Who were the audiences for Santa Maria Antiqua’s elaborate fresco cycles, and which of early Medieval Rome’s communities were represented among its worshipers? Although the identities of Santa Maria Antiquaís original founders are unknown, information about those who worshiped at the church and sponsored its decoration can be gleaned from the church’s frescoes in conjunction with epigraphic and textual evidence.

Imperial associations

The earliest fresco phase in the church, which antedates the building’s consecration around 570, preserves the Maria Regina on the apsidal wall of the sanctuary, called the ‘Palimpsest Wall’ for having retained multiple, later phases of decoration. This image is the oldest surviving depiction of Mary enthroned as a queen: Christ’s mother, clad in the opulent regalia of a Byzantine empress and originally flanked by two angels carrying crowns, “is bedecked with numerous royal attributes, including the loros or sash that was exclusively worn by members of the imperial family” (Kalas 2018, 196). This visual conflation of divine and temporal authority in the figure of Maria Regina raises the possibility that, some time in between the Byzantine occupations of Rome during the Gothic Wars (535-554) and Santa Maria Antiqua’s consecration (circa 570), the building bore a direct link with the Byzantine administrators that settled in the imperial apartments of the Palatine Hill above it (ibid).

 

Papal prerogatives

Frescoes of Latin and Greek Bishops and Church Fathers flanking the throne of Christ on the east aisle of the nave, completed around the time of Pope Paul I (r.757-767). Photograph by Dr. Steven Zucker for Smarthistory. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Whatever role the building may have played for the Byzantine administration of the sixth century, the earliest, securely dated phase of decoration in Santa Maria Antiqua after its consecration links the edifice with the Popes—the Bishops of the Roman Church—whose relations with the imperial court at Constantinople waxed and waned through the duration of Santa Maria Antiqua’s active use, as one theological controversy rose and abated before giving rise to the next. From the time of Pope Martin I (r.649-652), to which the earliest inscriptions in the sanctuary are dated (Lucey 2007, 139-40), through the eighth century, the papacy embellished the walls of Santa Maria Antiqua in order to convey the Bishops of Rome as the true defenders of the universal church—of orthodox doctrine and holy tradition against the errors of heresy. This message was sometimes proclaimed in opposition to the imperial court, which was directly involved in the theological disputes of the Church.

To the modern visitor of Santa Maria Antiqua, the central register of frescoes running along the church’s east aisle, part of a decorative program attributed to Pope Paul I (r. 757-767, pictured above), offers the most visible and best preserved example of this articulation of papal orthodoxy. In the center of this composition, Christ sits regnant upon a bejeweled throne, flanked to his left and his right by a panoply of what were originally twenty-two Latin and Greek saints of the Church drawn from throughout the Mediterranean Christian world (Maskarinec 2018).

Detail of Greek Fathers. Photograph by Dr. Steven Zucker for Smarthistory. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

This iconographic tradition draws on earlier precedents set by Paul I’s predecessors within the decoration of Santa Maria Antiqua itself: both Pope Martin I and Pope Paul VII (r.505-507) had previously furnished the sanctuary with arrangements of Latin and Greek Church Fathers to affirm orthodox positions supported by the Church in Rome in relation to Constantinople: in opposition in the case of Martin, in concord in the case of John VII (see Nordhagen 1968). On the frescoes of Paul I, Maya Maskarinec observes that “immediately to the right of Christ are four Roman popes and two Roman presbyters, all saints characterized by their involvement in the Christian conversion of Rome and the empire and including two popes (St. Leo and St. Sylvester) strongly associated with securing the Roman see’s claims to primacy within the Church and vis-à-vis the emperor,” and that among the Greek saints represented are “well-known Church fathers, some of whom had been previously depicted elsewhere within St. Maria Antiqua. More subtly, a number of those saints (in particular John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus, Cyril of Alexandria, and Athanasius of Alexandria) were known for their resistance to imperial policies” (ibid.)

These fresco cycles were produced at a critical moment in the relationship between Rome and Constantinople, when Rome asserted its authority in church teaching over and against the Byzantine emperor. In 754, Emperor Constantine V (r. 741-775) summoned a council of over three hundred bishops to affirm the imperial policy of iconoclasm—the belief that images of Christ and the saints should not be venerated, used in Christian worship, or placed in churches—as official church doctrine. The Roman See officially supported the veneration of holy images and condemned iconoclasm as heresy in 731, and would do so again at the Lateran Council of 769.

Immigrants from the East

Fresco of the Anargyroi, or Holy Physicians, in the chapel to the right of the sanctuary. Photograph by Dr. Steven Zucker for Smarthistory. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

It was not only in the context of fresco cycles affirming Roman doctrinal authority that images of Greek-speaking saints from the Eastern Mediterranean were employed in the decoration of Santa Maria Antiqua. To the right of the sanctuary is a chapel decorated by Pope John VII known as the “Chapel of the Holy Physicians.” Covering the walls of this chapel (the west wall cycle is pictured above) are depictions of the Anargyroi, Eastern medical saints who, according to tradition, provided miraculous healing without taking payment (Knipp 2002, 2). This special chapel dedicated to medical saints is not matched by any other surviving church architecture. However, the seventh-century Miracles of Saint Artemios describe the Chapel of St. Febronia (another medical saint) in the Church of Saint John Prodromos in Constantinople as being located to the right of the altar, suggesting Byzantine influence in the location of the healing saints’ chapel in Santa Maria Antiqua (ibid., 6). One of the medical saints featured in the chapel fresco is the Egyptian Saint Abbakyros, who appears in four separate locations throughout the church, including in a votive image in the atrium (ibid., 19). The healing brothers Cosmas and Damian, of Syrian origin, are also represented in the chapel of the Holy Physicians (not pictured).

During the period of Byzantine rule in Rome, Greek-speaking immigrants from throughout the Eastern Mediterranean took up residence in the eternal city, especially following the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641, which prompted a mass flight of citizens from the city of Alexandria (see Maskarinec 2018; Knipp 2002, 2). In Egypt, from whence many Greek-speaking émigré communities in Rome originated, the cults of the medical saints Abbakyros, Cosmas and Damian had taken over the old Pagan practice of incubation, in which an ill supplicant would spend the night in the shrine of a healing deity, “where they expected the god to reveal to them the means to a cure in a dream oracle or to cure them straightaway” (Knipp 2002, 11-12). David Knipp has therefore suggested that the chapel of the Holy Physicians may provide archaeological evidence of this practice having been transferred from the Eastern Mediterranean to Italy, especially when seen in the context of Santa Maria Antiqua’s charitable capacity as a diaconia, or church-affiliated welfare institution (ibid).

Works cited

Kalas, Gregor. “Acquiring the Antique in Byzantine Rome: The Economics of Architectural Reuse at Santa Maria Antiqua” in eds. Diana Y. Ng and Molly Sweetnam-Burland, Reuse and Renovation in Roman Material Culture: Functions, Aesthetics, Interpretations.Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 186-207.

Knipp, David. “The Chapel of Physicians at Santa Maria Antiqua.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Vol. 56 (2002), pp 1-23. Available online via Dumbarton Oaks.

Lucey, Stephen J. “Art and Socio-Cultural Identity in Early Medieval Rome: The Patrons of Santa Maria Antiqua.” Roma Felix: Formation and Reflections of Medieval Rome. Ashgate, 2007, pp. 139-158.

Maskarinec, Maya. City of Saints: Rebuilding Rome in the Early Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Kindle edition.

The full bibliography for this site can be read here.