by Angela Vicini Mastrangeli
The solemn Vatican Corpus Christi procession at the time of Gregory XVI
‘There is certainly nothing in the whole world holier, more august, or more splendid than the renowned pomp and circumstance that is usually seen in the Vatican every year on the feast of the most august Sacrament, when it is carried in veneration by the pontiff maximus’. (G. Barluzzi, Della solenne processione vaticana…, Roma 1837, p. III).
The graphic work we are presenting here is a direct visual testimony of one of the most deeply rooted religious customs in the Roman-Lazio area, the Corpus Christi procession, whose most solemn expression is the papal celebration at St. Peter’s Basilica. The performance of the solemn rite is part of the many festivals and ceremonies with which the spiritual and temporal power of the Church of Rome liked to manifest itself, even in the 19th century, in all its splendour, summoning religious and civil authorities, representatives of foreign states and, above all, crowds of pilgrims and the populace to take part in such events, who for the occasion, in addition to gaining special indulgences, could rub shoulders with the upper-class and aristocratic world, flocked to religious events as a real spectacle, to watch and perform in turn. It must be remembered that, despite the unquestionable seriousness of the devotional aspect, the preparation of the procession often proved to be a source of even heated conflicts, both among the participants and the public, over questions of ceremonial and etiquette, relating to clothing, symbols to be led, precedences to be respected, in an atmosphere that inevitably ended up being tinged with worldliness.
Officiated by Urban IV in 1264 and fixed for the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, the feast of Corpus Christi had as its most important and characteristic element from the very beginning the procession, one of the most typical forms, moreover, to which popular religiosity has always been attached. In Rome, as already mentioned, the rite had its highest manifestation in the setting of St Peter’s Square. Here, from the second half of the 15th century, the faithful, pilgrims and travellers gathered to attend the solemn procession in which the pontiff in person offered the Eucharistic Sacrament for the adoration of the people. To adorn the route, but above all to protect the participants from the scorching sun or the inclemency of the rain, corridors were set up all around the square, which still lacked the Bernini colonnade, covered with white marquees supported by flowered poles and flanked by multicoloured pavilions. In later times, with the construction of the colonnade, the function took place under the shelter of the colonnade, but the custom of decorating the intercolumniums with festoons of vegetables adorned with ribbons and with the heraldic shields of the pontiff and his cardinals and of completing the tour of the exedra with curtains did not cease. To further protect them from the sun, ‘superb tapestries of exquisite workmanship’ – Raphael’s famous tapestries – were also hung on the sides, once again fulfilling their decorative function.
In earlier times, the procession used to go from the basilica of St John Lateran to St Clement’s and back. It was Pope Nicholas V in June 1447 who replaced this route with the one from St. Peter’s to Porta Castello. Through gradual modifications, the rite was finally performed in the space of the square in front of the basilica and its immediate surroundings. The ritual of the pontiff’s participation in the celebration also underwent variations over time. In fact, some popes faced the route on foot and bareheaded as a sign of extreme veneration, others held a simple white headdress, and still others proceeded in a gestatorial chair, sometimes wearing a mitre, to emphasise the solemnity and splendour of the moment. Under the pontificate of Alexander VII Chigi, an important change took place in 1655, with the institution of the ‘thalamus’, a sort of kneeler, supported by a sedan chair, on which the monstrance was placed and in front of which the pope stood genuflected or, later, seated, wrapped in his large white cloak decorated in gold. Traditionally, after celebrating the ‘low mass’ in the Sistine Chapel, the pontiff would start the solemn procession that would descend through the Scala regia into the piazza greeted by the triple firing of the cannons of Castel S. Angelo.
Visual evidence of the papal Corpus Christi procession dates back as early as the 17th century, but it was in the 19th century that this production intensified, both in the pictorial and graphic fields. The original copy owned by the Biblioteca Casanatense is composed of thirty-five etchings, with coeval watercolouring, glued on textile support and joined to form a single strip approximately 14 metres long by 32 cm high. This makes it typologically similar to the more ancient ‘panoramas’ which, also consisting of repeated images placed in sequence on the wall of a sort of cylinder, allowed the spectator, placed at the centre, a circular 360-degree view.
