The Throne That Floats on Bronze Clouds

In 1867, a wooden chair, cracked by cuts and gnawed by worms, was lifted into view inside St. Peter's Basilica and photographed and displayed for veneration for what would be the last time in a century and a half. Rimmed with carved ivory and fitted with metal rings so it could once be carried like a sedia gestatoria, it looked like nothing more than an old, battered seat. But tradition held that this was the chair used by the Apostle Peter himself as Bishop of Rome, the first Pope, and so it was treated not as furniture but as a relic of the Church's own foundation.

The object's documented history begins centuries after Peter's death. In 875, the Roman Emperor Charles the Bald gave the wooden throne to Pope John VIII. It was studied repeatedly afterward, most recently between 1968 and 1974, when it was removed from Bernini's altar. Researchers concluded it was a single chair rather than two combined, covered in some kind of upholstery, and that its oldest timbers dated no earlier than the 6th century — long before Charles the Bald, but long after Peter.

Whatever its true age, the chair's fame rests as much on its casing as its wood. Between 1647 and 1653, Gian Lorenzo Bernini built an extraordinary gilt bronze reliquary shaped, medieval-fashion, like an enormous version of the chair it protects. Unlike real furniture of its era, Bernini's cathedra is made entirely of swirling scroll-work enclosing a relief of Christ instructing Peter to tend his sheep. A bronze cushion, rendered with startling realism, sits conspicuously empty — because the true seat lies hidden within.

Four towering bronze Doctors of the Church seem to bear the throne aloft on splayed struts: the Western saints Ambrose and Augustine of Hippo, mitered, on the outside, and the Eastern saints John Chrysostom and Athanasius, bare-headed, on the inside. Above, lit by a central tinted window through which light streams, gilded sunrays and sculpted clouds burst outward, so the whole ensemble appears to hover weightlessly over the altar in the basilica's apse — a fusion of sculpture, architecture and light typical of Bernini's Baroque imagination.

Inscribed in gold across the frieze, in both Latin and Greek, is Christ's charge to Peter: 'O Shepherd of the Church, you feed all Christ's lambs and sheep.' The altar beneath the chair is the second most important in the basilica, after only the papal altar under St. Peter's Baldachin, and together they stand as a visual argument for the authority of the Bishop of Rome as successor to Peter — an argument made in bronze, gold, and captured light rather than words.