In Via
Planning a trip? Or just on the pilgrimage of daily living? We are the podcast at the intersection of faith and travel, assisting you on the journey to encounter Christ. Hear stories, discover travel tips, and learn more about our Catholic faith. Along the way, we’ll show you that if God seeks to meet us in Jerusalem, Rome, Lourdes, Mexico City, or Santiago, he also wants to encounter you - right there in your car, on your run, or in the middle of your workday.
In Via
Tourists turned Pilgrims and the Demands of Art with Liz Lev
Join us as we talk with renowned art historian, author, and tour guide Liz Lev. Liz has been working as a guide in Rome and the Vatican for over 20 years - in this discussion, you'll quickly see why she's the most sought-after guide to the Vatican Museums.
We discuss the evangelizing power of beauty and the attempt to blunt that power (along with where the guilt lies for allowing that to happen!). While looking at the difference between tourists and pilgrims, Liz reframes pilgrimage as a journey of love. She also reveals her favorite places to take pilgrims in Rome and the tourist who changed her understanding of the Sistine Chapel.
Welcome to In Via, the podcast where we're navigating the pilgrimage of life. We are all in via on the way and we are learning a lot as we go. I'm your host, joan Watson. Join me as we listen to stories, discover travel tips and learn more about our Catholic faith. Along the way, we'll see that if God seeks to meet us in Jerusalem, rome or Santiago, he also wants to encounter you right there in your car, on your run or in the middle of your workday. So welcome back to In Via the podcast, where we're navigating the daily pilgrimage of life, and I am happy, excited and blessed to be joined today by Liz Lev. Liz, thanks for joining us, and I would love for you kind of to talk about a little bit who you are for those who don't know you, although I know a lot of our listeners already know who you are.
Liz Lev:So I am an art historian. I moved to Italy about 33 or so years ago, probably a little bit more, I think I'm holding it 30-ish out of Vanity's sake, but I moved because I was an art historian and I loved art, and in many ways I started my pilgrimage to Rome as a tourist and or an academic or something like that, but I was going with the idea of the aesthetic beauty, the experience, but it was in the work of learning more, in trying to get a sense of the context of these most beautiful, these most famous, these most extraordinary works, that I began to engage more and more with the Faith meaning behind it. And so it was indeed my origin as a tourist that brought about my reversion to the Catholic Church, and so now I am very much a pilgrim to these sites, alongside all those who accompany me.
Joan:So pilgrimage. So you first came. You were really in Rome as an art historian, not as a Christian pilgrim, and it was that encounter with beauty that brought you more back into the Catholic faith. Like that's, your pilgrimage is inundated with pilgrimage in a sense.
Liz Lev:Yes, I think beauty is a very important part of it. Beauty is the attraction, beauty is what makes you look twice. Beauty is what makes you lean in, but many people walk through the beauty, take pictures, instagram, and it remains something that only meets superficially. I think what was the changing factor was that, as someone who had to study this art, to get a better sense of where it came from, to begin to interpret it right, isn't that what everybody wants to do? They want to oh, what does this mean? Oh, what does this symbolize? Well, as you try to do that with art that has sacred subject matter, you eventually bump into truth. And when you run into truth so consistently, when you see truth expressed by people that you admire in Michelangelo and his representation of truth, at some point you begin to think you, with your waffling sensibilities no, I don't really think, I want to believe in anything. And you see the conviction of this genius and you begin to think well, maybe, maybe I'm looking at this backwards.
Joan:So many people want to separate people like Bernini and Michelangelo from their Catholic faith. And there's this attempt, I feel like sometimes to say oh well, these men, I mean, we've tried to reframe Michelangelo right, caravaggio. And so to understand, how do you? I mean, how do you see Michelangelo without Catholicism?
Liz Lev:Well, this is actually subject for a really fascinating podcast, which we get very long if we got into it, but I think in a nutshell, it's one of the things I'm very interested in, and that art history as a discipline was basically born in the 19th century. It was born kind of in the waves of secularism after the French Revolution, et cetera, et cetera. So you have groups of people who are interested in art but they're not interested in religion, and they have to find a way to reconcile the beauty and the attraction they feel, but without the commitment that that kind of art demands. So if you really follow these works of art to their source, they demand things from you.
