Sculpture: Doors of Death

“My good son Giacomo, you must promise me to finish the doors of St. Peter’s as soon as possible.” Each time Pope John XXIII posed for a bust during the summer of 1961, he urged Italian Sculptor Giacomo Manzù to get on with a Vatican commission for new bronze doors for the left-hand side of St. Peter’s façade. Manzù, who comes from Bergamo, Pope John’s birthplace, listened and obeyed. Last month workmen hoisted the ten-ton bronze portals into place.

“Inspiration Flowed.” Rome was not built in a day, and neither were Manzù’s doors. In 1947, the sculptor entered an international competition for new portals to replace makeshift oak ones that were considered temporary for 500 years. He won out over 76 other artists. But once he had won, Manzù admitted, the commission bored him. He cast, and then rejected, a scale model of the doors in 1954, eventually discarded more than 300 sketches for the project.

After the Pope’s gentle urging, “a miracle happened,” says Manzù. “Everything suddenly seemed clear, and inspiration for the doors flowed into my mind and consciousness.” Working with Monsignor Giuseppe de Luca, an old friend and a priest-publisher from Rome, Manzù finished the design in 1962. The work was then cast by two Milan foundries, using a new bronze formula created by Montecatini chemical laboratories near Milan.

Each bronze panel, rough-edged and scratchy like parchment sketches, contains a different intimation of mortality. At the top (see opposite) two large panels picture the crucifixion of Christ and the death of the Virgin Mary, her body supported by two angels before its assumption into heaven. Below (see overleaf), Manzù evokes scenes of death from the sacred history of the church—Abel clubbed by his brother Cain, St. Joseph waiting calmly for the ebbing of life, the first Christian martyr St. Stephen being stoned by a Jerusalem mob, Gregory VII dying on his papal throne. The agony of modern death is shown as well: a Bergamo partisan hanged upside down by the Fascists, Pope John praying in the Vatican Palace before his passion, the body of a mother watched by her weeping child, or an incontrollably tumbling human figure dying in space.

Vatican Objections. In the deft sweep of his lines and the religious themes that dominate his work, Manzù is unmistakably an heir of Renaissance tradition. Yet his sculpture has not always pleased a church that takes pride in the Michelangelo who painted St. Peter’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. In 1947 the Holy Office denounced as “obscene” a Manzù crucifixion scene that depicted a totally naked Christ. Last year, after viewing a plaster cast of the doors, Vatican representatives objected to four of the panels as too profane: Cain and Abel, death by hanging, death of a mother, death in space. Manzù, who is not a practicing Roman Catholic, staged a studio sit-in, finally got his own way by threatening not to finish the doors at all.

The St. Peter’s doors are not, to Manzù’s eye, his best work technically. Yet they have a personal value to him that surmounts their artistic worth. “These doors are the most important work for me as a human being,” he says, “because they are dedicated to Pope John and to my friend De Luca, without whom I probably would never have finished this task.”