For some time now, if you visit St. Peter's Basilica in Rome hoping to admire up close one of Michelangelo's most astonishing works, the Vatican Pietà, you are bound to have your expectations dashed.
Like the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, the Vatican Pietà has fallen victim to its own fame and lies, essentially unreadable, behind a thick, unbreakable glass case, kept at a frustrating distance from the public by an unsightly railing. While the Moses in San Pietro in Vincoli is only guarded by a balustrade, at least allowing farsighted viewers a partial glimpse of the work, the Vatican barricade renders the Pietà little more than a mirage.
The care with which the Pietà is shielded from the eyes of tourists and admirers, while painful, is undoubtedly necessary. On May 21, 1972, a disturbed individual named László Tóth—against whom no modification of the penal code could ever seem too severe—attacked Michelangelo's early masterpiece with a hammer, committing an assault on the entirety of art history, an affront to all of humanity.
It took only a few seconds for the madman to be subdued, but those few moments were enough to inflict dramatic damage on the marble miracle. That feminine face, capturing in stone the highest grace the human mind could conceive, those eyelids seemingly shaped from tissue paper rather than rock—all shattered in an instant by brute ignorance. What invading peoples, Napoleonic armies, and Allied bombings had failed to do over the centuries, a single madman managed in mere seconds.
Following the criminal attack came a miraculous and providential restoration that, against all odds, managed to return Michelangelo's masterpiece to its original splendor. A "dream team" of experts—comprising Vittorio Federici, director of the Scientific Research Office; Ulderico Grispigni, head of the stone restoration lab; Giuseppe Morresi, head of the plastics lab; and Franco Dati, restorer and technician for the Office—worked tirelessly for months to develop a new material that, through its plasticity and mimetic qualities, would allow for the creation of imperceptible prosthetics, restoring the Pietà to its original magnificence.
Drawing on materials used in dental technology, experimenting with mixtures of marble powder from various sources, and testing different adhesives, they also recovered fragments of the sculpture from around the world. Many of these fragments had been pocketed by opportunistic onlookers at the scene of the attack, likely destined to sit alongside their collections of Sardinian beach sand on their mantelpieces. Within just a few months, this team of heroic restorers accomplished the impossible: they flawlessly restored Michelangelo's Pietà, undoing the sins of human folly and returning it to its rightful glory.
But since caution can never be excessive, the Pietà has remained at a safe distance from the public ever since, protected by a thick bulletproof glass panel.
Visitors to Rome these days will know that the city's immense artistic heritage is currently undergoing an invasive restoration in preparation for the upcoming Jubilee of 2025. Not even one of the crown jewels of Rome's artistic patrimony—the Vatican Pietà—has been spared this grand makeover. As a small sign next to Michelangelo's masterpiece informs visitors, the Pietà is currently even more inaccessible than usual, entirely hidden from view due to work on a new protective glass panel, presumably even more impenetrable to bullets—and to sight. In place of the masterpiece, a cast has been put on display; however, the task of informing visitors that what they are seeing is not Michelangelo’s original work but a replica has been relegated to a tiny, marginal label—practically a footnote in size 6 font, a fine-print clause written in invisible ink.
And so the sublime happens: the crowd, armed with a suspension of disbelief, gathers before the 3D-printed plastic and plaster replica to snap selfies, setting aside the skepticism that should prompt them to question why a work of such value, already grievously damaged in the past, would be displayed in such a vulnerable manner.
It is not so much the public’s reaction that should astonish us, but the actions of those responsible at the Vatican. Hanging a photo of Scarlett Johansson in a public place is enough to draw a crowd of selfie-takers; it seems to be the behavioral regression Marshall McLuhan described when discussing humanity's ambition for 15 minutes of fame and it matters little if posting the selfie on one's Instagram profile at most yields 15 minutes of oblivion. But is exhibiting a replica in place of the original a natural course of action? If the Mona Lisa were to undergo restoration (as it rightly should) to remove centuries of grime and combustion residues, would the Louvre replace it with a poster purchased on Amazon?
I like to imagine that the custodians of the Vatican’s artistic heritage and the high-ranking clergy gathered in a clandestine sabbath, donned pointed hoods, and plotted this prank to the sound of Gregorian chants—a prank that makes the hoax of Modigliani’s fake heads look like child’s play.
Jorge da Burgos, the fictional monk from The Name of the Rose, condemned laughter, claiming it "shakes the body, distorts the facial features, and makes man resemble a monkey." But Jorge da Burgos was fictional, and I prefer to envision this secret meeting where cardinals doubled over in laughter, clutching their bellies: "Yes, let’s display a fake!" "But let’s only label it in Sanskrit that it’s fake!" followed by hearty back-slapping.
Yet, as I watch the caravan of tourists—like devilish goats escaped from the Vatican’s clandestine sabbath—crowding around the counterfeit artifact, brandishing glowing screens, I begin to reflect. In Florence’s Baptistery, Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise were replaced long ago with a replica, while the original resides in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. In Rome’s Piazza del Campidoglio, the statue of Marcus Aurelius is a copy, with the original housed in the Capitoline Museums. The entire exterior of Orsanmichele in Florence is lined with replicas, and many Roman sculptures we queue to admire in museums were themselves often copies of Greek or Hellenistic originals. At the Otsuka Museum of Art in Japan, not only do they display replicas of the Mona Lisa and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, but they have also recreated the Scrovegni Chapel and the Sistine Chapel in their entirety.
And then the bewilderment in the face of the fog of thought, which leads us to endure the display of a fake with the same passive inertia with which we endure the spread of fake news, gives way to admiration for Paul Valéry and Walter Benjamin, who, a century ahead of social networks, commenting on the advent of the technical reproducibility of works of art, were able to predict that "just as water, gas, or electricity enter our homes from afar and with minimal effort to meet our needs, so shall we be supplied with images and sequences of sounds, which manifest at a small gesture."
And a shiver runs down the spine, while Ukraine and Palestine are ablaze, when one considers that Benjamin concluded his famous essay on the technical reproducibility of art by reflecting on the fact that the technical reproducibility of the work of art, with the consequent and immediate mass accessibility of art, could have two alternative effects: it could, on one hand, democratize art and promote critical awareness, but it could also be bent to the interests of power to manipulate and glorify war. It seems to me, however, that the technical reproducibility of the work of art, instead of expressing itself in the two antagonistic effects foreseen by Benjamin, has manifested in two concurrent effects: the consumerist commodification of art, far from democratizing access to art, has instead created a pagan iconological cult, which, by granting everyone their 15 minutes of oblivion, serves as an exceptional weapon of mass distraction—useful, among other things, even as the planet slides into a new world conflict.