Liz Lev:In my own case, it demanded that I change my life, and so I can understand why, trying to find the dodge of well, michelangelo painted it for a paycheck or he painted it for his own ego and I'm not saying that his own ego wasn't part of it, but that this is just to somehow superficial job for him or just somehow of an empty legacy. I think that's a very short-sighted view. On top of everything else, when you look at that, when you really learn about the art, it's a completely unrealistic prospect to see the innovation of something like the Sistine Chapel, the crescendo, the very unique and personal vision, and not realize that this is a man of faith who is expressing something.
Liz Lev:Bernini on the other hand, is the most well-documented Catholic artist we have, short of Rubens and Fra Angelico. Bernini's engagement with the faith, after a bit of a troublesome youth, is legendary. And he's like our artistic Saint Augustine right, he starts out doing everything wrong and then one day he just turns around and he does everything right, to the point where General Oliva, who was the head of the Jesuits, used to say talking to Bernini was like talking to a graduate student in theology. He was deeply engaged in his faith. One of his sons was a priest, the other was a biographer.
Liz Lev:So these figures, they are actually meant to be sort of our spearheads in the world of evangelization, and that is something that, unfortunately, the powers of secularism understood, and they blunted them. They blunted them by taking Bernini's greatest work, something like Saint Teresa and Ecstasy, and staining it with the modern iris fascination with sexuality. They take the extraordinary call to sanctity, to holiness, to it to exercise heroic virtue in the Last Judgment, and they turn it into some sort of imagined proclivities of Michelangelo. And so this is the sterile, cheap, tawdry, lazy way that the modern age likes to look at beauty and not be transformed by it. And they have blunted the real message, and it is the fault of Catholics and Christians who let this happen every single time.
Liz Lev:There's no pushback on the question of the sexuality of Michelangelo. There's no pushback. Could this work mean more than that? Oh, no, okay, ha ha ha. Because it's lazy, because it's easy, because it's simple, because it's a takeaway and because it doesn't make us have to engage or think or transform ourselves. So we are just as guilty for letting it go as the people who have actively worked to change the evangelizing power of these artists.
Joan:Well, that was worth it. Just to be able to say that it makes me very, very upset. I mean, we don't want to be asked anything of, we don't want anything to be demanded of us, right? And so I don't want art to demand something of me. I just wanna go and look at it and, like you said, take a picture on Instagram. I don't wanna walk into the Sistine Chapel and ask what I mean. I love.
Joan:At the end of your TED talk on the Sistine Chapel, you said this demands something. This makes us ask who am I? What role do I have to play? We don't want that like. That's terribly inconvenient. And I think pilgrimage is the same thing. Right, we can go to these places as a tourist, consume, look, take pictures, enjoy or we can go as a pilgrim and ask something of us. Pilgrimage demands something of us, and so I love that insight of what is art demand from us. You said the Sistine Chapel forces us to look in a mirror, and I think pilgrimage does the same thing. And I loved your TED talk in that you had an optimistic view even of the crowds in the Sistine Chapel, that they remind us that beauty captures many people from all walks of life and all. It's a reminder that beauty speaks us all, and so I guess you see a lot of tourists and you see a lot of pilgrims in your daily life. Do you see a difference between the tourist and the pilgrim?
Liz Lev:Yes, there is. There can be quite a difference between the tourist and the pilgrim. There is the tourist who thinks that he or she is a tourist but really ends up being a pilgrim. So, many times I start a tour or a visit with people who are, you know, we really just want to be in and out of here and we just want to take this off the list and you two minutes into it it turns out, they have all of these questions.
