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Swann Auction Galleries Est. $828,550 - 1,227,850 Aug 18, 2022

Morton Auctions, Monte Athos Est. $119,246 - 169,096 Aug 18, 2022

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Heritage Auctions, Dallas Total Sold Value $1,677,755 Jul 28, 2022

Bonhams Los Angeles Total Sold Value $1,553,754 Jul 28, 2022

Eldred's Auction and Appraisal Services Total Sold Value $731,225 Jul 27, 2022

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Visitors are returning to the eternal city, and the thoughtless tourist herding to checklist attractions is picking up where it left off before the pandemic

When Covid emptied Rome of tourists, the city was left in the hands of the antique ghosts whose deep and ancient fingers gripped the seven hills nesting the omphalos of the world. But this summer, unmasked and carefree civilian hordes invaded the eternal city again. The Roman streets stank of shit, and piss, and sweat in the heat of the hot summer sun, and an endless flow of culture pilgrims passed toward the monuments, lured by the bait of imperium and the great art of centuries of Christian propaganda which tugged them to Baroque Rome. Four and a half centuries ago, the Roman Church committed to colossal investments in art and architecture to sell its brand of Christianity. Art turned this grubby city into a money-spinning gallery advertising God. Art still supports the economy of the city and brings smiles to the faces of church economists. The World Travel & Tourism Council reported that Covid cost Italy €120.6 billion in lost tourist revenue in 2020. But in 2022 the post-pandemic era began – and the Demoskopika Institute has already reported a €26 billion resurgence in the tourist economy.

There are degrees of initiation into art. At the Vatican Museum, tourist apprentices suffered their rite of passage into the credentialled bourgeoisie by voluntarily submitting themselves to the spiraling lines of passive hadjis fed into the art grinder – becoming anonymous members of the grockle-burger mass, their individuality sacrificed for the sake of their initiation, and herded toward hurried consummations with a few masterpieces of the history of the Christian hegemony and many more pictures of narcissist popes. Above the long wave rhythm of rhubarb crescendos and diminuendos and the messy melodies of crowd noise, the reassuring shepherd voices of murmuring guides whispered soft half-truths into the earbuds of their flocks and herded the mass through the museum toward the Sistine Chapel like sheep to ritual slaughter.

Crowds at Raphael 's School of Athens

The papal apartments were so packed with bodies that it was impossible to spend any time looking at the frescoed walls and crowded sculptures without being bumped and pushed. Michelangelo and Raphael’s works were veiled by the forcefields of fame and the anxiety of the mob, visible but invisible, seen but unseen, known but unknowable. In the Sistine Chapel an amplified and aggressive guard repeatedly shouted “SILENCE!” into an absurd microphone, painfully persuaded that although a horde of paid and profane customers were jammed into this hostile house of trade, it was a still and sacred space; “MOVE FORWARD!” he yelled as his uniformed and contemptuous comrades urged more tourists into the crowded hall, crushing them into the chantry; “NO PICTURES!” he cried at tourists taking photos, claiming the art was protected by copyright after the Japanese restoration renewed Michelangelo’s work – it was a weirdly liminal scene of greed and exploitation. Ejected, but transformed, the new bullied bourgeoisie – the processed meat of this factory of art initiation – trotted obediently through the gift shops and cafeterias, where they bought the perfumes of the popes, and the medals, and the magnets, and the merchandise as evidence of their art experience, tokens saved to be cashed socially at home as prestigious holiday checklist credentials of their rank and status.

The theater of consumption continued down in the valley under the solstice shadows of the Vatican hill, in the spectacular marble vaulted sanctuary of the Sant’Agnese in Agone, where a quartet sang a beautiful Laudate Deum while a gray-haired and red-capped priest ritually washed his hands in sanitizing gel, wiped them on white linen, then gloomily dipped the glowing moon-disc of a thin rice-wafer host into a gilded chalice – robed, and golden, and miserable, he stared at the few believers scattered among the ranks of bare wooden chairs gathered to witness the transubstantiation and eat the flesh and blood of their god, while a disinterested audience of massed tourists loomed darkly behind them, holding ubiquitous cellphones high to film this Disney performance of what was once numinous – here it was difficult to know the consumers from the consumed, the sharks from their prey.

Perhaps it is naïve to be shocked by the exploitative relationship between art and money at the Vatican, for this is the home of propaganda.  It was here in Rome in 1622 that Pope Gregory XV instituted the first self-conscious advertising agency, the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith), which printed materials designed specifically for missionary evangelism, forever tying the manipulative arts of persuasion to the church, and to commerce, and to art.

But if the supernatural power of art as a path to the divine was exploited and corrupted by money at the Vatican, where crossing the threshold to meet God was transformed into a secular rite of passage to bourgeois status; and if the liminal drama of the mass was objectified as a free re-enactment of quaint old customs in the Sant’Agnese; that power was made manifest at the Borghese Museum, a jewel of a building set in serene and Edenic parkland like a temple in one of the ethereal landscapes of ten thousand renaissance paintings, set behind the child and the Virgin. In those paintings the pathway into paradise was accessible only by passing through Mary and Jesus, only by accepting them as its guardians, only by accepting the obligations of faith. But when the Borghese family was at the height of its power, long-necked giraffes and big-billed ostriches and shimmering peacocks wandered here in the peaceable kingdom of the garden, where the desired heaven was made possible on earth by absurd wealth. Money made this Eden possible, not faith, and if the presence of God was ever near the heart of Borghese power, it was there through the intercession of the prodigy Bernini, whose miraculous hands made the Rape of Persephone, perhaps the finest sculpture ever shaped from marble.

Bernini, The Rape of Persephone

There is no Christianity here – Persephone’s story is an ancient myth personifying the seasons. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, beautiful Persephone was abducted to the underworld by her uncle, the god Pluto, who surrendered to his desire to have her as his wife, kidnapped her, and carried her away. While she was his prisoner in the underworld, she ate pomegranate seeds, and having eaten the food of the dead she could no longer return to the land of the living, but the supreme deity Zeus allowed her to be queen of the underworld for half of the year, and to return to earth for the other half. Persephone’s time on earth brought the fertile spring and the harvest of summer, while her descent into the underworld caused dying fall and cold winter. The old gods are dead and need such explanations – the contemporary experience of the numinous supremacy of the Rape is born from appreciating the extraordinary skill of man, the extraordinary skill of numinous Bernini, not his subject.

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