ROME (AP) – As elsewhere in Europe, museums and art galleries in Italy closed in the spring and again in the fall to limit the spread of COVID-19, making virtual tours the best option for art lovers wanting to see the treasures in the owns institutions such as the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and the Vatican Museums in Rome.
But some outstanding pieces of Italy’s cultural heritage remain on display for personal viewing in the country’s churches, which remained open during the resurgence of the virus in the fall. Some churches have collections of Renaissance art and iconography that any museum would envy.
Residents of Rome – and, in a normal year, tourists – can admire masterpieces by Michelangelo and Caravaggio in the city’s opulent cathedrals and churches.
“Emotions and sensations experienced upon entry are no less than those experienced when entering museums,” says art historian Benedetta Mazzanobile, who provides guided tours of the works of art in Roman churches in French, Spanish and Portuguese.
San Luigi dei Francesi, the French communal church in Rome, has three majestic works by the 16th-century painter Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio. Visitors who deposit a coin to illuminate the church’s Contarelli chapel can enjoy the paintings centered around the life of St. Matthew.
Two other Caravaggio paintings, depicting the Crucifixion of St. Peter and the Conversion of St. Paul on the way to Damascus, can be admired along with “The Assumption of the Virgin” by Annibale Carracci in the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo.
Works by another Renaissance master, Raphael, can be found in several churches in Rome, including Santa Maria della Pace. That’s where the artist painted “Sybils”, a fresco also known as “Sybils receives instruction from angels,” starting around 1514.
The pandemic disrupted plans to mark the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death. In Rome, the largest Raphael exhibition opened in March and closed three days later when the Italian government ordered a nationwide lockdown. The exhibition reopened in June when restrictions were lifted and ran until the end of summer.
A work of art in itself, the Vatican’s St. Peter’s Basilica is full of masterpieces, including Michelango’s “Pieta”, a moving statue of the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Christ.
The Santa Maria della Vittoria Church has a lesser known but powerfully evocative marble sculpture by Baroque architect and sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, “The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.”
That Italian churchgoers can now admire art without having to compete with the usual crowds of tourists is a mixed blessing, Mazzanobile said.
“The pandemic has certainly allowed us to reflect on the hordes of tourists now invading, sometimes in an unworthy manner, the streets and galleries of museums,” she said. “But I certainly believe that, like me, most guides and tour guides are waiting for those hordes.”