The work is introduced by a frontispiece, on which the title and edition data can be read, but where the indications of responsibility for the engraver, Salvatore Busuttil, do not appear, which are instead found on every plate in the series. Dated ‘1838’ on the first sheet and on most of the plates, which makes the year of the event depicted almost certain, the series also presents two other dates: ‘1837’ on sheets 22, 26, 27 and ‘1839’ on the last, no. 33, which shifts the publication of the entire sequence to the latter year. The title page is followed by an unnumbered panel with an allegory of religion in the top centre, represented by a crowned female figure holding a cross in her left hand and a chalice with a host in her right. Below her a dance of angels playing trumpets. Below is the scene of the Miracle of Bolsena from Raphael’s Rooms. Above left and right are statues representing the virtues, two on each side divided by smoking braziers: on the left Truth and Justice, on the right Temperance and Fortitude. On the left and right are two banners with descriptions of the feast of Corpus Christi, in Italian and French. 
Thirty-three numbered panels depict the processional procession in its orderly unfolding: in No. 1, the beginning of the colonnade and the start of the procession can be seen on the left, preceded by men with baskets full of myrtle to scatter on the pavement. Along the path between the arches are suspended garlands intertwined with ribbons and the coats of arms of Pope Gregory XVI, repeated several times, and the cardinals in office at the time. In the other plates the groups of monastic and religious orders, each one preceded by the cross or its banner, then gradually clerics, chaplains, abbots, bishops and archbishops, accompanied by the symbols of religious power (the exact order of the participants in the procession and their names can be followed in the transcription of the legend in the margin of each engraving).
The parade, seen in the accuracy of the description of the costumes and details, gradually reveals itself in all its value as a historical-social document. Of particular interest are the costumes of the commoners who, having come from the city’s suburbs and the province, attend the sides of the procession individually or in small family groups, forming real genre scenes. There is no lack of elegant bourgeois couples and pilgrim figures in their characteristic attire. Towards the end of the procession, the presence of the Swiss Guards, in their traditional parade costumes, the horse regiments, flamboyant in their blue uniforms, and finally the Pontifical Dragoons, placed with their band at the end of the procession, is imposing. The liveliness of the ensemble is decisively enhanced by the watercolouring, executed with great accuracy in strong, mellow tones.
‘A ‘modest, but very singular figure of an artist’, according to Callari’s definition of him, Salvatore Busuttil qualifies as a draughtsman and engraver in signing the plates of the series.
Born in Gozo in 1798, the artist was apprenticed to his father Michele, a painter of some prestige. The young man showed promise and in 1817 the Rector of the Maltese University, Francesco Saverio Caruana, exerted his influence with Governor Thomas Maitland to grant him a scholarship. The following year, Busuttil arrived in Rome, where he eventually settled permanently, enrolled at the Accademia di S. Luca and frequented the studio of Tommaso Minardi. His entire activity as a painter, draughtsman and engraver, intellectually attracted to classical antiquity and figure drawing, then took place in Rome. This latter interest is confirmed by a collection in eleven volumes, containing around 7,000 sheets, mostly small or very small and glued full size on the pages, with sketches, studies, proofs for engravings, finished drawings, still preserved in the Biblioteca Romana Sarti at the Accademia Nazionale di S. Luca. Each album consists of several quaternals, on the cover of which the artist personally annotates the tome and the fascicle in an order that is not, however, respected in the binding of the volumes. 
An apparent order is given by the subject of the representation: ornamental motifs, mythological and biblical stories taken from classical statuary and painting, frescoes and bas-reliefs, studies from life, ancient and popular costumes (These include the preparatory drawings for the series Rome Costume Collection, on which there is the ‘incidatur’, i.e. the final approval for the subsequent engraving), views and landscapes, animals, studies of anatomy, engravings by other artists, works all dating from between 1818 and 1854, the entire career therefore of the artist who died in Rome in 1854.