Liz Lev:These questions are much more existential and they want to know and they want to understand that by the time the tour is over it is clearly that was a pilgrimage and not a tour, whereas there are plenty of pilgrims who are, you know, here with all their things to bring out to be blessed by the Pope, but they just they don't really want to have to engage with these sites, and always in another church. Do we have to keep going to churches? I can't remember the names of all these churches. So I mean we do have this kind of crossover, but in its highest point. I mean these are sort of exceptions that prove the rule. In its highest point, I mean the tourist is the person who is coming for a reason that may be enriching in just another way. I mean people may just want to learn more about the world in general, get a greater sense of history and sort of context. So there is a sort of a rich form of tourism that in itself is a form of pilgrimage. But pilgrims, the pilgrim comes to pray. The pilgrim comes, I think, for comes to pray, comes to witness, comes to see these places, and I think one of the major things about pilgrimage is that it's not only what we're getting out of it the indulgence or the praying in the site or going to have fried zucchini, flowers or whatever it is that we're doing, it is also something we are giving, and I think one of the important things about pilgrimage that kind of got confused a little during the course of the Protestant Reformation, which gradually began to come down more and more negatively towards the act of pilgrimage. Indeed, if I remember correctly, it was while climbing the steps of the holy stairs that Luther had his great revelation that the justification comes through faith alone.
Liz Lev:But I think one of the most eloquent work for me is Caravaggio's Madonna of the Pilgrims, where you see these people with their dirty bare feet and their dirty clothes and their battered rags, and they've sunk to their knees. But your first impression, the sort of thing that you would dismiss in the work, all that is is the car, that's the jalopy They'll beat up Volkswagen they've taken, but those walking sticks that separate their face from their bodies. We see this transformative expression on their faces. Whatever they've come to see, they've seen, and I think that reminds us that pilgrimage really is a journey of love, and it really is. It's born out of, also, the desire to go visit someone out of love.
Liz Lev:It's like the sort of very lost practice in Italy we still do this, but here we don't the lost practice of going to a tomb. On this day and these days of November, november 2nd, everybody in Rome is at the cemeteries. Today, this moment, when we go and we make a journey, whether it's to a cemetery, whether it's to cross the country to be home for Thanksgiving dinner, why do you do that? Do you do that for Turkey? Nobody really likes Turkey that much.
Liz Lev:You go, do it out of love, which is a manifestation of our love, and this journey towards the Lord who already came to us. I mean that great pilgrimage of the Incarnation. But I think this is our way of something to bear in mind that pilgrims are really very successful pilgrimages when they realize that this is a journey of love.
Joan:And that I mean in the Catholic worldview these saints are not dead. They're alive in the Lord and they're our family, and so we are visiting our family we're visiting our friends.
Joan:we're, you know we're praying at these tombs and we know they're not in the tombs, but we're making this gesture to come and visit our family and friends. And when we begin to see life in this way, life as pilgrimage, life as a bigger family than just here on earth, it completely transforms the way we live and the choices we make. I love that, that the journey of love. And so I think you've already answered the question I'm about to ask. But you know, I've actually heard from people when I've taken pilgrimages, when I've led pilgrimages. People say, well, I can just read a book, I can just look at that in a book, I can just look at that holy card, right, why do I have to go to San Marco in Florence? I'll just look at the holy cards of Fra Angelico's paintings.
Joan:And if you've seen the Sistine Chapel in real life, it's hard for you to even begin to think well, I'll just look at this in a book. But what would you say to somebody? You know, we have this new, relatively new phenomenon where we've seen the Sistine Chapel, whether we've been to Rome or not, and that's a relatively new thing, right? Christians before us would walk into that Sistine Chapel and maybe they'd heard stories about it, but they had never seen it. And so what would you say to someone? I mean, is that a good thing, I guess? First of all, is that a good thing or a bad thing that we've been exposed to these works of art without seeing them in real life?
