The Vatican: Spirit and Art of Christian Rome

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Название: The Vatican: Spirit and Art of Christian Rome

Автор: коллектив

Год: 1982

Издательство: Metropolitan Museum of Art H.N. Abrams

ISBN: 0870993488

Формат: PDF

Размер: 88 Мб

Страниц: 398

Язык: Английский

The Vatican is a unique domain. The world's smallest independent city state, it is the seat of the papacy—and thus the spiritual headquarters of one of the world's great religions, Roman Catholicism—and at the same time it is among the largest and most distinguished complexes of architectural and artistic treasures in the West.

To the ancient Romans, the Vaticanum was a swampy and ill-defined region along the bank of the Tiber. It was the site of the Vatican Circus—begun by Caligula and finished by Nero—and the place where the apostle Peter, the first bishop of Rome, was crucified and buried. Less than three centuries later, the Holy Roman emperor Constantine erected a monumental basilica over the site of Peter's tomb, a church that stood for more than twelve hundred years until it was torn down, beginning in the 1500s, to make way for the magnificent Renaissance basilica that is today the focal point of Christendom.