S-Pietro in Vincoli

This church was built about 440 A.D. by Eudoxia, the wife of Emperor Valentinian III to be a shrine for the chains of St. Peter, which she had received from Pope Leo I (The Great). This occured after the chains, one from the Marnertine Prison, near the Forum, and the other from the prison of Jerusalem, where St. Peter was held, according to tradition, were wrought together by miracle. The interior of the church is in the style of a Roman basilica, with 24 beautiful marble columns in Doric style; the ceiling was painted by Parodi, XVII century and the floor has been recently restored. The most important feature of St. Peter in Chains is, in any case, the statue of Moses by Michelangelo. He made this statue for Pope Julius II, nephew of Sixtus IV. Sixtus IV, before being elected pope, had been titular cardinal of St. Peter in Chains and this title he gave later to his nephew, Julian della Rovere (nepotism was the pontifical fashion then). Julian became pope, with the name of Julius II; he is the pope who started rebuilding St. Peter's at the Vatican, who had the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel painted by Michelangelo and had the Stanze painted by Raphael. Well, as soon as Julius II was elected, he started thinking of his magnificent mausoleum to be placed in the new St. Peter's church and he summoned to Rome Michelangelo, who had just astonished his townsmen with the colossal statue of David. Michelangelo planned for the pope a huge monument, which was to be three storied, four sided, decorated with 44 statues of the size of Moses and 28 reliefs. The contract was stipulated, Michelangelo was soon off to the Carrara quarries to choose marbles for his gigantic undertaking. He spent seven months there. When Michelangelo came back to Rome, the Pope had changed his mind, ad he had been persuaded by Michelangelo's competitors against the project. He tried, unsuccessfully, to settle with the pope and after a quarrel he left Rome. Later they were reconciled, but he was kept busy with other works, and the monument was never finished. The 44 colossal statues dwindled to one and Julius II never saw his mausoleum finished.

At length, after innumerable vicissitudes and controversies, in 1545 when Michelangelo was 70, and 40 years after he had made his first plan for the mausoleum of Julius II, he completed the monument we see now in St. Peter in Chains and was finally released from that contract by the relatives of the dead pope. The statue of Moses was probably finished one or two years after he had painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

The figure of the prophet is very close to the ones he painted on that ceiling; it has the same majesty and power and is one of the many magnified human figures created by Michelangelo, reflecting his concepts of Man and his philosophy. The statue of Moses, more than any other by Michelangelo, embodies his sentiments and thoughts; it portrays exactly the fervent emotions, the anger, the conception, the disappointment and the sorrow of Moses in a dramatic moment of his life, when after receiving the Ten Commandments from God, he came down from Mt. Sinai and found his people worshipping the Golden Calf. Michelangelo has represented in the marble, with perfect exactness, the psychology of that moment. Moses is holding the tables under his right arm tightly, as if to defend from heresy the Code of Law on which the human rights of generations to come would be based.

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