Liz Lev:Well, I think it is a great gift for us to have these visual experiences that we can share, works of art, works that are not limited to one place, which are difficult to see and hard to get to and prohibitively expensive for many. So I think in many ways, the democratization of beauty, in a certain sense, has been a great boon to humanity. However, the substitution of virtual for real, which we've already seen how well that went with the Mass, the substitution with the virtual and the real, is growing more and more problem, problematic, and so, I would say, less a question of reading a book, because, being a college professor, I'm not so sure I would believe the whole book question, but I mean,
Liz Lev:I have the same experience by looking at it through a screen I think is where the question is. What if I have a really good 4K resolution? First of all, the screen is a perspective of somebody else. Somebody else took that picture. Somebody else chose the perspective. Somebody else chose how you're going to see it. You walking into a place, you know how you are going to see it. What is it? What is it like to take that first step into St Peter's?
Liz Lev:You can't take a picture of what it's like to cross the threshold and be into a church that's four foot forward to two football fields long and that is sort of beautifully unified in its decoration. You can't simulate what it's like to stand in the Sistine Chapel. If you are paying attention, if you, if you don't care, if you're just going to walk in and walk out and sneak a picture to show how clever you are, then no, there's no point in you going at all. Please don't, because we can do without you occupying the extra space. But if you are going with the mind of an enlightened tourist or a pilgrim, when you stand in the Sistine Chapel and you understand, you are looking at what St John Paul II called the invisible beginnings in Genesis, the invisible endings in the Last Judgment, and you are surrounded, sometimes uncomfortably and annoyingly, but you are surrounded by people from everywhere and you realize, if you are a pilgrim, if you believe what we say, we believe we are standing between the two cardinal points of human history.
Liz Lev:And we are surrounded by all these people, where what we all have in common, from past to present, is that we are all on a same journey, we have a beginning, we have an end, we are on a collective pilgrimage, and that everybody feels the sense of something special, something meaningful, whether or not they manifest it by talking about the silliest thing in the world. It's different ways that people try to possess the sense of belonging to something that is greater than we are, and I think that's that is not easily. That's not easily transformed through any kind of virtual reality. The way the misunderstandings over Caravaggio paintings. If you realize where you're standing as opposed to looking at a picture, it helps you understand a little bit what the artist is trying to tell you. So context is very important, but most importantly, I think there is no photograph of St Peter's bones
Liz Lev:for people who have gone to the Scavi they can possibly substitute the moment when you finish that Scavi tour. It's been an hour or something. You're standing, you're shuffling, you turn the corner into a teeny, tiny space and they're peeking around so that it's very awkward position. There are the bones of St Peter, who died a stone's throw from where you're standing, whose body was thrown into a ditch and from whose remains all the beauty that surrounds you comes. And there's a very similar experience, I think, in the Holy Sepulchre too when you walk into that Holy Sepulchre and you're in that space where Jesus was resurrected there's.
Liz Lev:No, you can't simulate that.
Joan:Yeah, and there are no words to try to describe it someone who's not experienced it. But I love that idea of like I mean, as you're describing, being in the Sistine Chapel. There's this openness that you have to have. You have to escape the jadedness, first of all for those of us who have been there several times, who are sick of the crowds, right. So there's this desire, but you have to go with this open heart, this open mind to receive, because it can be very easy just to go in and, okay, it's fine, I've seen it.
Joan:I remember going for Vespers in the Sistine Chapel once, and with us went a Roman man who lived across the street from the Sistine Chapel but had not been there since the renovations Very classic, roman right, like oh, I haven't been in, you know, 30 years. And when he walked into that chapel for the first time, seeing it after the Restoration, I was pulled out of my jadedness, right to see it with those new eyes. And so I think it's a call for us as pilgrims to see that art anew and to see it with that openness that it's not just something to check off our box, our checkbox, but to receive it the way it was painted and the way the Lord wants us to receive through it.
Liz Lev:That's what I think is important, also about those of us who lead or guide pilgrimages that we have the opportunity to see things fresh with other people's eyes. It's like it's what it's like teaching right you get to see the material again through the students' eyes, when the students understand it for the first time and watching them wrestle with it, and I think that's a very beautiful aspect of pilgrimage.
