Suffering for art

We found that the line for the Vatican Museum was much shorter at 1:30 than it had been in the morning. We figured we had time for some gelato, which I collected before moving as quickly as I could with it streaming down my hands in the intense heat all the way to the front of the line where I found L waiting for me, sending others ahead. We ate our nearly melted gelato quickly and moved into the museum as I tried to clean the sticky mess off my hands as best I could.

The museum itself is an interesting mix of modern and ancient, and after a brief visit to a souvenir shop we entered the older section in a mass of sweaty humanity seeking one of Michelangelo’s masterpieces, the Sistine Chapel.

There is a vast amount of art from various periods to see on the way, but the conditions inside the museum were so unpleasant that it was difficult to appreciate any of it. I stopped only a few times to take pictures of things when there was a brief break from the close, clammy intensity of being crammed into a narrow corridor in 100 degree heat with a thousand unfamiliar people from all around the world.

It was hot, smelly, sweaty and terrible in there, and it seemed to go on forever as we followed the signs to the Sistine Chapel. Each corner we turned or room we exited led to yet another hallway and another sign encouraging us onward and prolonging our discomfort. The time data on my photos confirms that it took nearly an hour to reach the chapel, an hour of this miserable claustrophobic contact with equally miserable strangers as like sheep we moved clumsily from one room to the next. The conditions were terrible, but what made the situation worse was that the whole time we were passing things I wanted to stop to look at, yet the idea of staying even a moment longer than absolutely necessary in this endless hallway of misery made that unthinkable. I took only a fraction of the photos I would otherwise have done.



Finally, FINALLY, we arrived at the Sistine Chapel. My poor, miserable wife could stand it no longer, even though we had reached the goal, and headed straight for the exit. I had waited years to stand in that room, so I forgot my physical sorrows once I arrived and tried to find a place with at least some elbowroom from which to observe the ceiling.

As with the piazza, it was amazing to stand below such a famous thing as the chapel’s ceiling. I thought again about Michelangelo on his back on that high scaffold, painting in his sketches of the various bible stories, Pope Julius II bearing a strange resemblance to Rex Harrison and shouting “When will you make an end!?!” Standing below it you understand why it has earned so much attention over the centuries. It’s simply amazing to behold.

Many people were ignoring the posted signs forbidding photography, so I took a single, non-flash image of the ceiling:



I then followed L’s path and we raced to reach the outdoors again, thinking about how wonderful the experience might have been under other, more human conditions.