708 onward. It is worth noting that the vow of Louis XIII had force of law. This law was abolished by King Louis-Philippe in 1831. This did not prevent Pope Pius XI, in 1922, from confirming Our Lady of the Assumption as “principal patroness of France.” The secondary patronesses of France are Saint Joan of Arc and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Saint Petronilla remains a secondary patroness, but her cult has fallen into desuetude, even though each year the French ambassador organizes a Mass for France in the chapel of Saint Petronilla in Saint Peter’s Basilica. Moreover, every President of the Republic visiting Rome is bound by tradition to make the gesture of coming there to pray in recollection.

The photograph that adorns the cover of the current issue of Magnificat is by Robert Hupka (1919–2001). At the World’s Fair in New York in 1964, he photographed the Pietà by Michelangelo from every possible angle, in different lighting, thousands of times. “And so,” he confided later on, “while I dedicated countless hours to this work, the statue became for me an ever greater mystery of beauty and of faith.” This is because “in order to appreciate a sculpture in the round, in order to see it vibrate in the light, you must circle around it; it is not enough to address it from the front.” 

The more you contemplate Michelangelo’s Pietà,1 the more you mull over the question that was posed already during the sculptor’s lifetime by his friend Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) ¹ concerning the Pietà: “How could an artist’s hand produce so divinely such an admirable work in so little time [one year]? It is miraculous: that a shapeless rock should attain the sort of perfection that nature models only very rarely in the flesh.”

While he was sculpting this absolute masterpiece, the young Michelangelo (twenty-three years old) was still imbued with the intellectual atmosphere that he breathed in Florence, with the renowned humanist Pico della Mirandola as his master, who lyrically describes the creative flame that was to animate the young sculptor: “Rising from perfection to perfection, man reaches the stage where his soul is completely united to his intellect, where man becomes an angel, entirely inflamed with this angelic love, like matter that is seized by the fire and transformed into flame, purified of all the impurities of the earthly body and metamorphosed into a spiritual flame by the power of the soul; ascending to the intelligible heaven, it rests in the arms of the Primeval Father and there finds its happiness.”

Listening to such a master, the young Michelangelo was quickly convinced that the ardent contemplation of human beauty with a pure heart enabled an artist to lift his creation to the level of expressing divinity. Is man not the image of God? Vasari had understood this well, and he said: “The idea of this extraordinary man was to compose everything in terms of the human body and its perfect proportions, in the extraordinary diversity of its attitudes, and furthermore in the whole interplay of the soul’s passionate movements and raptures.”

Beauty becomes divine, as pure as it is beautiful

Pico della Mirandola wanted his young pupil, rising from perfection to perfection, to reach the stage where the artist becomes an angel. Michelangelo did not stop at that stage: desiring to be perfectly conformed to his baptismal name, he strove to become an archangel. Therefore let us contemplate his Pietà. The face of Christ bears no marks of suffering, while that of the Blessed Virgin shows no sadness. But then, how can the artist, through such a non-dramatic and improbably impassive depiction of the worst thing that can befall a mother, touch our minds and our hearts so profoundly that his sculpture reaches our most deeply buried questions about the meaning of our life? How did the artist manage to make out of a pallid, inert, cold block of marble a deafening shout flung in the face of the world, a cry that expresses the whole tragedy of the human condition and of the triumph of Love over death?

Perhaps we will find the answer in this sonnet that Michelangelo—an occasional poet—was pleased to send to a friend:

Nay, prithee tell me, Love, when I behold
My lady, do mine eyes her beauty see
In truth, or dwells that loveliness in me
Which multiplies her grace a thousandfold?

Thou needs must know; for thou with her of old
Comest to stir my soul’s tranquility;
Yet would I not seek one sigh less, or be
By loss of that loved flame more simply cold.

The beauty thou discernest, all is hers;
Yet grows in radiance as it soars on high
Through mortal eyes unto the soul above:

There is it transfigured; for the soul confers
Upon what she holds, her own divinity:
And such transfigured beauty wins thy Love. ²

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1 An excellent painter, a friend of Michelangelo, he is above all the greatest art historian of all time and the inventor of the concept of “Renaissance.”
2 The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti, translated by John Addington Symonds (London: Smith, Elder & Co.; New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1904), Sonnet XXV, “The Transfiguration of Beauty”.

Pierre-Marie Dumont

Pietà (1498–1499, detail), Michelangelo (1475–1564), Saint Peter’s ­Basilica, Vatican. © Photo Robert Hupka, 1975 – Editions Arstella. www.la-pieta.org