Joan:Yeah, just kind of a fun question as we wrap up what's your favorite place to take people, to lead people in Rome, whether it's something very you know, a very typical place or a very off the beaten path place, where do you think you've maybe you've seen the Lord work? Or where's your favorite? You know because I've been on tours with you in the Vatican Museums, I've been on tours with you in the Roman Forum, at the Coliseum, but where's your favorite place to kind of take a pilgrim to have that encounter with the Lord?
Liz Lev:Well, for me it really is the Vatican Museums, because the Vatican Museums allows you to build a story and sort of the way that the collection oscillates from pagan classical art to medieval art, to this duel between Raphael and Michelangelo, and there's something really exciting about the way everything fits together. There's something really stunning about the order with which you can see the classical world is doing its thing. It has no idea that there's going to be an incarnation, but once the incarnation comes, it can co-opt that beauty and it turns it into something completely new. All the while you have these human beings being human beings who are wrestling with each other, but somehow, between these dislikes and these arguments, they manage to produce their best work. I mean, I find the whole thing remarkably compelling and incredibly eye-opening.
Liz Lev:Besides that, I love to any place with Caravaggio. I love to visit, I like to do a lot of tours. One of the things I really enjoy doing is to talk about the So of Rome. Maria from Sant'Agostino sopra Minerva to Santa Maria, to Santa Maria de la Pace, just because there's a lot of strange ideas about the history of the church and women, and I find it a very nice way to kind of pick away a little bit at the shell of assumptions and stereotypes that we've built up about the church and women and kind of think about things a little bit differently.
Joan:Do you have a favorite pilgrim that you could speak about, A favorite person that you've shown around Rome? That might not. That might be okay for public telling that you know you've shown a lot of people around. Have you given us a favorite moment of someone who maybe has become a pilgrim out of a tourist, or just even the most fun person to show the Vatican museums to?
Liz Lev:I think the person who comes to mind is really not exactly what you're asking for, but the person who helped me see and reminded me of something very important about assumptions from people who have studied and spent a long time doing this. So many years ago I was doing a tour. It was a small group tour with maybe six people. They didn't really know each other and I think one person might have been traveling alone. She was irritating, she interrupted, asked questions. That seemed kind of silly and you could see that she was grating on the rest of the group. So it made it kind of difficult in dealing with the group because every time she opened her mouth I could see the other couple kind of rolling their eyes and trying to figure out how to diplomatically work through this.
Liz Lev:But when we got to the Sistine Chapel I let everybody go back in the day you could explain in the Sistine Chapel. So it was unusual for me to not just do the explanation of the Sistine Chapel, but I just was not in the mood, I was tired. So I was standing in front of the Last Judgment and this woman came back over to me and I remember just rolling my eyes internally and she said that's a pretty sexy painting. The first thought in my mind was oh my gosh, why? And then I looked at it through her eyes and I realized she was right and that the way Mary was placed next to Jesus, the way the figures interact to eyes like hers as opposed to eyes like mine, that's what that looks like.
Liz Lev:And thanks to this woman, the entire transformation of how I think about the Last Judgment -everything I write, everything I know. I owe it to this person who suddenly, with what seemed like a silly phrase, cut through all the art speak and all the Christian speak that would prevent me from seeing that Michelangelo was really trying to talk about a very profound kind of love, a deep passion of Christ for his church. So that's my favorite pilgrim.
Joan:Sometimes truth comes in the funniest places. Well, thank you, liz. How would people find you and your work if they want to learn more, or if they're going to Rome and they want to hire you for a tour of the Vatican Museum?
Liz Lev:Well, it'd be great. I have a website. It's Elizabeth-Lev. com about as easy as can be, excellent.
Joan:Well, thanks for taking the time with us. Thank you for opening some of these things up. I love how you spoke about the beauty in the pre-Christian and how God had this story written. God had the story written. He knew he was going to use beauty in pre-Christian art to bring us and in a sense, he brought the whole world from tourists to pilgrims, as he brought
Joan:Christ and brought beauty into the world Through Christ. But thanks so much for taking the time and listeners, thanks for listening. Feel free to share this episode with your friends and family and subscribe and follow to Invia for more episodes to come. God bless.
