By We visited the Vatican the first week
of January so there was only
a short queue for the Sistine Chapel,
and few visitors, once inside, to distract
from possibly Rome’s most famous work of art;
its gaudy magnificence; its lavish
genius; its conspicuous wealth; its
indulgent humanness; its celebration
of beauty, of flesh, and immortality.
Michelangelo, painter, architect,
sculptor and poet, spent months on his back
creating The Last Judgement on the ceiling –
a graphic history of prophesy.
One of the polymath’s sonnets ends:
‘…love makes perfect our friends here on earth
but death makes them more so in heaven’.
We left the Vatican via the Library
with its seventy thousand volumes.
There was an exhibition of illustrated
manuscript versions of Virgil’s works –
possibly the city’s most famous poet –
each much more than a millennium old,
fragments saved during the papacy’s
many epochs of acquisitiveness.
One illustration depicts Dido,
Queen of Carthage, on her funeral pyre.
She had been jilted by Aeneas, who left
to do his god-given duty to found Rome.
She killed herself with her ex-lover’s sword.
The poet has Aeneas – who had carried,
on his back, his own aged father from Troy’s
burning ruins – watch the funeral pyre’s
receding flames as he sailed, almost due north,
across what would become Mare Nostrum.
AeneasAnchisesAncient RomeCarthageDidoMara NostrumMichelangeloSistine ChapelTroyVaticanVirgil
John Williams
February 26, 2023The poem stands in the tradition in which one form of art (a poem) comments on other forms of art (painting and epic poetry) and draws on the fact that the Vatican contains both Christian and pagan iconography. It juxtaposes Michelangelo’s ceiling and its ‘graphic history of prophesy’ with an illustration of Virgil’s story of Dido and his Aeneas, the fall of Troy and the founding of Rome. This Christian/pagan contrast generates the tension which drives the poem, and it’s a pity to find an easy swipe at the ‘acquisitiveness’ of the Papacy, now known to be a repository of learning that otherwise would have been lost. One might suggest that the purpose of such stellar iconography, fragments and manuscripts illustrate aspects of virtue, nobility and human aspiration that serve to uplift rather than dispirit the observer. I ‘Longing and Duty’ might have explored such a theme more deeply, perhaps, rather than leaving us in the sea.
‘…its gaudy magnificence; its lavish
genius; its conspicuous wealth; its
indulgent humanness; its celebration
of beauty, of flesh, and immortality.’
Elise Oliver
March 3, 2023In reply to John Williams’ comment on this poem: Gosh – or something that rhymes with it. Btw: ‘illustrates’.