Direct from the Vatican:

...Intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, there is no other center...

...Situated alone, it focused attention and raised imagination - and as I later found out - spoke volumes about ancient culture and modern envy...

...Most entrances and exits are set at slight angles to provide a sense of flow from one part of the exhibit to the next...

...For weeks before the opening, the press detailed how the show TOM O'BRIEN is a free-lance writer who teaches English at the Manhattan School of Music...

...The accent throughout is plural: the collections include sculpture, paintings, and artifacts collected or commissioned (and eventually housed in churches and museums) by popes over sixteen centuries...

...even with crowds, one should be able to view them in an orderly and reasonably moderate way...

...Some masterpieces simply could not be moved, the Sistine Chapel for example, or Raphael frescoes such as The School of Athens or Parnassus...

...The art historian's view might have been forced by the limits on choices from the Vatican...

...The pieces are not presented in a clutter fashion...

...This marriage of culture and commerce has existed for some time, happily reducing corporate taxes...

...The whole episode in the show is an odd - intellectual and unemotional - way to represent the greatest artist that the papacy has ever known...

...Approaching it, one could ponder its significance - who was this Homer, I remember thinking as a child, who Aristotle, and why did Rembrandt so contemplate them...

...There are none of the great statues, e.g...

...and the catalog has naturally been made a Book-of-the-Month Club selection...

...Jerome in the Wilderness, and some of the Vatican Fra Angelicos into the core of a strong exhibit on religious art of the Renaissance...

...Instead, we are asked to think about Michelangelo through a statue that inspired him - the Belvedere Torso, the central fragment of a larger limbed sculpture from the first century B.C...

...THE MET could have, perhaps, centralized these works, culled parallels from its own galleries, and opened an exhibit on ancient sculpture...

...But it also illustrates the essential hollowness of the show: the really dominant work of art in the exhibit is the layout...

...Of course art museums do not survive by spirit alone: according to the current ideology of their directors, they survive by "the really big show" which appeals to a mass audience and generates support from industry and government...

...The exhibit thus marks the convergence of the religion of art and the art of religion around the current central dogma: there is no salvation outside of blockbusters...

...Even with the limits of the show pieces, there could have been a different plan that might have made a more powerful collective impression...

...The exhibit is thus about museuming, not surprisingly, the Met's meat and drink...

...To speak plain truth, a viewer would learn more of the spirit of medieval or religious art in the Met's own galleries...

...the only new ingredient here is Catholicism...

...But "many" is almost a source of the problem - there is a manysidedness about the exhibit that leaves it without an emotional focus...

...They are delighted, with reason...

...But perhaps it is not spirit we are supposed to be looking for either...

...The Vatican exhibit was carted gratis by Pan Am...

...But without an emotional center for a blockbuster, its art easily degenerates from an aesthetic experience to a cultural event...

...When I went, Guido Sarducci was there taping a segment for Saturday Night Live...

...seem incongruous...

...In short, if you want to think or meditate on the ancient statues, you have to hop back and forth...

...Indeed, never in the course of artistic events has so much been printed about the setting up of an exhibit, and so little about the exhibit itself...

...But somehow I can't accept that their delight in process must be our delight in product...

...What the Met has mounted, in short, is a museum within a museum - a hodgepodge of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, Egyptian, Mod-ern, and Third World art...

...The only distinct impression that you get on leaving is that the popes, indeed, have collected great art - at least until the eighteenth century, when humanism and clericalism parted paths...

...Alternatively, the Met could have made the Raphael tapestry, the anguished mannerist Caravaggio Deposition, Leonardo's St...

...The exhibit demonstrates how antique works can be restored, how this work inspired that, how papal taste fit in or set general trends, how the popes excelled as curators, etc...

...For example, in addition to the Torso, there is some mildly impressive ancient statuary, the Augustus of Prima Portia, the Eros Cen-tocelle, and the Apollo Belvedere, a Roman copy of a Greek sculpture that so inspired eighteenth century neo-classicists...

