Saturday, April 25, 1998

Vatican's mosaic for the millennium

By JOHN HOOPER / The Guardian

VATICAN CITY -- Every so often a truck shudders to a halt at the gates of the Vatican, spilling powdery dust on the unsullied black uniforms of the Swiss Guards. After a quick inspection, it trundles up the cobbled street which leads to the pope's palace.

The truck's periodic arrival is one of the few outward signs of what could turn out to be John Paul II's most enduring contribution to the millennium celebrations. It is laden with hundreds of thousands of tiny cut stones -- the raw material for a project that has earned comparison with Michelangelo's decoration of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

For the past two years a Russian mosaicist has been working in virtual secrecy in the Vatican to create one of the century's most ambitious works of art. By the time it's finished, for inauguration in 2000, the Redemptoris Mater chapel will be adorned with up to 100 million mosaic pieces.

Photographs published recently by the magazine Oggi show that the ceiling and one wall of a sizable hall have already been decorated. The chapel is in the most sensitive part of the Vatican, the Apostolic Palace, which houses not only the pope's private apartments but also the offices of his chief minister, the secretary of state.

It is therefore by no means clear whether it will be open to the public. Some of the Vatican's finest works of art, including murals by Raphael and his pupils, are hidden from view.

The Redemptoris Mater chapel combines several of the pope favorite themes. Dedicated to the Virgin Mary, to whom he is especially devoted, it takes its name from an encyclical he published in 1987.

It also reflects his wish to reunite Eastern and Western Europe and heal the breach between Rome and Orthodox Christianity. The artist, Aleksandr Kornoukhov, is an Orthodox Christian and his work is uncompromisingly Eastern in style.

Kornoukhov, 50, said he had been recommended to the pope by Russian poet Olga Sedakova. "It was she who took my first sketches to Rome to put them before the Holy Father," he told Oggi.

His mother was also a mosaicist, though her best-known works are of a rather different kind: she was responsible for many of the depictions of triumphant socialist toil in the Moscow subway.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)