21st-century pilgrims

The tourists who flock to galleries in Paris, Florence and Rome are like medieval shrine-visitors, says Martin Gayford. Most don’t care about art, and are only there out of duty

Last month in Rome I was standing in St Peter’s, in front of Michelangelo’s famous early masterpiece the ‘Pietá’. This, I might add, is by no means an easy thing to do in July. At any one time there was a jostling scrum of 50 to 100 visitors around that sculpture.

The magnet that draws so many to that side-chapel in St Peter’s is of course the name of Michelangelo, ‘Divine’ even to his contemporaries. But it isn’t just any old Michelangelo that has this mesmerising effect. In Rome you can have his ‘Risen Christ’ in Santa Maria sopra Minerva to yourself on most days, and in Florence there is a clutch of his sculptures in the Bargello that attract no attention to compare with the throngs around the ‘David’ in the Accademia. The Royal Academy in London has a Michelangelo relief, the ‘Taddei Tondo’, sheltered behind its own glass window near the entrance to the Sackler Gallery. I have never caught a single visitor looking at it.

No, it is only certain, stellar works that have this mysterious, perhaps magical, power to attract huge crowds. It is the same with that other god of art, Leonardo. It has been seriously suggested that a separate museum might be built in Paris for the ‘Mona Lisa’, leaving anyone interested in the rest of the Louvre’s collection free to examine it in relative tranquillity. In order to see Leonardo’s ‘Benois Madonna’ in the Hermitage, St Petersburg, I had to wriggle into a narrow space between a guide’s back and the picture — since tour parties formed an audience in front of it at all times.