turbulent years. The doors were removed during the demolition of Saint Peter’s in the sixteenth century, but Pope Paul V had them adapted to the larger size of the central portal of the new church and reinstalled in 1619. There, in more or less the original site, they can still be seen.
The two doors each consist of three large, rectangular panels situated one above the other, separated by horizontal strips with little historical scenes and surrounded by borders of acanthus scrolls. The upper panels show Christ enthroned making a blessing gesture, and the Holy Virgin Mary in glory; the middle panels show the standing figures of Saint Paul and Saint Peter, and the bottom, square panels show the martyrdom of both saints. Together they illustrate Christ as the head of the church, Saint Mary as its symbol, and Paul and Peter as its founders. The panel with the standing Saint Peter makes this rather general symbolism more specific (fig. 2). It shows the saint entrusting the keys he received from Christ to a kneeling pope, thus illustrating that papal authority derives directly from Peter. Two inscriptions make this meaning more explicit. One says, “Saint Peter the apostle” and the other “Pope Eugenius IV from Venice,” denoting that the kneeling pope is not any pope, but Eugenius himself. The horizontal strips between the panels elaborate on this theme of Pope Eugenius and papal authority with concrete historical examples. The left strip between the upper and middle panels (fig. 3) shows the Greek delegation leaving Constantinople to attend the Council of Ferrara in 1438 and Emperor John VIII Palaeologus kneeling before Pope Eugenius. The strip on the right depicts the pope and the emperor attending the Council of Florence in 1439. The left strip between the middle and the lower panels depicts Pope Eugenius crowning Emperor Sigismund in Rome in 1433, followed by their ride through the city. The right strip shows the Jacobites (Syrians) accepting the agreement of unification with the Western Church and departing from Rome in 1443. Inscriptions in Latin explain the quintessence of these scenes, pompously concluding, “These are the illustrious proceedings of Eugenius IV, they are the testimonials of his lofty spirit.”9
The arrangement of the various scenes over the left and right doors reveals a carefully thought-out scheme. The scenes on the left door, under the figure of Christ, visualize the temporal aspect of the pope’s authority. They show the emperors John VIII Palaeologus and Sigismund both kneeling for Pope Eugenius, and between them Saint Paul, whose traditional attribute of a sword is prominently put on view, evoking associations with “the sword of the Spirit” (Ephesians 6:17). On the right door, scenes showing the unification of the church under Pope Eugenius IV as its supreme leader illustrate the spiritual power of the papacy. The central panel, with Saint Peter handing the keys to Eugenius, underscores the pope’s unlimited authority. Together, the doors bear out the papal claims of plenitude of power in both temporal and spiritual matters. These are the claims made by any pope, but within the difficult circumstances of the 1430s and 1440s they were especially relevant for Eugenius IV. The universal claims and entitlements of the papacy, which are the concerns of any pope in any time, are demonstrated via one specific pope, Eugenius IV, giving the events of his life a timeless dimension. This careful balancing of generality and specificity set the example for papal propaganda in the two centuries to come.
The fresco paintings on the walls of the Sistine Chapel offer another example of papal propaganda (fig. 4).10 They were commissioned by Sixtus IV, who was, more than thirty years after Eugenius, still battling with the general council. The conflict had flared up because of Sixtus’s ruthless aggrandizement of the papacy and of his own family. At the same time, the French King Louis XI, with whom he had strained relations, tried to outmaneuver him by appealing to a general council. The general council thus not only constituted a threat to the papal authority from within the church, but was prone to be (mis)used by secular rulers as a political instrument to put pressure on the pope. Sixtus’s response, as we have seen, was to annul the decrees of the Council of Constance and renew the Execrabilis bull, which forbade appeals to the general council. From 1481 to 1483 he had his claims to full papal authority visualized and legitimized on the walls of the Sistine Chapel. This was part of a project that Sixtus had started in 1477, which involved the construction and decoration of the chapel for official celebrations by the pope and his court. The decoration consisted of paintings by a team of prominent artists, headed by Pietro Perugino and including Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Cosimo Rosselli, and Luca Signorelli. The paintings depicted a parallel series of scenes from the lives of Moses and Christ. The two series started on the altar wall with The Finding of Moses and The Birth of Christ (both destroyed in the 1530s to make room for Michelangelo’s Last Judgment), continued over the two long walls, and concluded on the entrance wall with The Fight over the Dead Body of Moses and The Resurrection and Ascension of Christ (also lost in the sixteenth century, but soon replaced by new ones on the same subject; fig. 5). The frescoes that still remain on the south and north walls show closely corresponding episodes from the lives of Moses and Christ. The Trials of Moses (fig. 6), for instance, is matched by The Temptations of Christ (fig. 7), which is situated directly opposite it. The Latin captions help make the correspondence more explicit, as both use the word temptatio.11 Thus, the scenes on the south wall show Moses as a representative of the Old Testament, whose deeds find their fulfillment in Christ and the New Testament. Another example is Moses Receiving the Tablets with the Ten Commandments (fig. 8), which is matched by Christ’s Sermon on the Mount (fig. 9). The captions explain that both episodes deal with promulgatio legis: promulgation of the law, respectively, of the Old and the New Testament.12 Moses is thus represented as a sort of precursor, who instituted the rules of God that would be fulfilled by those of Christ.
One pair of corresponding paintings illustrates this point in particular. A fresco on the south wall, painted by Botticelli, shows several episodes of a revolt against the leadership of Moses and the supreme priesthood of his brother Aaron during Israel’s forty-year passage through the desert (fig. 10). God’s intervention, however, made the earth swallow the leaders of the revolt and restored Moses’s and Aaron’s authority.13 The caption explains the theme as “the threat [Conturbatio] to Moses, the bearer of the tablets of the Law.”14 An inscription within the painting further explains this. On a building in the background that closely resembles the Roman Arch of Constantine (at first sight a curious addition to a desert scene) is written a quote from the New Testament: “Neither doth any man take the honor to himself, but he that is called by God, as Aaron was.”15 This makes it clear that the leadership of God’s people and the supreme priesthood are divinely instituted and not to be challenged by anybody. The reference to the general council disputing the pope’s full authority is obvious.
The corresponding fresco on the opposite wall, by Pietro Perugino, makes this message even more apparent (fig. 11). According to the caption, it illustrates “the threat [Conturbatio] to Jesus Christ, the lawgiver,”16 but this is actually only to be seen in the right background. According to
