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Early Medieval Europe

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Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK EMED Early Medieval Europe 0963-9462 2007 The Author. Journal Compilation Blackwell Publishing Ltd XXX Original Article

The basilica of S. Cecilia
Caroline J. Goodson

Material memory: rebuilding the
basilica of S. Cecilia in Trastevere,
Rome

C

aioii xi

J. G

ooosox

Examining Pope Paschal Is early ninth-century architectural project of
S. Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome, brings to light the diversity of functions
of

tituli

in early medieval Rome. Not only was the church a papal basilica
and site of the stational liturgy of Rome, but it was also a shrine to the
saint Cecilia, a popular Roman martyr. The architectural arrangement
makes clear that the papal project incorporated both the papal cult and
the popular cult of the saint by manipulating the archaeology of the site
and translating corporeal relics to the urban church.

The basilica of S. Cecilia in Trastevere was made by many men and one
woman. Legend holds that a noble Roman woman and soon-to-be
martyr Cecilia dedicated her home as a church, which was arranged and
administered by Pope Urban I (22230).

1

Most of the structures that

*

I thank Fabio Barry, Dorigen Caldwell, Tobias Kmpf, Steven Ostrow, Tina Sessa and Emma
Stirrup for their thoughts, suggestions and corrections to my work on S. Cecilia in Trastevere.
Monsignor Guerino di Tora, Badessa Giovanna and the Benedictine nuns of S. Cecilia, in
particular Suor Letizia, generously facilitated my research by extending permission to document
the Cappella del Bagno and other parts of the church and excavations. A debt of gratitude is
owed to Emma Stirrup for her assistance measuring the chapel in the sweltering summer of
2003. Early versions of this article were read at the 2005 Renaissance Society of America
meeting, University of Delaware, and Northwestern University, and I thank those audiences
for their critical comments, especially Hugh Kennedy who heard it more than once, and Julia
Hillner for her precision.

1

The story of Cecilias life, death and her foundation of the church is recorded in the

Passio
Sanctae Ceciliae virgina et martyris

, a narrative composed probably in the late fth century.
Socit des Bollandistes (eds),

Bibliotheca hagiographica latina antiquae et mediae aetatis

(Brussels, 1949), no. 1495, edited by H. Delehaye,

tudes sur le lgendier romain: Les saints
de novembre et de dcembre

, Subsidia hagiographica XXIII (Brussels, 1936), pp. 7396, 194
220. Delehaye used an eighth-century manuscript from Paris (Bibliothque Nationale,
lat. 10861) and a tenth-century manuscript from Chartres (Bibliothque Municipale de
Chartres, 144) for his edition of the

Passion

. Other published editions used the eleventh-
century legendary of the monastery, discussed below, p. 50; A. Bosio,

Historia passionis beatae
Caeciliae virginis,



Valeriani, Tiburtii, et Maximi martyrum

(Rome, 1600), pp. 1 26. It is not
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The basilica of S. Cecilia

3

stand today were built on the orders of Pope Paschal I (81724). They
underwent restorations in the third quarter of the eleventh century,
under the cardinal Desiderius, abbot of Montecassino, cardinal of
S. Cecilia, and later Pope Victor III (10867), and at the end of the
sixteenth century, under Paolo Camillo Sfondrato,

cardinale nipote

of
Pope Gregory XIV (15901) and cardinal of the church from 1591 1618.
Through these transformations, the life of the building was tied to the
death of Cecilia. In the early ninth century, Paschals church was built
to incorporate the remains of structures that coincided with

loca sancta

(holy or sanctied sites) described in the

Passion

of Saint Cecilia, the
story of her life and martyrdom. Paschals building project consolidated
the site of a saints life and martyrdom within the fabric of an urban
papal church, incorporating the veneration of a saint with the papal
mass. At the centre of his new church, beneath the main altar, Paschal
placed the body of Cecilia herself, returning the saint to her home and
her holy relics to the place of her martyrdom. The subsequent rebuild-
ings of the church recapitulated key events: the death of Cecilia, the
discovery of her body and its placement under the altar. In each of the
major building campaigns at the church, in the ninth, eleventh and
sixteenth century, the historical texts about and the archaeology of the
site were key elements in shaping the renovations.

