Whatever happened to the papal tiara?

The triple crown – that oversized, turban-shaped, jewel-encrusted, gold-and-silver helmet – traditionally epitomised the pope’s power as God’s representative on earth. After his coronation in 1963 Paul VI declared this piece of historic headgear unsuitable to Peter’s pastoral mission. It has not been worn since, not even by the traditionally-minded Benedict XVI. The tiara has become a sort of papal relic; progressive Catholics regard it as outmoded and outdated, and it makes them cringe.

Several tiaras nevertheless grace the Vatican’s collections, and can be gawped at from time to time. The “Spanish Tiara”, a gift from Isabella II of Spain, dates from 1855. The “Belgian” was donated by the ladies of Leopold II’s court in 1871. The “Palatine” was a present from the members of the Palatine Guard in 1877; the “Paris” came from the Catholics of France in 1888, while the “Austrian” was given by the Emperor Franz Joseph in 1894.

These tiaras constitute only a fraction of the regalia popes have acquired. Renaissance popes, the earliest who recorded their collections carefully, commissioned such items often. In the 1460s, Paul II ordered two tiaras encrusted with precious stones valued respectively at 50,000 and 200,000 florins.  Sixtus IV’s tiara was worth 110,000 florins in the 1470s and it included over 10,000 ducats worth of pearls and gemstones. Julius II commissioned a tiara in 1510 that held an enormous 120-carat ruby.

Such ostentatious diadems strongly reflected wider political aspirations to Italian domination at the time. Popes had already begun to emblazon the tiara’s form on coins, coats of arms, and other images representative of their authority. Alongside the crossed keys, it made their mark distinctive; one knew when something was papal, rather than merely episcopal or royal. And popes guarded their prerogatives over image rights jealously. Only once did they concede a right to use the tiara shape, to the Patriarchs of Lisbon in the early 18th century. The habit of the Archbishops of Benevento to use a tiara-like device rankled.

It may surprise modern sensibilities that popes had so many tiaras to choose from. Yet majesty lay in multiplicity. Popes wore them, but they also paraded them in processions – up to four at a time on gilded cushions, according to the diaries of some early modern masters of ceremonies. The ill-fated Pius VI was a particular fan of such theatre – so much so that in the 1780s he refurbished the four tiaras he inherited. Alas, only one of these, the so-called “Gregory XIII”, survives. When Napoleon’s troops took Rome in 1797, they confiscated the entire papal treasury. Three tiaras were melted down; the great 400-carat emerald in the fourth was prised out and taken to Paris.

Pius VII therefore had to confront his coronation in Venice in 1800 without a tiara, so a papier-mâché one was quickly mocked up. Local noblewomen loaned him gems to mount in the structure, which proved lightweight and agile. Just the sort of headgear a pope who wanted to be seen and remembered could seize upon, in fact. Gregory XVI retired Pius VII’s paper crown, but commissioned a fresh one in lightweight metal. His image-conscious successor Pius IX then widened its use, vesting it with connotations of universal authority and the papal plenitude.

Pio Nono’s approach, in fact, harked back to the Middle Ages. The tiara’s original significance seems to have been as a temporal crown – the pope had his mitre for the spiritual power – but Innocent III promoted the idea that it might mean something more. He appears in a famous fresco which shows him in his tiara beside the Throne of the Lamb – a clear assertion of the tiara’s universal symbolism. Boniface VIII, another keen exploiter of visuals, added a second crown to his tiara. A 14th-century Avignon pope – we are not sure which – added a third, which led to the meaning of the “triple crown” being hotly debated.

Some said the three crowns represented royal, sacerdotal and imperial powers. Others argued that they were signs of the threefold nature of theological harmonies: Father, Son and Holy Ghost; Greek, Latin, Hebrew; the Church as Christ’s wife, daughter, and mother. Hundreds of pages of text explicated these arcane arguments. Pius IX revived the debates when he wore the tiara to celebrate the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception in 1854. Because the occasion was intended to define the Immaculate Conception as a universal dogma, he encouraged the tiara to be seen as a symbol of what would become, in 1870, his infallibility.

Yet later popes have not always been convinced. Long before Paul VI’s repudiation of the tiara, Benedict XV sold the jewels in the “Napoleon Tiara” – a gift from the emperor back to Pius VII when they were working towards reconciliation – to raise money for victims of the First World War. A pastoral pope should have other priorities, he intimated; his post-Vatican II successors have strengthened that line ever since.

One irony of contemporary attitudes to tiaras is that (with the understandable exception of John Paul I) each pope since John XXIII has had one made for him by pious Catholics somewhere in the world. John XXIII’s, a gift from the people of his hometown of Bergamo, remains in the cathedral treasury there. Paul VI’s, a modernist one fabricated in Milan, and the model for that used by Jude Law as Pius XIII in Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope, now resides in the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Washington, DC.

John Paul II’s was made in Hungary; Benedict XVI’s in Germany. Even Pope Francis has his own tiara: an ostentatious, pearly item presented to him by the President of the Assembly of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The precise locations and fates of these tiaras are not widely known. Unlike the indigenous headgear of Papua New Guinea, which Francis gamely sported on his visit there this year, they are not likely to appear on a papal head soon.

The surviving tiaras bear material, if silent, witnesses to the papacy’s ongoing transformations in the contemporary world. This particular papal symbol seems destined for ongoing romanticisation, but will there ever be a revival? How future popes see their relationship with past and present will determine this, as so much else.

Dr Miles Pattenden is a member of the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford

The post Whatever happened to the papal tiara? first appeared on Catholic Herald.

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