Book review: “The Vatican: All the Paintings — The Complete Collection of Old Masters Plus More than 300 Sculptures, Maps, Tapestries, and Other Artifacts” by Anja Grebe

The fresco called The Aldobrandini Wedding is eight feet long and three feet high, and it was created by a Roman artist two thousand years ago, early in the first century.

In The Vatican: All the Paintings — The Complete Collection of Old Masters Plus More than 300 Sculptures, Maps, Tapestries, and Other Artifacts, Anja Grebe notes that the work was rediscovered in 1601 to immediate and great acclaim, admired by painters Peter Paul Rubens and Nicholas Poussin, architect Giuseppe Pannini and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It came into the Vatican collections in 1818.

The painting depicts a veiled, timid bride being reassured by the goddess Venus while the god of marriage, a bare-chested youth with a crown of leaves, looks on. “The magic of this fresco, painted with extreme sensitivity, is enhanced by the three Muses in the right half of the picture, who provide musical accompaniment to the scene,” writes Grebe.

Grebe, one of the authors of The Louvre: All the Paintings, is a teacher of art history at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. Her text was translated into English by Richard Elliot.

While comprehensive in its way, Vatican book isn’t quite as complete as its title suggests. The book includes the 661 paintings that are on display in the permanent painting collection, but, of course, as an art institution, the Vatican would have a great number of other paintings in storage. Also included in the book are 315 sculptures and other artworks, many of which are by ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman sculptors, much older than The Aldobrandini Wedding.

 

A wedding and a royal dandy

That first-century painting is striking because it is so long and so beautiful and so different from much of the rest of the paintings in the Vatican collections. Easily ninety percent or more of the paintings in Grebe’s 525-page book illustrate scenes from the Bible, particularly the New Testament, or portray the early years of the Catholic Church or other religious subjects.

Another painting that is distinctive in this way and that is likely to surprise the reader when it shows up a quarter of the way through Grebe’s book after pages and pages of Madonnas, angels, saints and crucifixions is Thomas Lawrence’s 1816 portrait of King George IV of England.

Like the wedding fresco, this portrait is very large, nine and a half feet by nearly seven feet. It also shows an eminently secular and worldly George with his dandyish stance and flowing locks and “ceremonial garb of shimmering silver” as well as a “blue velvet mantle, star and chain and blue knee strap.”

 

The painting was created when George was still the Prince Regent, and Grebe notes that Lawrence “idealized the physical appearance of the 50-year-old prince, hiding his heavy figure beneath sumptuous regalia.”

 

A dying pope

A much different portrait in the Vatican collections features Pope Clement IX, painted in 1669 by Carlo Maratta.

Elected to the papacy on June 26, 1667, Clement was a “much-loved pope” who, when he was sitting for Maratta’s painting in 1669, “had already fallen ill” and would die at the end of the year

This sensitive character study of an art-loving pope considered to be particularly gentle is a kind of a snapshot taken as Clement interrupts his reading to fix the viewer with his attentive gaze.

 

Words for the viewer to read

A much smaller image — about 1.7 feet by 1.3 feet — is The Resurrection of Lazarus, a predella panel, painted about three centuries earlier, by the Sienese artist Luca di Tomme.

Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha were good friends of Jesus, and, when Lazarus died and the sisters wept, Jesus went to the tomb and called the man back to life, saying, “Lazarus, come forth!”

This phrase was presumably once inscribed on the [now illegible] ribbon that links Christ’s lips to Lazarus’s mouth, which can also be seen as a symbol of the breath of life.

This ribbon of words on the surface of the painting is reminiscent of the words of the Archangel Gabriel in the Annunciation by Simone Martini and his brother-in-law Lippo Menni.

In that work, completed in 1333 for an altar at the Cathedral of Siena, the heavenly messenger is saying in words the viewer can see: Ave gratia plena dominus tecum (Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee). The work is now in the Uffizi in Florence.

 

 

The suffering Christ

While the Annunciation tells the story of the start of Jesus’s life, Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Pieta focuses on the end, showing Jesus as the Man of Sorrows, bracketed by his weeping mother and St. John.

The panel is roughly two-and-a-half feet by one-and-a-half, and Grebe writes:

The aim…was to elicit the viewer’s compassion for the suffering Christ…Christ’s maltreated body bears all the signs of the Passion: the crown of thorns on his bleeding head, the bloody, swollen weals from his scourging, the gaping wound in his side and the stigmata from the crucifixion nails.

 

The shepherd and the giant

The Vatican: All the Paintings is filled with great works of art by great artists, such as Leonard da Vinci, Raphael, Veronese, Titian, Rubens, Caravaggio and Fra Filippo Lippi from the Renaissance as well as more modern painters and sculptors such as Auguste Rodin and Paul Gauguin.

The book features a lavish display of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling and Last Judgment Wall, covering 46 pages with more than 100 images.  One of the most striking is in a corner pendentive of the ceiling depicting the young shepherd David — sword arm raised, the other arm holding Goliath’s hair in a tight grip — about to decapitate the Philistine giant.

Grebe notes that Michelangelo has constructed the scene from an unusual angle:

Seen from the ground, Goliath seems almost to be tumbling head first onto the viewer, while David, sitting on the victim’s back, raises the sword of the defeated giant in order to administer the final blow.  The slingshot lying in the foreground is the weapon with which the young David brought down the mighty, armor-wearing Goliath, who now rears up beneath his slayer with his last ounce of strength.

 

Astonishment

With 525 pages and nearly 1,000 images, The Vatican: All the Paintings is a book to savor. Full-page and double-page displays are offered for 180 of the most important works.

This, however, means that most of the other images are crowded several to a page. The reproduction is clear enough and sharp enough for the reader to encounter these smaller images and, yet, often enticing enough to wish for a larger display. Alas, the only way for each to have a full page would be in a volume of more than a thousand pages.

One fairly small painting that gets the full-page treatment is Gentile da Fabriano’s small panel St. Nicholas Appeases the Tempest of the Sea, part of the Quaratesi Polyptch.

The panel, one-and-a-quarter by two-feet, is charming with its flying saint rescuing a storm-tossed ship. Grebe praises Gentile’s “extremely vibrant and realistic manner” in portraying the miracle by St. Nicholas of Bari, the patron saint of sailors.

Gentile depicts the ship as a typical merchantman of the day being tossed about in the wildly foaming sea with a torn mainsail and listing heavily. The sailors are agitatedly trying to throw some of the precious cargo overboard while one of them grapples with the ropes in an attempt to stabilize the mast.

Grebe adds that “one rather magical touch is the mermaid swimming in the foreground who looks on with astonishment as the miracle unfolds.”

Like every other great museum, like every other work of art, the Vatican is a miracle of the yearning and strength of the human spirit to grasp and understand, however imperfectly, the world in which we live and the lives which we lead.

Astonishment is an apt response.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

12.26.25