Chair of Saint Peter the Apostle

Today we don’t celebrate a person but a piece of furniture — and hold off on laughing, because it’s one of the most curious pieces of furniture in Christendom. The Chair of Saint Peter is a wooden throne kept in the Vatican basilica. Medieval legend identified it with the bishop’s seat that belonged to Peter, the first bishop of Rome. In reality, scholars have established that it is a ninth-century piece: probably a portable imperial throne of Byzantine workmanship, which in 875 Charles the Bald, king of the Franks, gave to Pope John VIII when he came down to Rome to be crowned emperor. And here comes the detail that makes the trip worthwhile. The front of the throne is decorated with eighteen ivory plaques depicting **the labors of Hercules and the constellations of the Zodiac**. A throne pagan to the core that ended up standing for the apostle’s chair: nobody has hidden it, it’s right there for anyone to see. Over time the memory of the historical facts was lost and the object was venerated as a relic. In the seventeenth century Gian Lorenzo Bernini built around it that great construction of gilded bronze that everyone knows, in the apse of Saint Peter’s, with four Doctors of the Church holding it up and, on the backrest, the scene of Christ saying to Peter: “Feed my lambs.” The Italian word cattedra comes from Latin and means the bishop’s seat: it’s the same word Italians use for a teacher’s desk at school. There’s no name day today, but there is a lesson about time: things become what people believe they are, and sometimes it takes a thousand years to notice.