“Rome appears; I greet her as one greets a mother!”

There is one city in the world where, even before you set foot within its walls, it is the city itself that seizes you, enfolds you, and transfigures you. It is a city you will claim to have visited, whereas in truth it is she who will have unveiled to you the treasures of your inner life. As you walk her streets, thinking you are ­discovering her, it is she who will reveal your own soul to you.

Take your place on that hill overlooking Rome where the Romantic painter Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869), a disciple of Friedrich, has set Raphael and Michelangelo.  Side by side with them, in the ­evening light, contemplate the Eternal City. You find ­yourself almost ­granted a vision, at the very spot where Chateaubriand, in the autumn of 1803, stopped, overwhelmed, and wrote, in his Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: “Rome appeared; I greeted her, this queen of the world. I greeted her as one greets a mother. I felt that I was only a traveler, but that my soul had just come home.”

In such a place, in such exalted company, you are no longer a tourist, nor even a contemplative pilgrim. For it is not you who contemplate Rome; it is Rome that searches your soul.

Twilight falls. The dust shimmers with light like the golden ­tesserae in the apses of the major basilicas. The shadows lengthen and sketch anew a majestic world in which the purposes of God are made manifest. Over Rome the light does not go out; it ­recollects itself. It grows more solemn, more interior. At the hour when the day itself is preparing to withdraw into its sanctuary, the sky becomes a vault. The moon is a lamp lit to mark the tabernacle where the daylight will come to rest. At this hour, in Rome, all creation becomes liturgy and sings Compline.

And behold: at the center of the painting, as at the ­center of the world, the dome of Saint Peter’s, in a soft blur of latent gray, rises from the mist of evening. It lifts toward heaven like ­incense of a pleasing fragrance. Raphael and Michelangelo gaze upon it. They behold the work their genius began, which ­others continued, and which the centuries will sanctify—until our own time: on November 18, 2026, Pope Leo XIV will celebrate an ­extraordinary Mass in the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome to mark the four-­hundredth ­anniversary of its solemn consecration.

In communion with Raphael and Michelangelo as they ­contemplate the papal basilica at dusk, Carus seeks, with his brush, to celebrate “the inner conversion, the second birth,” that he himself experienced in Rome. It is this interior experience that his friend Goethe (1749–1832) so eloquently bears witness to with his pen when he writes, in his Italian Journey: “In this city where all ­contradictions are reconciled in beauty, I rediscovered what I had always carried within me without knowing it.”

In this twilight hour, the artist invites us to let ourselves be seized by Rome, the city that reveals to man the depths of his own soul: pagan Rome, ­glorious witness to the Gospel’s preparation; ­apostolic Rome, forever a ­fertile soil, made fruitful by the blood of the martyrs; Christian Rome, splendor of a universal Catholicity, ­living, ­visible, tangible; eternal Rome, divine mystery of unity, where human ­history and the history of ­salvation are wedded.

It is into this very story that Carus invites us to enter. His work is not simply a Romantic view of Rome, with two legendary artists contemplating their own work even before it has been raised from the ground. It is the story of a Christian artist’s soul, the story of a soul that longs to come home and that, in the light of the setting sun, discerns its mother, arms flung wide like Bernini’s colonnade, ready to welcome her child.

Pierre-Marie Dumont

Memories of Rome: Raphael and Michelangelo contemplating Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome (1831), Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869), German Museum of Romanticism, Goethe House, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. © Arthotek / La Collection.