On the Feast of All Saints, 1983, I worshipped at Mass in the Sistine Chapel with Pope St. John Paul II on the altar. Msgr. Alfons Stickler, the Austrian-born Vatican Librarian and champion of the Tridentine Mass and of Latin as the language of the Church, was consecrated a bishop at this Mass (St. John Paul made him a cardinal in 1985).
After the Mass I and two friends lingered in the chapel instead of rushing off right away with other guests to a reception in the Vatican Library. Except for workmen stacking chairs we had the place to ourselves. That is, we could take our time looking at Michelangelo’s famous fresco paintings without being trampled by the horde of tourists who jam the chapel once the Vatican opens its doors for the day. We spent about twenty minutes doing so. I have to say I was underwhelmed.
In the first place the ceiling frescoes are exactly that: ceiling frescoes. Used as all of us are to seeing Michelangelo’s work in close-up photographic detail, when you look at the pictures with the naked eye from the floor of the chapel they are scarcely more impressive than what can be seen on the painted ceilings of countless Italian churches and palazzi of the same period. But even the fresco of the Last Judgment on the end wall of the chapel seems, when seen from a few feet, not much more than a series of anatomical studies, especially of the male anatomy.
I also have to say that in November, 1983, the restoration of the ceiling frescoes financed by Japanese television had only recently begun. No more than an area probably six-feet wide had been completed.
The Japanese restoration consisted simply of the painstaking removal of grime accumulated over the centuries in order to reveal Michelangelo’s colors as he had painted them. There was no touch-up, no application of new pigments anywhere. In other words, it was a genuine restoration and I am prepared to believe, based on the reports of others, that if I saw the Sistine Chapel ceiling today I might have a stronger impression than the one I had in 1983, but don’t know that for sure. I haven’t been back since.
Why am I recalling now an experience from more than thirty years ago? Please be patient.
In my novella Young Tony and the Priest I spend some time on my protagonist’s discovery that when they were new the Gothic cathedrals of northern Europe weren’t the great grey hulks we see today. They were painted inside and out, and in bright colors. The discovery leads Tony to realize that when Christendom existed the age was not “dark” as some now call it. It was vivid, and so must have been the lives of the men and women who worshipped within canary-yellow walls when all worship was Catholic, else they would not have painted the walls as they did.
I see nothing vivid or lively about the persons shuffling along the sidewalks of Washington D.C. where I live, their lives apparently circumscribed by the little electronic screen they carry in one hand and at which they stare, vacant-eyed, at every pedestrian crossing as if it will tell them when to walk. These persons inhabit the world, but where have their souls gone? Cyberspace? Where exactly is that? Evidently it is not in the true space into which we look when we turn our eyes toward the heavens. Is it only “virtual” — no more real — than the mere images that play on the electronic screen? If so, how can a soul immersed in it not become lost?
But let’s get back to the subject of restoration. The New York Review of Books blog of December 16 reported the news that an interior I know better than that of the Sistine Chapel is being “restored” — i.e., not merely cleaned like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel but painted. It is that of Notre Dame de Chartres — Chartres Cathedral. The blogger, Martin Filler, who writes frequently on architecture for the NYRB, describes what is being done as a “scandal”. Judging from what he reports and photographs accompanying his blog, I’d say, bearing in mind that we’re talking about sacred precincts, that a more apt description would be desecration.
In one photograph can be seen anachronistic trompe l’oeil yellow faux-marble piers against walls painted a bright white in the cathedral’s apse. The look, Filler writes, is that of “some funeral parlor in Little Italy.”
Apart from the vulgarity of such “restoration,” Filler points out that the colors painted on the cathedral today, whatever they are, won’t be the ones seen by worshippers eight hundred years ago when construction and decoration of the cathedral were completed. That is for the simple reason we don’t know how Medieval painters made their pigments any more than we know how the stained-glass makers of those days got their colors, which have never been equaled.