...But then of course it's not ancient statuary that we are supposed to be observing here: it's the Vatican Collections...

...The Torso is impressive, but it is Michelangelo's power at a remove...

...The Met defenders claim, of course, that giant art exhibits serve a democratic purpose, and that all resources of public relations must be mobilized to attract the widest possible audience...

...Cynics may dismiss all the publicity as hype to boost ticket sales...

...Collectively, therefore the exhibit amounts to a tour, superficially coherent only because it derives from one source...

...Blockbusters are suppposed to correct this elitism, but the Vatican art exhibit at the Met confirms it by asking the profane masses to settle for something shallow...

...pieces had been lovingly packaged, lavishly restored, elaborately shipped, heavily indemnified, and laid out with consummate care and craftsmanship by the Met staff...

...its installation has been sponsored by Philip Morris ("A great company brings you great art," some of its advertising explains...

...Colors are subtly shifted from warm to neutral tones as a backdrop for roman-esque and medieval art to cooler gray, white, and ocher for livelier Renaissance and Baroque pieces...

...Either claim, however, ignores a secondary motive revealed in the publicity and evident in the arrangement of the show itself: curatorial narcissism...

...sadly, his presence did not seem incongruous...

...Blockbusters, or special exhibitions, can serve a powerful function - the Pieta, for example, lent by the Vatican to the 1964 New York World's Fair or Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer which, when acquired by the Met, was placed on special exhibit befitting a masterpiece on the first floor...

...Visual continuity is provided through the figure of the roman arch, present in some form in almost every room...

...This is not because it lacks significant works of art - it contains many, including the famous Apollo Belvedere, The Deposition by Caravaggio, the tapestry of The Miraculous Draught of the Fishes after a design by Raphael...

...Everywhere there are signs of the sincere pride of the Met staff in convincing the Vatican to establish this temporary colony overseas...

...THE ART OF THE POPES GOES ON TOUR Direct from the Vatican TOM O'BRIEN DESPITE THE HOOPLA that has greeted the Vatican exhibit beginning its American tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you might leave it, as I did, intellectually informed but spiritually unmoved...

...The total experience inspires respect, but not joy...

...curatorial enthusiasm over the parts probably helped to pull the wool over their own eyes...

...But with Cardinal Cooke a Trustee of the Met, and, together with Archbishop Marcinkus of the Vatican Bank a director of Friends of American Art in Religion, this was only a matter of time...

...going there becomes like buying obligatory opera tickets, liking every Meryl Streep movie, even watching The Winds of War...

...Perhaps my response - and search for something of larger significance - was stimulated by the vast media attention that heralded the first coming of these treasures to America as some sort of second coming...

...That is, regardless of an ideology of public service or hidden motive of public rip-off, there is a very private note about the show: it seems of, by, and for art historians rather than the average, even intelligent viewer of art...

...Not having such masterpieces in this show, or even a set of impressive pieces from the same period, the Met staff has buried the issue of content of the whole under a mass of quantity...

...Consider the title of the show: "The Vatican Collections: The Papacy and Art...

...Such extraordinary effort in displaying the exhibit bears testimony to a sincere desire to provide the best possible conditions for viewing the art - a response, no doubt, to criticism of such crowded, hectic shows as "The Age of Spirituality" and "Alexander the Great...

...no Canova's, no Laocoon, no Pieta...

...whose powerful frame and massive muscled tension served as model for the figures of God and Adam on the Sistine ceiling...

...But these statues are set out in several different places - the arrangement, the Met explains, is determined according to when popes acquired pieces, not when they were first created...

...There is a motto on the Belvedere Museum: "procul este, pro-fani"-closed to low brows...

...THE layout - the best ever on a Met blockbuster - testifies to the enormous love that has been lavished on this show, but ironically also points to its core problems...

...As they stand in the Vatican exhibit, the impact of these works is diluted amid the clutter of inferior paintings, other styles, and other periods of art...