So the Pope asked Raphael to paint the fraudulent Constantinian Donation

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Not all fake news should be thrown away; some are pure bullshit that should be carefully preserved and exhibited sub oculis omnium, without being scandalized by the poisoning of the well of truth. Take the Vatican Museums: for five centuries in their spaces – not at all museums at their inception, but rather residential and office spaces of the pontiffs – the most colossal hoax in the history of the Church and the West has majestically towered ; it was a bit battered by the wear and tear of time and has now been put back in order thanks to a formidable ten-year undertaking, begun under Antonio Paolucci and concluded with Barbara Jatta. Now admirable – with their bright colours and clear figures, without fading, darkening or cracks and without the encumbrances of scaffolding – are the four walls plus the vault of the Hall of Constantine, the Aula Pontificorum Superior, the largest of the famous Raphael Rooms, the one for which the artist from Urbino only had time to make the preparatory cartoons, before his sudden and premature death, and which was completed by his disciples, Giovan Francesco Penni and Giulio Romano, who however did not feel like continuing the experimentation of oil frescoes started by Raphael (they are by his hand, as the restorations conducted with excellence by a first-rate staff – Paolo Violini, Fabio Piacentini, Francesca Persegati and the late Guido Cornini – have sensationally confirmed) the two allegorical figures, in oil precisely, of the Comitas and of Iustitia, in whose execution one could detect the trial and error attitude of Raffaello, who immediately corrected the defects of his mixtures). But this is not the focus that interests us now.

The peculiarity of this wonderful Vatican historical-political nonsense is that it was conceived after having already been unmasked decades earlier. The entire pictorial cycle on the walls in fact tells in 800 square meters of fresco the four crucial episodes of the advent of Christian Rome after the end of the persecutions and paganism: the vision of the Cross, the victorious battle of Ponte Milvio, the Baptism of Constantine, the Donation of Constantine. The first is a legendary miracle, the second is a historical fact, the third is an improbable episode, the fourth portrays the imposture we are dealing with, although at the same time it truthfully documents the internal appearance of the ancient basilica of St. Peter, where the Donation is set . But let's take the dates: in 1440 the humanist Lorenzo Valla, a learned curial scholar in the service of various lords and finally of the Pope, wrote his De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione, in which he philologically dismantled the authenticity of the alleged document that "proved" the legitimacy of the temporal power of the Church and the superiority of the sacra potestas over the imperial one; well, in 1518, almost 80 years later, Leo X Medici commissioned Raphael to "paint" the largest reception room of the Pope, on the second floor of the Apostolic Palace, where all the highest authorities received were "wrapped" in the explanatory iconography of papal power, of which the gift of the city of Rome to Pope Sylvester by the kneeling Constantine was a tangible illustration. A crystalline case of art as soft power.

If therefore a naive bona fide in the validity of the Donation cannot really be invoked for the papal choice of 1518, why then decide to undauntedly spread to the world a falsehood that everyone by then knew to be such? It was quite clear – and history has since demonstrated it – that that phantom document, conceived in Carolingian circles around the eighth century, would have benefited the enemies of the papacy much more than the papacy itself. Here we enter the dangerous field of hypotheses and the most plausible is that, since the newborn Lutheran schismatics brandished that text by Valla against the Vatican wickedness, an instinct of reaction and Roman defiance suggested commissioning those reckless frescoes of a “fact” that Dante had already execrated: “Ah, Constantine, of how much evil was the mother,/ not your conversion, but that dowry/ that the first rich father took from you”. Yet an afterthought creeps into the layman's mind at the sight of the restored scenes: all right, the document was deplorably bogus, but what about the historical substance? Net of the "human greed" factor, hadn't the Church, especially during the centuries of the barbarian invasions, had to exercise a civil substitution in the face of the collapse and non-existence of public institutions? Please move to the adjacent Raphaelesque Stanza di Eliodoro, where Leo the Great stops Attila: there are no secular protests about that clerical interference.

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