Chiara Munzi cleans an image of Jesus on the fresco surrounding the Holy Stairs at the Pontifical Sanctuary of the Holy Stairs in Rome July 10. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)
By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY — With large sheets of plain plywood blocking public access to the Holy Stairs, one woman lovingly touched a large color photograph of the stairs, made the sign of the cross, lowered her head and prayed.
For centuries, the faithful have climbed up the 28 steps in prayer on their knees.
But the popular devotion has been put on hold for an entire year, and the tall placard depicting the staircase is all the public can see as a team of Vatican restorers complete the final phase of a 20-year effort to repair the sanctuary of the Holy Stairs and clean its 18,300 square feet of frescoes.
According to tradition, the Holy Stairs are the ones Jesus climbed when Pontius Pilate brought him before the crowd and handed him over to be crucified. It’s said that Constantine’s mother, St. Helen, brought the stairs to Rome from Jerusalem in 326 A.D.
In 1589, Pope Sixtus V had the sanctuary specially built and decorated for the stairs and the Sancta Sanctorum above, which houses some of the oldest relics of Rome’s early Christian martyrs and a silver- and jewel-covered Byzantine image of Christ.
The 16th-century pope wanted the sanctuary not only to preserve the important relics, but also to express the essentials of the faith through an abundance of vivid, colorful images describing key events in the Old and New Testaments, said Mary Angela Schroth, a Rome art gallery curator who has been involved in the restoration project.
“Since the faithful often did not read or write, the stories came to life” through images, she told Catholic News Service in mid-July. And so, “every square inch” of the sanctuary — its two chapels, five staircases, vaulted ceilings and broad, high walls — were covered in frescoes and decorative art.
“This was meant to amaze and attract the public,” she said.
But the illustrative gems slowly vanished over the centuries as dirt, grime, water damage and primitive or aggressive restoration techniques discolored or covered up what lay beneath. Add poor lighting to the mix and the dingy, gloomy space no longer did what it was designed to do: be a completely immersive physical, spiritual experience with visual cues accompanying the faithful on their journey toward the Sancta Sanctorum, said Paolo Violini, the Vatican Museums’ top expert in fresco restoration.
With initial help from the Getty Foundation in 2000 and then through the generosity of the Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums, both the St. Lawrence and St. Sylvester chapels and the four stairwells — two sets on either side of the central stairwell of the Holy Stairs — have been fully restored.
With the central staircase restoration planned to be completed by the end of the year and the front atrium at the end of 2019, it will have taken 11 modern-day restorers nearly two decades to resurrect what 40 artists created in less than two years in the 16th-century.