The hand of the draughtsman Busuttil reveals himself to be technically secure and gradually more adept at capturing details, nuances, and impressions, with an agile and perhaps more felicitous sign than his contemporary and friend Bartolomeo Pinelli, whose taste for genre scenes and popular character he shared. In contrast, other works in which the artist participated as a draftsman fall within the canons of academic culture: La Colonna Traiana illustrata da Erasmo Pistolesi, of 1846, illustrated with a series of 42 plates engraved by Nicola Moneta; La patriarcale basilica Vaticana by Filippo Maria Gerardi, published by Agostino Valentini between 1845 and 1855, with 239 plates by various artists; the Nuova Raccolta of 50 main views of Rome and its surroundings , ca. 1850, with plates engraved by Gaetano Cottafavi and others; a series of portraits of cardinals and men of letters engraved mostly by Antonio Mannelli; a small sheet depicting the Circumcision of Jesus Christ engraved by Quintilio Apolloni. In Rome, however, the artist did not only dedicate himself to drawing, but also to pictorial works that occasi
onally sent to Malta, where two mythological subjects, Aeneas Tears the Myrtle and Ajax Rescues Himself from the Storm, which the painter painted for the governor’s palace, are still preserved in the Verdala Palace in Rabat, and in the parish church of Kercem in Gozo, the large altarpiece with St. Gregory, the last certain work, painted despite its large proportions with the graceful touch of the miniaturist.
Busuttil’s engraving production ran parallel to his activity as a painter and draughtsman. In all likelihood, his first engraving is the St. Matthew – a specimen in the Cathedral Museum in Mdina – dedicated to his benefactor, Rector Caruana, but the most conspicuous part is to be found in the Roman period, in the years between 1829 and 1850. Genre engravings in the Pinellian style are documented and largely preserved in the most important Roman libraries: Carrettieri playing morra, Minenti di Roma, Carciofolari, Pifferari, Moscerellaro, Giuncataro; of socio-historical documentation: Il Possesso del Senatore of Rome, from 1830, and the Corpus Christi Procession itself; finally, an interesting group of images created for the celebrations of the Octave of the Dead. These are compositions with a religious subject, inspired by biblical stories or the lives of saints, which reproduce the scenes composed for the sacred wax representations, a devout custom, typically Roman, which took place every year on the feast of the dead at the headquarters of the oldest confraternities. From the middle of the 18th century, in fact, in the churches of the companies of mercy and in the adjoining cemeteries, it became customary to set up, for the purposes of piety and the collection of alms, scenographic apparatuses, conceived as veritable ‘small theatres’, in which a structure, made with painted backdrops and decorated with funeral decorations, housed life-size figures arranged to represent biblical episodes, scenes from religious life, and miraculous events. Skilled workers were engaged in the creation of the ‘actress’ figures, at first simple wooden silhouettes then three-dimensional mannequins modelled in wax, painted and dressed according to the theme to be interpreted. The subject of the sacred representation, chosen from time to time by the confraternity council and submitted to the prior approval of the Master of the Sacred Palace, was then described in a sheet accompanied by an engraving on which the names of those who had made the sketches and wax statues and the engraver were written.
Busuttil made engravings for numerous representations of the Octave: for the Archconfraternity of St. Mary of the Oration and Death in 1829 St. Odilon of Cluny, in 1830 Saints Pudenziana and Prassede bury the bodies of the martyrs; for the Pia Unione del Cimitero dell’Ospedale della Consolazione in 1831 St. Paul the hermit dies assisted by St. Anthony, in 1832 the Finding of the Body of St. Rosalie, in 1842 S. Francesco Borgia in front of the corpse of Isabella Queen of Spain; for the Cemetery of S. Maria in Trastevere in 1843 the Burial of St. Philomena and St. Anthony of Padua makes the murdered man testify to exonerate his father, replicated in 1845 for the Confraternity of Charity in Marino.
Even this aspect of the Maltese artist’s production thus testifies to his full integration in the Roman artistic environment of the early 19th century and his interest in the pietistic expressions of the society of the time, repository of a centuries-old tradition of a culture of faith often steeped in spectacularity.