Pinacoteca Art Gallery
Room XVII 17th Century
Models for St. Peter's Chair
Vatican City
Rome Italy
2016

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, (Naples 1598 - Rome 1680)
Models for St Peter's Chair
Clay and straw on a framework of iron and cane


Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Models for St Peter's Chair
Room 17 of the Pinacoteca contains the preparatory models made of clay mixed with straw on a framework of iron and cane for the bronze figures of St Peter's Chair. They are works of great documentary and artistic interest both because of the high quality of the models that testifies as to the intervention of Bernini, and because of the fact that the forms for fusion were drawn from them. The models for the Chair include the heads of St Athanasius and St John Chrysostom as well as the figures of angels. The mighty monument in marble, stucco and gilded bronze that decorates the area of the apse of St Peter's Basilica was constructed by Bernini and his assistants in the years 1658-1666 during the pontificate of Alexander VII (pontiff from 1655 to 1667). Its creation was a result of the decision to transfer the much venerated relic of the wooden chair on which, according to medieval tradition, St Peter used to sit to instruct the Christians (actually it is the throne that the emperor Charles the Bald gave to Pope John VII in 875) from the Baptismal Chapel to the apse of the Basilica. The great bronze throne, in which the wooden chair is preserved, is silhouetted against the clouds, surrounded by angels and by four large figures of the Doctors of the Church (St Ambrose, St Augustine, St Athanasius and St John Chrystostom).


Pinacoteca
The new Vatican Pinacoteca (Art Gallery) was inaugurated on 27 October 1932 in the building especially constructed by the architect Luca Beltrami for Pius XI. It was built in the nineteenth century Square Garden, isolated and completely surrounded by avenues, in a place considered suitable for assuring the best lighting conditions for both the correct preservation of the works and their optimum aesthetic enhancement. Thus the age-old question of the exhibition of the paintings, which were constantly moved around the Apostolic Palaces due to the lack of a setting that matched their importance, was solved. A first collection of only 118 precious paintings was created by Pope Pius VI around 1790. It was of short duration due to the fact that, following the Treaty of Tolentino (1797) some of the greatest masterpieces were transferred to Paris. The idea of an art gallery, understood in the modern sense as an exhibition open to the public, was only born in 1817 after the fall of Napoleon and the consequent return to the Church State of a large part of the works belonging to it, according to the directions of the Congress of Vienna. The collection continued to grow over the years through donations and purchases until it reached the current nucleus of 460 paintings, distributed among the eighteen rooms on the basis of chronology and school, from the so-called Primitives (12th - 13th century) to the 19th century. The collection contains some masterpieces of the greatest artists of the history of Italian painting, from Giotto to Fra Angelico, from Melozzo da Forlì to Perugino and to Raphael, from Leonardo to Tiziano, to Veronese, to Caravaggio and to Crespi.