Basilica di San Pietro in Vincoli: Michelangelo’s Extraordinary Masterpiece of Renaissance Art

Here’s the latest in an ongoing series of photographs from a 21-day, three country, five city winter vacation to Europe with my ladyfriend Serena. In this post we pay a visit to the Basilica di San Pietro in Vincoli, one of the oldest churches in Rome, containing one of the most important works by Michelangelo, the tomb of Pope Julius II: “Moses”.

In my last post, we paid a visit to the Roman Colosseum (and honored one of my favorite films in the process). As we were figuring out how to get back on the main street to grab an Uber (it’s a bit tricky with all the security), we stumbled upon a nearby church (about a 10 minute walk from the Colosseum). The exterior looked pretty plain and there were no large crowds gathered outside it either so we decided to pop in for a quick look. What we stumbled upon was the Basilica di San Pietro in Vincoli (Saint Peter in Chains) – and what a fortuitous stumble it was!
 

 

Basilica di San Pietro in Vincoli

The Basilica di San Pietro in Vincoli is a Catholic place of worship in the historic center of Rome, located in the charming “West Village-y” Monti district. The church is known above all for hosting the tomb of Julius II, adorned by a massive marble statue by some guy named Michelangelo Buonarroti (more on this later!)
 

The church was founded in the 5th century(!) but the Basilica di San Pietro in Vincoli is different from other churches in the city, primarily due to the simplicity of its decorative elements. The restorations commissioned by Julius II at the beginning of the 16th century, which affected the facade and the porch, gave the church its current appearance. And like so many of Rome’s attractions, it’s got quite a story behind it.
 

According to tradition, Aelia Eudocia, a Byzantine empress, during a trip to Palestine in 432, received as a gift from Juvenal, Patriarch of Jerusalem, the chains that had bound Saint Peter during his imprisonment in Jerusalem (where he was miraculously freed by an angel), by order of Herod Agrippa.
 

She sent them to her daughter, Licinia Eudocia, who wanted to donate them to Pope Leo the Great, who already possessed the ones used in the Mamertine Prison (where the Apostle Paul was imprisoned before his martyrdom). When Licinia Eudoxia showed Peter’s chains to Pope Leo I, they miraculously merged into one. The church was built to celebrate and remember this miracle and to house this precious relic.
 

The Chains of the Apostle Peter

The apse is from the original fifth-century basilica and it was frescoed by Jacopo Coppi (1523-1591)
 

“The Immaculate Madonna” by Giovanni Paolo Lolmo (c. 1550–1593)
 

The basilica’s pipe organ , built between 1686 and 1687 by Giacomo Alari and enlarged in 1884 by Attilio Priori. Further modifications were made in 1924 by Paolo Quaresima and between 2012 and 2014, the instrument was restored by Michel Formentelli with the reinstatement of its nineteenth-century features.
 

Michelangelo’s “Moses”

The Basilica, however, is mostly famous because, since 1545, it houses one of the masterpieces of Renaissance art: Michelangelo Buonarroti’s “Moses”, a colossal 8-foot tall statue, sculpted between 1513-1515 (and retouched in 1542), to adorn the funeral monument of Pope Julius II, commissioned by the Pope himself upon Michelangelo’s arrival in Rome at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
 
It wasn’t all that unusual for rulers of that era to commission the creation of their own tombs while they were alive – as long as they had the cash. And as we all know by now, due to his extraordinary talent, Michelangelo was in high demand and was one of the wealthiest (and most envied) artists of the Renaissance.
 

The tomb was to have been a three-story freestanding monument and may have included as many as forty-seven large figures carved of marble (Michelangelo had one-hundred tons of marble shipped back to Rome from the Carrara quarries for the project!), but Michelangelo’s work was interrupted by other papal commissions, chiefly the frescoes on the Sistine Ceiling (executed from 1508 to 1512) and the death of Julius II in 1513.
 

Other commissions, restructured contracts with the Pope’s heirs, and constant reimagining of the design further slowed progress until almost four decades after signing the first contract with Julius II, the last contract for the tomb monument was drafted. This one requested Michelangelo to only complete three out of the initial forty sculptures supposed to adorn the mausoleum.
 
The final tomb was completed in 1545 and includes Michelangelo’s Moses along with Leah and Rachel (probably completed by Michelangelo’s assistants) on the lower level, and several other sculptures (definitely not by Michelangelo) on the upper level. In the final design, the figure of Moses became the primary element because, as the artist wrote to his biographer Ascanio Condivi, “this statue alone is sufficient to honor the burial of Pope Julius.”
 
FUN FACT: Strangely enough, Pope Julius II is buried elsewhere, specifically in St. Peter’s Basilica under a simple tombstone. His magnificent tomb is presently unoccupied!
 

According to many critics, this was one of Michelangelo’s favorite works as he considered it extremely realistic. Chronicles narrate that the artist, once the work was finished, struck the right knee commanding, “now speak!” (there is a scar on the knee thought to be the mark of Michelangelo’s hammer). However, Michelangelo himself did not hesitate to refer to this project as the “Tragedy of the Tomb”, a true ordeal which until the last days of his life was a source of torment and remorse.
 
Italian Renaissance painter Giorgio Vasari wrote in the “Life of Michelangelo”: “Michelangelo finished the Moses in marble, a statue of five braccia, unequaled by any modern or ancient work”. What makes this figure special is not only its physical accuracy, but the psychological depth that emanates from Moses’ face. His expression mixes anger, pain, reflection and restraint(*). Sigmund Freud spent three weeks in 1913 trying to figure out the sculpture’s emotional effect. Michelangelo’s Moses is one of the most striking works of art of the Italian Renaissance. And we just stumbled upon it! That’s Rome.
 

“The Lamentation over the Dead Christ” attributed to Cristoforo Roncalli (c. 1552/1553–1626), known as il Pomarancio
 

“Saint Margaret of Antioch” (1644) by the Italian painter Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1591 – 1666), known as Guercino
 

The tomb of Cardinal Cinzio Passeri Aldobrandini (who died in Rome in 1610) features a (badass!) winged skeleton and was erected between 1705 and 1707, nearly a century after the cardinal’s death. It was designed by architect Carlo Francesco Bizzaccheri and French sculptor Pierre Legros the Younger.
 

I’ve already requested a similar design for my tombstone…
 

The large ceiling fresco “The Miracle of Peter’s Chains” was painted by Italian artist Giovanni Battista Parodi in 1706.
 

This wraps up another post from our only (alas!) three days in Rome.
Next up is the Vatican Museums (and you don’t want to miss that!)
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