The walk down the Corso has indeed taken us a long way from our starting-point, the Church of Sta. Maria in Via Lata, where over the now subterranean chapel in which the Doctor of the Gentiles dictated to St. Luke the Acts of the Apostles, the prelates called the “Auditors of the Rota” with the “Master of the Sacred Palace” (the Vatican) celebrated the fourth day of the Octave of the Feast of the Apostles. On the fifth day, in pursuance of the design by which each department of the hierarchy should in its turn honour the Princes of the Faith, the Pope said Mass at the Church of St. Peter of the Chains, assisted by the ecclesiastical body known as the Clerks of the Chamber. “San Pietro in Vincoli” stands on a rather lonely part of the Esquiline, the highest of the Seven Hills. The great poet of the Tenth Century, Adam of St. Victor, the author of some of our most beautiful hymns, compares the Apostles to the Hills, because the rising sun strikes them first and then reaches the regions below. On the spot where now stands the Church of St. Peter’s Chains there was originally, according to the most ancient authorities, St. Jerome, the Venerable Bede, and others, a sanctuary dedicated by St. Peter himself on the first of August, in order to consecrate to God the month which the Romans had named after Augustus Cæsar, and which they devoted to his worship. Of the precious chains with which the sanctuary was destined to be enriched, those which had fallen from St. Peter’s limbs in Herod’s prison were still treasured by the Christians in Jerusalem; the others, in which he was to be led out to martyrdom, were perhaps not yet forged, for he was still a free man when he came to consecrate the Church on the Hill that looks to the east, and to fix August the first as a day of special reparation to the Almighty for the idolatry which that month saw the Romans lavish on a dead mortal.
St. Peter’s chapel was still standing and attracted many pilgrims when, some four hundred years after its erection, it was enclosed and incorporated in the large Church we now know, called, from her who built it, the Eudoxian Basilica. The name brings before us two Christian Empresses, a mother and daughter, the elder the wife of Theodosius II, Emperor of the East; the younger married to Valentinian III, Emperor of the West. The elder Eudoxia[13] had made a vow to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and when she visited the Holy City, the faithful there presented to her the Chains of St. Peter, which she received with transports of gratitude, holding them more precious than the rarest jewels. Then, having venerated them with great devotion, she sent them as a gift to her beloved daughter Eudoxia, the wife of the Emperor of the West. The young Empress was in Rome at the time, and she at once took the chains to the Pontiff, St. Leo the Great, and he, to her joy and surprise, told her that in return for her piety he would show her the Chains with which St. Peter had been loaded in Rome. Apparently the Empress did not know that they had been preserved and venerated there ever since the beginning of the Second Century. It was some forty years after the martyrdom of St. Peter that the reigning Pope, St. Alexander, was made a captive, and placed under the charge of the Tribune Quirinus, the governor of the Roman prisons. Quirinus had a young daughter named Balbina, who was miraculously cured of a great sickness by touching the chains of St. Alexander. As she knelt in the transports of her joy, she could not cease from kissing and weeping over the blessed chains, and Alexander said to her: “Kiss not my chains, but rather go and find those of the Blessed Peter and kiss them!”
Balbina hastened to obey. The chains with which Nero bound St. Peter had been devoutly preserved by the Christians, and she had no trouble in finding them. With the Pope’s consent she gave them into the keeping of Theodora, the sister of St. Hermes, the Roman magistrate who had been martyred under Trajan a few years earlier. Theodora seems to have deposited them in St. Peter’s own little Church on the Esquiline, and we can infer that it was there that the wonderful scene described in the Roman Breviary took place more than four hundred years later. How one wishes one could have seen the fair young Empress in her straight Byzantine robe, stiff with gold and gleaming with jewels, kneeling with clasped hands, her eyes wide with wonder, in the half light of the old chapel, while St. Leo, not too absorbed in devotion to be keenly interested in his examination, as he was in everything that seemed worthy of attention at all—stood where the sun rays fell through one dim window, and, the chain from Jerusalem in one hand and the Roman one in the other, held them close together to compare and judge of them. As he did so, they touched—and then the marvel happened. Link sprang to meet link, ring welded into ring, and while the Pontiff gazed mute and awestruck, that which he held had become one chain without scar or flaw to show the point of union—the Chain still guarded, still venerated on the very spot where the portent occurred.
Eudoxia built a noble Church as a shrine for the relic; this Church was restored and added to as the ages passed on, and exactly one thousand years after Eudoxia’s time, in 1477, Sixtus IV and his nephew, Giuliano della Rovere, caused a splendid casket with bronze doors to be made and placed under the High Altar to receive St. Peter’s Chains. There they now lie, and on the 1st of August, every year, there is high festival in San Pietro in Vincoli; the walls are hung from top to bottom with crimson brocade, the pavement is strewn all the way from the door to the High Altar with freshly gathered box sprigs, and their fresh, clean fragrance mingles with the perfume of incense and the peculiar sweetness that pure wax candles give out when lighted in great numbers close together. There is High Mass with solemn music and the celebrant and his assistant wear their richest vestments. The Church is crowded with worshippers and wreathed in flowers, and when the two Chains which became one in the hands of St. Leo are shown to the faithful, the sight seems to bridge the centuries for us, and fills our hearts with love and gratitude to God for giving us our first great Pastor, who bore them so rejoicingly for his and our Master’s sake.
