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The chapel in which the ‘Pietá’ is placed has been sealed with a layer of security glass since 21 May 1972, when a deranged visitor named Laszlo Toth attacked the marble with a hammer. A few yards in front of the glass there is a barrier, and — wishing to take a good long look at the piece, since I am working on a book about Michelangelo — I slowly shuffled sideways through the crowd, gazing at the sculpture the while.
Around me there broke a ceaseless tide of humanity. Some, a minority, simply looked at it, one touching family — from, I think, South America — holding tiny children up to gaze at the distant Madonna with her dead son. Most simply took a photograph, often on their mobile phones. As I stood there, a burly American shouldered his way forward, bent on displacing a small man of East Asian appearance who was busily snapping on his iPhone, and as he did so he assertively barked out, ‘Next!’
He had, I realised, understood precisely what was going on. This mêlée in which we were jammed together had nothing to do with art appreciation. It was a queue to take a photograph. The urgency of the desire to capture the famous object on your camera makes it nearly impossible to contemplate. Every day at the height of the season, thousands of pictures are taken of this object, all largely identical and all bad — since it is impossible to get a good image of a work like this from 20 feet away through glass.
What then happens to them? The world has been filling more and more rapidly with photographs. At home, we have boxes of slides, taken in decades gone by and now never looked at although we’ve still got a projector in the cupboard under the stairs. But of course, since the inception of digital photography the quantity of images made has risen colossally. Even in the 1980s there were limits imposed by the cost of film; now virtual space is crammed with superfluous images. The volume of photographs has now surely overtaken the amount of human attention available to look at them.
That is an odd thought. But stranger still to contemplate is the degree of suffering that the jostling multitude around the ‘Pietá’ had undergone in order to arrive at that point. That day, it was 38°C in Rome at noon. The heat clamped down the moment one stepped out of an air-conditioned interior. To get into St Peter’s these days, rather than simply walk through the door, you have to wait in a maze-like construction in the Piazza outside — in full sun — and pass through airport-type security. It is a process Dante might have described in his Inferno, as a punishment reserved for the idly curious.
But in a way, modern tourists are more like pilgrims than the damned. They share the same focus on a few closely defined sights. I saw a similar torrent of humankind — indeed much greater — at the shrine of the eighth Shia Imam at Mashhad in eastern Iran, all bent on getting to the grill that surrounds his tomb. Once there — a place too sacred for unbelievers to intrude — they cling on to ironwork, which is worn away steadily by their touch so that every few decades it has to be replaced.
There was intense crowding in Renaissance Rome, before the ‘Pietá’ was even carved. At least a hundred people were crushed to death or drowned in the Tiber as a result of a blockage caused by a mule on Ponte Sant’Angelo during the Holy Year of 1450. There was — and is — obligatory discomfort too: the ascent of the Scala Santa at St John Lateran up which the only way to go is on one’s knees. The pilgrim route round Rome — or indeed, any holy place — consists of certain must-visit sites and relics, much like the tourist circuit.
The contemporary tourist-pilgrim must visit Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, ‘Pietà’, and ‘Moses’, just as in France they must form a crocodile round the flower beds of Monet’s garden at Giverny, or in Egypt sweat it out at the Pyramids of Giza. Enjoyment has little to do with it.
Few visitors today — I would guess — approach the ‘Pietá’ in a religious spirit. Laszlo Toth, the vandal, may have been among the last who did so. As he raised his hammer he shouted, ‘I am Jesus Christ risen from the dead.’ Later, in court, he warned that those trying him would themselves be severely treated on Judgment Day — which at least implies a devout, if deranged, cast of mind. Nor is it easy to appreciate the ‘Pietá’ as a work of art. It has moved into a Warholian category of being famous for being famous, and entirely obscured by its fame.
The mystery, perhaps an insoluble one, is what anyone gets out of mass cultural tourism. The appeal of other varieties of popular travel — the beach, the pool, the ski slope — is obvious enough. But what satisfaction can be found in pounding round hot and packed streets, probably following a guide with a little flag, and stopping at certain points to take a photograph of something the appearance of which is completely familiar to almost everybody alive in the first place?
The difference between modern tourists and the visitors to shrines and relics is that religious pilgrims get some spiritual benefit — at its most concrete, so many years less to spend in Purgatory, a step towards salvation. Whereas the 21st-century, postmodern tourist gets nothing but a digital photograph, perhaps to be posted on a social-networking site sometime later. As a reward for the expense, the weariness, the sunburn, the boredom, the hours spent at airports and in coaches, the sore feet, the headaches, it just doesn’t seem enough.
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