Michelangelo's monster

To Henry James, in the second half of the 19th century, St Peter's in Rome was as much a walk as a church: "It serves where the Boulevards, where Piccadilly and Broadway fall short," he wrote. Keith Miller's study of the great baroque basilica offers a stimulating perambulation around this vast expanse of sacred space in the company of a sophisticated guide.

Covering an area of almost six acres, St Peter's is said to be the largest Christian church in the world. Indeed, its dome, looming over the skyline of the Eternal City, sometimes appears to be a symbol, not only of the combined embrace of Holy Mother Church and of papal authority, but of the sublime itself.

Not the least of St Peter's qualities as an architectural wonder is the way in which it assimilated the work of so many artists and architects in the course of the long-drawn-out period of its construction, while remaining at the same time a synthesised whole. Bernini may have imposed a decorative unity, with his sensual use of marble, all those twisted barley-sugar columns - and what may appear to the modern eye to amount to a general lack of restraint - but, in the two centuries preceding him, the names of those contributing to the church's design included Bramante, Raphael, and, of course, Michelangelo who, already over 70 when he took on the commission, may not have been responsible for all the work commonly attributed to him. At the centre of new St Peter's, which reached completion in 1667, with Bernini's Piazza San Pietro, lay the remains of the old basilica, built by the Emperor Constantine in the 4th century AD over the supposed site of the apostle Peter's grave, and not finally demolished until the first decade of the 17th century.

Miller's book is far from being simply a travel guide. Instead, he describes it as a kind of Frankenstein's monster, in which elements of cultural and political history, architectural criticism, as well as travel writing, combine to provide a riveting investigation of a church which, by its very nature, must address "divergent and even incompatible sets of cultural and spiritual needs".

On a much smaller scale, Margaret Visser did something comparable, seven years ago, in her book The Geometry of Love, in which she described a walk around the Roman church of Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura, delving into its history, and the significance of its pictures and decoration, while attempting to show how it evokes powerful responses in visitors pursuing very different agendas, both religious and secular.

Miller helps us to understand St Peter's on a number of levels: as an extraordinary spectacle of engineering and of shifting symmetries of space and design; as a centre of artistic expression, a "school for artists", crowded with the works of the masters of the 16th and 17th centuries, and containing a supreme masterpiece from the end of the 15th, Michelangelo's Pieta; as an abiding influence on other domed structures around the world, from Wren's St Paul's to the Washington Capitol, and Albert's Speer's plans for a Great Hall in the projected Nazi Germania; and, finally, as a place of pilgrimage to the remains of St Peter himself, as much an object of fascination to the ordinary tourist as they are to those directed by their Christian faith.

In one extraordinary chapter, Miller burrows deep into the bowels of the church, to the airless "street of tombs", to examine the evidence for the identification of the bones, excavated from beneath the altar during the papacy of Pius XII, as those of Peter. The official story from the Vatican may be that the tomb and remains are genuine, but, as Miller says, the chain of evidence is broken, and in the end it comes down to a matter of faith, not just religious faith, but faith in the "integrity and objectivity of the individuals concerned": archaeologists, epigraphers, and Monsignor Kaas, the official who had the bones secretly removed and stored elsewhere for safe-keeping, when they were uncovered in 1942.

Keith Miller's St Peter's joins other outstanding titles in Profile's Wonders of the World series, fast becoming something of a wonder itself, with its elegant design, its scholarly enthusiasm, and its respect for the general reader. Like the best guides, it makes one long to visit the place in question, armed with book in hand.

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