On the sixth day of the Octave the Pontiff said Mass in the Mamertine Prison, where the two Apostles passed the last days of their life on earth—the “Voters of the Chamber” assisting at the function. On the seventh, the chosen sanctuary was that of S. Pietro in Montorio, the spot on the Janiculum Hill where St. Peter suffered martyrdom. Its terrace porch, high on the side of the slope, is the one spot I know of from which all Rome can be seen, spread out like a mantle of jewels on either side of its yellow river and raising its classic hills in a wide semicircle against the shifting red and gold of the Campagna, the blue of the serrated Sabines to the east and the soft green outlines of the Alban Mountains to the south. The vast perfection of the scene is almost more than sight can suffer; the beauty becomes a menace in some strange way; it is as if man had challenged the Creator to a contest of production. Exquisite as is the distant landscape, more lovely still is that huge city with its hundred domes tossed up like opals to the sun, its proud honey-coloured palaces raising tier after tier of fretted marble in noble and perfect outlines, its mediæval towers, windowless, huge, indestructible memorials of long past strife and carnage, standing like half-drowned breakwaters frowning on the tide of ever growing life and splendour that they have been powerless to arrest; the Coliseum crouches like a sulky monster at the foot of the Esquiline, whence St. Mary Major and St. John Lateran look down on it as the angels might look down on the dead; wherever a convent or villa lies along a ridge, the slender spires of cypresses mark the line, answering to every kiss of the breeze, though the dark velvet of their foliage refuses a single gleam to the sun; add to this the rush and sparkle of Rome’s innumerable fountains, and you have a vision so matchless in beauty and so supreme in associations that it inspires an awe too great for delight.
Yet, splendid as it appears to us, how much more splendid must it have shone, externally, when St. Peter’s dying eyes looked their last on the “Golden City” of Nero, teeming with its two millions of inhabitants; and St. Peter saw what our eyes are too dim to see, the victorious army of his martyred children already crowned in Heaven, the vast field which they had bedewed with their blood to nourish the seed of the Church—the miles of hidden sepulchres whence their bodies are to rise triumphant at the Last Day; and the tears we are told he shed ere he died were surely tears of joy for the glory that was to be Rome’s.
In the courtyard of the monastery attached to the Church of San Pietro in Montorio, the exact spot where his inverted cross was erected is enclosed in a lovely circular chapel surrounded by granite columns, the work of the great Bramante. The hole where the cross stood has never been filled up, but is left open to view, and, if you are one of the faithful, the good monk who shows it will give you a few grains of that consecrated soil to take home with you. The Church itself was built by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and Michelangelo took great interest in it, going to the length of quarrelling bitterly with his friend Vasari about the design for the chapel which they had jointly undertaken to put in for the reigning Pope, Julius III. He desired to have there a fitting sepulchre and memorial for his Cardinal-uncle, Antonio dei Monti, through whom the obscure Tuscan family had risen to power and prominence. The sculptor, seeing with his mind’s eye the statues he intended to place there, vowed that there should be no architectural ornamentation to detract from their effect; Vasari looked upon the statues as mere details of the ornamentation of the whole. So they quarrelled, both about the subordinates chosen by Vasari to carry out the work and about the work itself. Michelangelo won his point, the chapel was left austerely bare; the statues looked cold and lonely in it; and Michelangelo, who would have died rather than subscribe to an artistic falsehood, admitted his error and acknowledged that Vasari had been right.
He left some fine traces of his genius in the paintings now in other chapels of the Church; he supplied Sebastian del Piombo with the design for the “Scourging of Christ,” and Vasari tells us a quaint story about another picture there. It seems that the famous Cardinal San Giorgio had a barber who, in his leisure hours, had learnt to handle the brush and had become a fine artist in tempera, but who could not draw a single correct line. Michelangelo discovered him, encouraged him to persevere, and, wishing to give him a chance, made a very careful cartoon of St. Francis receiving the Stigmata, and told the barber to copy and carry it out in colour. This the humble painter did, very successfully, and his name, Giovanni dei Vecchi, has come down to us, with those of the approved artists of his day.
The incident leaves us with a delightful impression of the great-hearted genius, so patiently and kindly helping on an obscure disciple, and lends much interest to the painting which stands as a memorial of his condescension. There is another souvenir of him in Rome, which calls up a picture equally attractive—that of his wandering into the Farnesina one fine morning to have a chat with his young friend, Raffaelle Sanzio of Urbino, who was employed in decorating the sala of the exquisite little palace of the “Farnesina” with the immortal story of Cupid and Psyche. But the place was deserted. Messer Raffaelle had gone off to get his dinner, and Michelangelo could not have any of the talk he enjoyed so much. Looking round for something on which to write his name and let his friend know that he had tried to see him, his eyes fell on Raffaelle’s palette and brushes, all charged with colour. Michelangelo snatched them up, and, laughing in his beard at the schoolboy joke he was perpetrating, mounted on a step-ladder and dashed in a great strong head on one of the yet empty lunettes. It took him just half an hour, and then he ran away, chuckling at the thought of the young man’s surprise and perplexity when he should return and see what some unknown visitor had done. But Messer Raffaelle was not in the least perplexed. There was but one hand in the world that could have drawn those bold, tempestuous lines. He refused to efface them, and the head is there to this day, a tribute to Michelangelo’s humour and Raphael’s reverence. They call it “Michelangelo’s visiting card.”