St Peter's baldachin, Bernini's canopy over the apostle's tomb

Some works you admire and some organise an entire building. Bernini’s baldachin is one of the second kind. It stands at the exact centre of St Peter’s, over the papal altar and above the apostle’s tomb, and the whole church seems built to funnel you towards it. Here’s what to look for, what the 2024 clean turned up and which stories I don’t buy for lack of a source.

A bronze canopy over Peter’s tomb

The idea behind it is simple. A baldachin is the fabric canopy carried over the most sacred object in a procession, and Bernini turned it into a fixed structure almost 29 metres high, roughly the height of a ten-storey building. He made it for Urban VIII between 1624 and 1635 and set it over the papal altar, which in turn stands over Peter’s grave. The dove of the Holy Spirit is painted on the underside of the canopy.

The four columns twist, and not on a whim. Bernini based them on the marble columns that had surrounded the apostle’s tomb in the old basilica, so the new monument recalled the one that had stood there for centuries. For me that’s the cleverest decision in the whole work, because it ties the Baroque to the memory of the place.

What is Bernini’s baldachin made of?

More than you’d think. According to the Fabbrica di San Pietro, it combines bronze, gold, wood and copper. The great canopy on top is wood and copper, and much of the rest is gilded bronze. Above that runs a whole world of figures, with putti, foliage, colossal angels, the papal tiara and the keys.

And the bees. They were the emblem of the Barberini, Urban VIII’s family, and they’re scattered over the bronze like the client’s signature. From the middle of the nave they disappear, so I’d move round to one side of the altar to find them.

What the 2024 clean revealed

The previous restoration dated from 1758, when a team of around sixty people a day worked on it for three months. Since then a layer of damp dust had dulled the gold and the tone of the bronze. In 2024 scaffolding went up for nine months, designed not to touch the baldachin and to let the liturgy continue, and on 27 October it was unveiled at the closing Mass of the Synod. The Knights of Columbus paid for the work.

The surprise, according to the Fabbrica’s head of technical works, Alberto Capitanucci, was the colour. The bronze has a leather tone that isn’t a patina but a deliberate foundry treatment, so the whole thing would read as a processional canopy held up on leather-covered poles. The restorer Giuseppe Mantella added that in 1758 the original fire gilding, done with mercury and practically indelible, gave way to gilding with gold leaf.

My favourite detail is something else. About twenty metres up, the team found graffiti and signatures left by earlier restorers and sampietrini, the sole of a child’s shoe, probably from a youngster learning the trade from a father who worked there, and an eighteenth-century shopping list. To me that’s the best reminder that as well as a masterpiece, this has been somebody’s workplace for centuries.

Figures that do the rounds, and that I don’t trust

In other guides you’ll read a height of 28.74 metres and dates of 1623-1634. I haven’t found either in an official source, and the Fabbrica gives almost 29 metres and 1624 to 1635, so that’s what I go with. Nor will I repeat the story that the bronze was stripped from the Pantheon, because however often it’s told, it doesn’t appear on the basilica’s website or in Vatican News. If a guide presents it as certain, it’s fair to ask where it comes from.

How to see it well, from afar and up close

The baldachin is inside St Peter’s Basilica, which is free and open from 07:00 to 20:00. I’d look at it first from the nave, well back, with Bernini’s Chair framed between the columns at the far end. Then I’d move to one side and, time permitting, look down into the Confessio, where the Niche of the Pallia sits beneath the altar.

Coming from Michelangelo’s Pietà in the first chapel on the right, the baldachin is the natural next stop along the nave. For the view from above, climbing St Peter’s Dome costs €17 by the stairs and already includes the basilica. And to see what lies underneath, the Vatican necropolis is the tour that takes you down to the apostle’s tomb.