Volume 40, Number 4 · February 11, 1993
Popes and Pagans
By Garry Wills
Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture DC, January 6–April 30, 1993
catalog of the exhibition at the Library of Congress, Washington,, edited by Anthony Grafton
Library of Congress, 323 pp., $25.00 (paper)
From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance
by N.G. Wilson
Johns Hopkins University Press, 240 pp., $49.95
Piero della Francesca
by Carlo Bertelli, translated by Edward Farrelly
Yale University Press, 240 pp., $60.00
Visitors to the Vatican know Pope Nicholas V for his eponymous chapel painted in visual Sensurround by Fra Angelico. It seems, to modern taste, the only one of the four frescoed papal apartments, in this part of the palace, where one might reasonably be expected to pray. By Ruskin's standards this is because Angelico was 'pre-Raphaelite'—he antedates the humanist incursion that filled whole walls with classical torsos wrestling in anatomically interesting ways. Forty years after Fra Angelico did the chapel of Nicholas, Pinturicchio placed the fleshy Borgia pope (Alexander VI) in scenes of classical pomp. Twenty years later Raphael painted a naked Arnold Schwarzenegger climbing a barrier in his Stanza dell'Incendio. Twenty-five years later Michelangelo created a shower of nude sinners falling into hell—in Ruskin's eyes, 'heaps of dark bodies curled and convulsed in space, and fall as of a crowd from a scaffolding, in writhed concretions of muscular pain.'[1] A fall indeed from the glowing purity of the Nicholas V chapel.
Review, 3054 words
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