Vatican: Chapel of Pope Nicholas

 

Although he disliked the pomp and splendor of the Vatican, Edward Hutton loved the chapel of Pope Nicholas V with its frescoes by Far Angelico. ***

Amid all the dying pomp of the Vatican, the Oratory of Nicholas V stands like a little country chapel, as simple as that, and gay as it were with the wildflowers of Tuscany. Of all the sanctuaries of the Eternal City, it alone keeps about it something of the mysticism and charm of the early Renaissance—of S. Francis, for instance. After the material splendor of S.  Peter’s, the cold magnificence of the great palace of the Popes, it offers you a marvelous repose, in which it is possible to forget even the papacy and to pray to God. And, indeed, in all the Vatican it alone is a place of perfect happiness full of sweetness and light. One finds there nothing of Roman somberness and solemnity, but, as it were, an intimate silence and joy. And to cross the threshold unexpectedly in the midst of the immense ghostly palace, so full of unreal and material things, is to come suddenly out of a dream into the sanctuary of home…. 196

 

Fra Angelico;

 

It was in 1445 that Pope Eugenius had invited Fra Giovanni da Fiesole to Rome, where he remained till, Eugenius dying in 1447, Nicholas V besought him to decorate the new chapel he was building at the Vatican…. 

 

There on the walls Angelico has painted the life and death of SS. Stephen and Laurence….

 

As one looks at these living and exquisite pictures, the work of an old man of sixty three, one is chiefly struck, I think, by their freshness, as though the influence of Rome had revealed to a mind, enclosed till then by a country cloister among the wildflowers, the realities of the world, of life, that contemporary life which was about to become so splendid. The gentle friar, who has dreamed his life away among the saints and has walked hand in hand with Jesus, as it were, has become, under the influence of the Eternal City, the most perfect and most satisfying of naturalists, not copying life but creating it, out of a profound realization of it.  Some joy always secretly in his heart has led him, suddenly so observant of men, to just this realism, as we might say, which is so new and so charming a feature of his work here in the Vatican. Consider then that woman who in the ministration of S. Stephen, lightly, lightly holds her child’s hand, oblivious of everything but the emotion which the saint’s words have suddenly awakened in her heart: or that blind man, who, when S. Laurence distributes alms, approaches with so uncertain a step, one hand stretched out before him, the other holding firmly, blindly to the friendly staff: It is as though we had really seen these people, so surely has Angelico drawn them from the mere details of life in the Eternal City. How well they must have loved one another, these two, the Pope who was the greatest humanist in Italy…and the artist who had, long and long ago, mistaken earth for heaven in his joy at its perfection, only to find here at last, it might seem, that it was in some sort the only truth he might really apprehend. (201-202)

 

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 Edward Hutton: Rome, fourth edition, 1922.

*** A reader directed me to a virtual tour of the Nicholas chapel.