2

In many ways, S. Cecilia is typical of the churches of early medieval
Rome. Like many of the

tituli

, early neighbourhood churches, the
beginnings of the church are shrouded in legend.

3

The character of the
saint may very well have emerged from the name of the church, reect-
ing its original donation of property from a perhaps rather more mun-
dane Caecilia.

4

The

titulus s. caeciliae

was said to have been founded by

clear which manuscripts were used by the fteenth-century hagiographer Mombritius; B.
Mombritius,

Sanctuarium seu Vitae Sanctorum

, 2 vols (Paris, 1910), I, pp. 33241.

2

For an introduction to the church, see R. Krautheimer

et al.

,

Corpus basilicarum christianarum
Romae

, 5 vols (New York and Vatican City, 193777), I, pp. 94111. On the

c

.1600 renova-
tions, see E. Stirrup, The Altar Sculptures of Virgin Martyrs: The Ideal of Chastity and the
Decorous Treatment of Relics in Tridentine Rome, D.Phil thesis, University of Oxford
(2002), pp. 11267; T. Kmpf, Framing Cecilias Sacred Body: Paolo Camillo Sfondrato and
the Language of Revelation,

Sculpture Journal

6 (2001), pp. 1020; A. Nava Cellini, Stefano
Maderno, Francesco Vanni e Guido Reni a Santa Cecilia in Trastevere,

Paragone

20 (April
1969), pp. 1841; E. Loevinson, Documenti di S. Cecilia in Trastevere,

Archivio della R.
Societ romana della Storia Patria

49 (1926), pp. 356401.

3

F. Guidobaldi, Chiese Titolari di Roma nel tessuto urbano preesistente,

Quaeritur Inventus
Colitur

, Studi di Antichit Cristiana 40, 2 vols (Vatican City, 1989), I, pp. 38396; C. Pietri,
Donateurs et pieux etablissements daprs le lgendier romain (V

e

VII

e

s.), in

Hagiographie.
Cultures et socits IVXII sicle. Actes du Colloque organis Nanterre et Paris 25 mai 1979

(Paris, 1981), pp. 43547; R. Vielliard,

Recherches sur les origines de la Rome chrtienne

(Macon,
1940); J.P. Kirsch,

Die rmischen Titelkirchen im Altertum

, Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur
des Altertums 9:1/2 (Paderborn, 1918).

4

V. Saxer, La chiesa di Roma dal V al X secolo: amministrazione centrale e organizzazione
territoriale, in

Roma nellalto medioevo

, Settimane 48 (Spoleto, 2001), pp. 493633, at pp. 55860.
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Caroline J. Goodson

Cecilia herself in her own home in the days before she succumbed to
martyrdom.

5

Whether or not that is true, there is consistent evidence
attesting to a church dedicated to S. Cecilia within the city of Rome
from the sixth century onwards, and perhaps before.

6

Though we do
not know when it originated or what it looked like, we can be fairly
certain it was always located in the area where it still stands, in the busy
neighbourhood of Trastevere across the river from the majority of the
ancient monuments of the city. A late eighth-century visitor to Rome
noted the location of the earlier church, prior to Paschals rebuilding,
as one of the sights to see along the route from the Porta Aurelia across
the Tiber River to the city centre, where he then visited monuments such
as the Colosseum and the Baths of Diocletian.

7

Among the early medieval
urban churches of Rome, Paschals S. Cecilia is a very well-preserved
example and its study illustrates the ways in which ecclesiastical build-
ings served in the life of the city as points of intersection between sacred
history, historic topography and papal politics.
The story of the relationship between Saint Cecilia and S. Cecilia
and the popes and cardinals who shaped that relationship has not been
told. The conventional view of the church is still that presented by
Richard Krautheimer, the much-acclaimed architectural historian of
Rome. Krautheimer made S. Cecilia and the other churches of Paschal
landmarks in western architectural history by holding them up as a
medieval revival of Romes fourth- and fth-century basilicas.

8

Accord-
ing to his interpretation, the basilicas erected by Paschal I in the rst

5

Delehaye,

tudes sur le lgendier romain

, p. 219.

