The Fisherman's Tomb. John O'Neill
surviving family tombs inadvertently preserved by Constantine under the Vatican disappeared. Because of Constantine’s engineering, they (unlike the tombs on the Appian Way) survived the great invasions of Rome. Unknown to the invaders, they remained wholly intact as they had been in 337 when they were buried beneath the newly constructed basilica. The outside world knew only of a few legends and ancient writings in the Vatican archives about Peter’s grave. The rest of the tombs beneath the basilica were left suspended in time and space.
Outside, the world changed. The capital of the Empire was moved to Constantinople, where it would exist for one thousand years until the Turkish conquest in 1453. Eventually the capital of the Western Empire would move again, this time to Ravenna. Rome moved from the center of the Roman world to its periphery. In the late fourth century, the Roman legions, once the dominant military force of the world, were shattered — first by war between themselves. Then waves of invaders, like wolves sensing the weakness of their prey, brought the Empire in the West to an end. The Visigoths under Alaric shattered the Roman armies while looting Rome. They were followed by the Vandals, whose name survives as a description of their habit of pointless destruction. Because of faith or superstition, these hordes did not destroy the wooded St. Peter’s Basilica itself, although the Vandals certainly stripped and looted it. But with the death of all involved in the construction of the church, the destruction of the great families of Rome, and the eradication of almost all written records relating to St. Peter’s (as well as almost all those who could read them), the waves of destruction passed through Rome and the West leaving the forgotten tombs buried underneath St. Peter’s unknown and untouched.
When literacy and learning began to return to the West, there were no records left to tell the popes or Michelangelo, Raphael, the Medici, or Bernini that a few yards beneath their feet lay one of the greatest surviving storehouses of Roman art and history in the world. Ironically, the tombs hidden below the feet of the famed Renaissance painters and sculptors held early versions, some 1,500 years old, of many of the same themes embraced by Titian, Botticelli, Rubens, and many great painters. Leda met the Swan and beautiful Venus reclined in the dark-filled tombs unknown to the world.
The New Basilica
St. Peter’s Basilica, as constructed, was built of wood and measured over 340 feet in length. It was completed around 337 and became the focal point of Christianity for 1,200 years. In the wooden church, much of the history of the West occurred. It housed events such as the crowning of Charlemagne as Emperor of the West in 800. Numerous kings and emperors were enthroned and buried there. More than two hundred popes over one thousand years were elected and then enthroned within its walls. They ranged from saints and heroes to the Borgia popes indifferent to the spiritual. But the long parade of popes and history did not disturb the ancient tombs underneath the basilica. The tombs continued their long sleep, unknown to the world. Although for most of its life located outside Rome’s walls, defenseless and made of wood, the old basilica, while often looted, was amazingly never burned or destroyed.
Around 1450, it became apparent that the one-thousand-year-old wooden church was beginning to collapse. Popes Nicholas V and Julius II were determined to replace the old St. Peter’s with a new, immense basilica. Old St. Peter’s had survived the Vandals and the Saracens, but it did not survive the grand reconstruction plans. The historic St. Peter’s was almost totally destroyed, mindlessly obliterating wonderful artwork, sculpture, and crypts, many dating back one thousand years.
Among the destroyed works of art were frescoes and mosaics created by Giotto and other masters of the late Middle Ages. Tragically, these works survive now only in ancient accounts and scattered fragments. The tombs of more than one hundred popes were eradicated, along with other burial sites and memorials. In fact, the destruction wrought by the construction vastly exceeded that caused by time and even the waves of looters. Thankfully, the builders did leave intact the old altar and foundations, simply building over them. Beneath it all, the Necropolis continued its thousand-year sleep, remaining unknown and untouched through the construction of the immense new church.
Pope Julius II, the moving force behind the new St. Peter’s, intended to have a vast tomb for himself on the main floor of the new basilica. The tomb was to be constructed by Michelangelo. Although Michelangelo constructed a much reduced model of the vast tomb Julius intended, it was placed in a different church after Julius’s death, and Julius never rested there. Instead, in an illustration of the vagaries of politics, pomp, and power, the immensely powerful Julius was buried without a monument of any kind in the floor of the Vatican. Today he is remembered only by a simple and difficult to locate marble slab.
In 1626, an excavation to install Bernini’s bronze baldacchino50 deeply encroached into the Necropolis.51 The excavation revealed various pagan tombs including a sarcophagus of one Flavius Agricola.52 Flavius, whose image reclined full length with a wine cup on the lid, advised through an inscription:
Mix the wine, drink deep, wreathed in flowers, and do not refuse to pleasure pretty girls. When death comes, earth and fire devour all.53
The priests and workmen, horrified by the discovery of a pagan libertine rather than a saint beneath the basilica’s main altar, immediately dumped portions of the sarcophagus into the Tiber, sealed the site, and kept the inscription secret in the Vatican Library. This was, after all, the notorious era of the “fig leaf campaign,” when nude portions of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment were painted over or covered and fig leaves painted over ancient Roman statues in the Vatican.
Periodic later excavations likewise found pagan graves rather than saints, suggesting the horrifying possibility that the great seat of Christianity rested not on the tomb of saints, but on the graves of pagans. As mentioned earlier, Protestant leaders such as Luther questioned whether Peter had ever come to Rome at all.54 They denounced as frauds the great basilica and the papacy itself, which claimed to be descended from Peter.
In 1939, the long sleep of two millennia was about to end. In February of that year, at his specific request, Pope Pius XI was buried in grottos under the altar of St. Peter’s, alongside Emperor Otto II of Germany, King James III of England,55 Queen Christina of Sweden,56 and many other popes and kings. The Church determined not only to honor his wish to be buried in the grottos, but also to surround the grave with a chapel.
Because the grottos had low ceilings, it was decided to lower the floor to create the chapel. Digging almost immediately uncovered beneath the floor shockingly beautiful, brightly colored, and vivid mortuary murals of cranes, flowers, dolphins, pygmies, and even Venus rising from the sea.57 After first finding the elaborate tomb of a consul’s daughter, the diggers came upon the grave of a young and clearly beloved Christian woman named Aemilia Gorgania.58 She had been a twenty-eight-year-old wife, famous in Rome around A.D. 150 for her beauty and innocence. She was surrounded by Christian inscriptions including one in early Latin reading, “Dormit in pace” (“rests in peace”)59 together with a drawing of a woman drawing water from a well (a familiar early Christian motif for the refreshment of heaven, which also represented the story of the Samaritan woman — Christ’s unlikely first messenger to a Samaritan village). Next to her were the words “sweet souled Gorgania.” In a short time, other astounding discoveries of bejeweled Romans and tombs were made in the Necropolis. The work was halted and Pius XII informed of the discoveries.
Pius XII now confronted a difficult decision — namely, whether to continue to excavate under the foundations, possibly proving once and for all that Peter was not buried there, or to cease the digging as in 1626, treating the excavation as if it never happened and sealing any records in the Vatican Library. Pius XII made the incredibly brave decision to pursue the excavation. Unlike the excavators in 1626, Pius XII chose to pursue the truth. The search for the Apostle had begun, in the dark, early days of World War II. It would not end for nearly seventy-five years.
Chapter Six
Pius’s Gamble
The history of human institutions is a record of ephemeral lives,