Conclave diary

Terry Nguyen on being in Rome for the election of the first American pope.

My neck starts to hurt halfway through the tour, but I can’t stop looking up. I spent the past week constantly craning my neck—in Rome, then Florence, then back in Rome—as if it was a sin to divert my gaze from the heavens. But on my last day in Italy, my neck finally said, Enough. 

The group I am with shuffles into the Hall of Constantine, a room in the Vatican dedicated to the first Christian Roman emperor. Through the static-y microphone attached to my ear, I’m told that Pope Julius II commissioned Raphael to paint scenes from Constantine’s life. Raphael, who could have had the glory of the Sistine Chapel, was instead given four rooms in the Apostolic Palace to fresco. Raphael knew the rooms would be his magnum opus. They are magnificent. 

On the Hall’s ceiling is a less-magnificent fresco, painted by Tommaso Laureti. A broken statue lies defeated before an upright golden cross in the Triumph of Christianity over Paganism. There’s a profanity to its overt iconoclasm, but also a contrived sanctity. “It looks like fan art,” Patrick observes. In a sense, it was—idling somewhere between the sacred and profane. 

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For centuries, papal patronage was one of the few factors that ensured the posterity of an artist’s work. Some popes became prolific patrons, believing that their commissions would serve as lasting artifacts of their papacy. But today, it is the artists who are remembered and celebrated—even those who died destitute and half-forgotten like Botticelli and Caravaggio. The legacies of individual popes, on the other hand, blur into the tapestry of Church history. 

The Pope might be seen as the mouthpiece of God, but it is the artist who creates, who renders mankind in his distinct image. The artist offers proof of life itself. Perhaps this explains the masters’ strained relationships with their pontiffs, why Paul V withheld clemency from Caravaggio, who he’d hired to paint his papal portrait, when the artist had to flee Rome for his crimes. 

The first thing I look for when I enter the Sistine Chapel, where the conclave had convened just five days prior, is Michelangelo’s self-portrait in The Last Judgement, a fresco commissioned by Pope Clement VII. He depicts himself as a carcass, dangling between heaven and hell. “I've already grown a goiter from this torture, / hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy / (or anywhere else where the stagnant water's poison),” Michelangelo wrote of his four years painting the chapel. 

The crowd stands awestruck under the scene of his torture. Some try to snap a photo and are scolded by guards. Years after Michelangelo finished The Last Judgement, the church deemed the work too immodest and Pope Pius IV ordered for the nudes to be covered. Daniele da Volterra was hired to add loincloths to the figures after Michelangelo’s death. I wonder if he was haunted by the image of the master’s flayed flesh. 

Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you have prepared for me.

When the cardinals face The Last Judgement to cast their votes, what do they think of? Does Pope Clement VII ever come to mind or, as I’ve experienced it, is Michelangelo’s vision of heaven and hell so totalizing that it simply obliterates all thought?

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