Early Christian Rome – Architecture and Imagery from Constantine to Innocent II - six talks by John McNeill

What was Rome like in the 4th century? Did it remain populous and vibrant despite the shock of the first Barbarian incursions of the 270s and the building of a new circuit of walls under Aurelian? The economy certainly showed no sign of decline. The Palatine, Forum Romanum and Campus Martius still shone with well-maintained buildings. Indeed, Maxentius could replace Hadrian’s old Temple of Venus and Rome with a far grander structure on a podium which almost filled the gap between a corner of the Forum and the Colosseum, and one of Constantine’s first architectural accomplishments was to complete the basilica nova with concrete vaults that soared 128 feet above its marble pavement. Meanwhile, around the edge of the city, the first of the great imperially-sponsored Christian churches were constructed, at the Lateran and Vatican, on sites which were to become the papal and administrative centres of the Middle Ages.

Roman funerary practice forbade the burial of the dead within the Urbs – the strictly defined urban area of Rome – giving rise to the creation of clusters of catacombs and martyria along arterial roads leading out of the city. By the end of the second century, when we first hear of the Church of Rome purchasing or accepting extra-mural land for use as cemeteries, there were many of these catacombs. Bodies were mostly inhumed in rock-cut cavities to either side of the underground tunnels, but wealthier families frequently commissioned chambers (cubicula) in which several of their members would be buried and where feasts were held on the anniversaries of death. Often extensively decorated, the catacomb chambers around Rome preserve the most extensive assemblage of early Christian imagery to survive anywhere.

By the end of the 4th century Rome was encompassed by a ring of vast funerary basilicas, and its pre-Constantinian house churches were being replaced by substantial community churches. Twenty-Five of the old house churches were designated ‘titulars’, their priests eventually acquiring the dignity ‘cardinal’ and being called on to assist the Pope. Several survive in something like their Late Antique form – Santa Sabina, San Marco, San Clemente, Santa Balbina. All were built of brick, with arcades constructed from reused marble columns and capitals, their apses usually embellished with imagery in mosaic. Of the great funerary basilicas only San Sebastiano on the Via Appia survives in its original guise, the basilicas of San Lorenzo and Sant’Agnese having been rebuilt or extended with galleries and three-storey elevations. The latter brought something of the architectural idioms of the eastern Mediterranean, of Byzantium, into a Rome beginning to suffer from severe population decline.

Perhaps the most famous event in Charlemagne’s reign was his coronation as emperor in Rome on Christmas Day, 800 by Pope Leo III. Not only was this a climactic moment in a relationship between the papacy and the Franks that had been building for half a century, it created a new and complex relationship between concepts of ecclesiastical and secular power. The papacy had been growing in authority over much of the previous century, gradually sidelining Byzantine claims to authority and taking control of the city and its surrounding territory. Renewal – the renovatio romani imperii of Charlemagne’s proclamation as emperor – took on a particular form under papal patronage. The centrepiece of this are three magnificent basilicas created under Pope Paschal I (817-824) – Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Santa Maria in Domnica and Santa Prassede – their interiors ablaze with mosaics of remarkable iridescence and sparkle.

Although Rome is the only city in Europe where standing buildings survive from every century of the Christian era, the 10th century is scraping the barrel. A few modifications can still be seen at Santa Maria Antiqua (the church in the Forum), probably made in the late 10th century, and the church of Santa Maria in Pallara, on the Palatine, was built at some point between 953 and 999. That changes with the arrival of a new international reform-minded papacy after 1046. Newly expressive types of wall paintings appear at San Crisogono and San Clemente, tower-houses begin to proliferate, and tiny chapels are established in areas where populations are again beginning to climb, as with Santa Maria in Cappella, in Trastevere.

San Clemente and Santa Maria in Trastevere are the two great projects of the early 12th century, and unlike the situation between c. 850 and c. 1050, these were not projects undertaken in isolation. Church building in Rome was booming, and the skills necessary to construct and equip large numbers of buildings with marble columns, pavements, ceilings and apse mosaics were widely available by 1100. San Bartolommeo in Isola, San Crisogono, the Quattro Coronati, Santa Pudenziana, Santa Maria in Cosmedin, were all rebuilt over this same half century. All were undertaken on behalf of individual popes or by their ‘cardinal titulars’. San Clemente was technically the most demanding, involving the construction of a new church 13 feet above the level of the old. Santa Maria endorsed the return of the Ionic colonnade as recently employed in neighbouring San Crisogono. Both also invested in rhetorically sophisticated mosaic cycles – two buildings guaranteed to take one’s breath away.