Some number of readers will know Chartres Cathedral as I do, as persons who have made the annual Pentecost pilgrimage to it from Notre Dame in Paris (I’ve done it three times). Try to imagine with me how the Rose Window, the most famous window in the world, will look when surrounded by light-colored walls instead of the relative darkness in which it is now set and that shows it off. Filler quotes a French art critic who compares the cathedral’s windows where the walls have so far been painted to watching a movie in a theater where the lights are left on.
That brings me to something else. Whatever the modern colors, they are bound to look garish compared to what once was because of a factor that didn’t exist eight hundred years ago: electric lighting.
Persons who were familiar with St. Peter’s in Rome before electric lighting was installed lamented that following generations, like ours, would never see the Baroque splendor of the basilica’s interior as its designers supposed it would always be seen: by candlelight. Doubtless today’s lighting system is much improved over the original one at the turn of the twentieth century, but does anybody want to argue seriously that the technicians who installed it would know more about lighting and its effects than Michelangelo or Bernini?
That is not my main question here. My main question is this: Why would anyone want to see an eight-hundred-year-old Gothic cathedral look like new?
It is his inner life that gives to a person the vibrancy or vitality he will project to the world. We recognize this when we speak of someone being “full of life.” The inner life, the life of the mind and soul, is fed by reading, conversation with others and with God (through prayer) and in contemplation. To contemplate is to think about something, to mull it over. We may contemplate ideas, which we get from reading and conversation, or on things at which we look — art or the beauties of nature. Of course we can also contemplate events, happenings. What we are trying to do, in any case, is to understand, to grasp the significance or meaning of something and to take it in, to make it a part of ourselves — to interiorize it.
The zombies we see with their smartphones don’t do any of this. As a consequence they are not vivacious, not full of life, but dull and uninteresting — even to themselves. However, these persons aren’t real zombies. They are human beings, which is to say they are meant to do more than stare at an electronic screen. Alas, because they don’t read, talk about anything that matters or think, they don’t know what it could be. Instead of intellectual curiosity, they are filled with a fear of missing out on “whatever” and being seen as losers if they don’t constantly monitor the social media. Instead of the energy born of prayerful contact with the Source of life, He in Whom “we live and move and have our being” but is unknown to them, they feel and project spiritual torpor. So, to vivify their lives they seek a more intense experience of what they do know. This could be anything from watching a movie with more sex and violence than the last one they saw to dumping the spouse they have in order to get a new one. It could also take the form of desecration in Chartres.
In sum, painting Chartres Cathedral is not restoration. It is an appalling manifestation of the relentless modern urge to seek the new and novel. When the painting job is done people will gawk at it for a time, but the novelty will then wear off. It will be like the guitar Masses that priests in the 1970s thought would keep folks coming to church on Sunday. The difference is that the fad for guitar Masses ended after a few years but no one will be able to unpaint Chartres Cathedral.
Two footnotes: 1) Church buildings in France are property of the state. The idea to paint the interior of Chartres Cathedral originated in the Historical Monuments Division of the Ministry of Culture. I don’t know, but suppose, that Chartres diocesan officials and cathedral staff may be consulted on some matters as a courtesy, but they are not to be blamed for the “restoration”. Whether or not they like it, they will have to live with it, like everybody else, when the project is completed in 2017.
2) Probably no high-ranking Churchman since Vatican II has been more tradition-minded, or more vocal about it, as was Cardinal Stickler. When Empress Zita, widowed spouse of Bl. Emperor Karl of the House of Austria, died in 1989, His Eminence said Mass for the repose of her soul at a side chapel in St Peter’s. This was fitting since the Cardinal, born in 1910, was once her subject. It was also the first Tridentine Mass said in the basilica since Bl. Pope Paul VI introduced his Mass in 1969, the one now called “ordinary”. Side-chapel Tridentine Masses, usually said by young priests working in the Vatican’s various departments, would become common during the pontificate of Pope Emeritus Benedict, which seems to me a longer time ago, in some respects, than when Cardinal Stickler became a bishop.