6

There exists a funerary inscription referring to what may be the

titulus sanctae Caeciliae

which
has been dated between 379464: G.B. De Rossi,

Inscriptiones christianae urbis Romae

(Rome,
185788), no. 816. Another inscription names a presbyter from the

titulus

, though its dating
has been contested: A. Ferrua and A. Silvagni (eds),

Inscriptiones christianae urbis Romae
septimo saeculo antiquores

, ns (Rome, 1922), no. 116, assign a date of the sixth century, and
provide references for earlier scholars earlier chronologies. Presbyters from the

titulus Caeciliae

and the

titulus s. Caeciliae

signed the acts of the Roman council of 499 and 595, respectively,
and these signatures have been held to reect the transition from actual property donor to
invented saint in the names of some Roman

tituli

, see for example Saxer, La chiesa di Roma,
pp. 6056, 607. An episode in the life of Pope Vigilius (53755) took place in the

ecclesia
sanctae Caeciliae

,

Liber Ponticalis

[hereafter

LP

], 61: 4, L.M. Duchesne,

Le Liber Ponticalis:
texte, introduction et commentaire

, 3 vols (Paris, 188692), I, p. 297, 300 and n. 12, though
this section of the text is part of the second edition, dating from around 640, R. Davis,

The
Book of Pontiffs (Liber Ponticalis): The Ancient Biographies of the First Ninety Roman Bishops
to AD 715

, Translated Texts for Historians 6, rev. edn (Liverpool, 2000), p.

xiviii

.

7

For a discussion of the Einsiedeln itinerary, see recently F. A. Bauer, Das Bild der Stadt
Rom in karolingischer Zeit: Der Anonymus Einsiedlensis,

Rmische Quartalschrift

92 (1997),
pp. 190229, with bibliography.

8

R. Krautheimer, The Carolingian Revival of Early Christian Architecture,

Art Bulletin

24:1
(1942), pp. 138, at pp. 201. Reprint of article and postscript in R. Krautheimer,

Early
Christian, Medieval, and Renaissance Art

(New York, 1969), pp. 20356; 2nd postscript
in R. Krautheimer,

Ausgewhlte Aufstze zur europischen Kunstgeschichte

(Cologne, 1988),
pp. 2726.
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The basilica of S. Cecilia

5

quarter of the ninth century were a little renascence after centuries of
the Dark Ages, during which period the very few buildings in Rome that
were built had non-basilical plans, perhaps reecting foreign, non-Roman
inuence. He argued that the signicance of medieval churches such as
S. Cecilia lies in the way in which they resemble in plan and elevation
the great basilicas of Christian antiquity such as St Peters and St Pauls.
Krautheimer saw S. Cecilia and Paschals other buildings as a great break
in the pattern of church building in Rome, from an era of non-basilical
structures to a resurrection of an ancient architectural splendour, the
Christian basilica. Further, Krautheimer saw a political message in this
revival; he suggested that Paschal was seeking to stake out an element
of importance for Rome and to claim imperial grandeur for himself by
replicating the basilicas of great ancient emperors, especially Constan-
tines basilicas.

9

This argument was part of Krautheimers theory of the
Iconography of Medieval Architecture, whereby he demonstrated that
architectural plans and elevations were copied from earlier buildings for
symbolic purposes.

10

Aspects of the shape of a building, such as continu-
ous transepts or domes surrounded by annular colonnades, linked a new
building to great historic prototypes, such as the Constantinian basilica
of St Peters or the fourth-century complex at the Holy Sepulchre,
Jerusalem. For the medieval audience, Krautheimer argued, the inclu-
sion of some of these salient architectural features in a new building
was enough to associate it with the ancient one and the new patron
with the historic one. This theory has been an extremely pervasive and
compelling interpretative scheme and is still very present in the study
of medieval architecture.
11
One reason for the endurance of Krautheimers theory is that it is
based on close examination of the evidence. He advocated close looking
at textual and archaeological sources and the data behind his synthesis
constitute an expansive corpus of empirical observation and meticulous
archival research, still an important resource today.
12
Yet at its core,
Krautheimers theory is a largely formalist interpretation of architecture,
9
Krautheimer, The Carolingian Revival, p. 14.
10
R. Krautheimer, Introduction to an Iconography of Mediaeval Architecture, Journal of
the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942), pp. 1 33. Reprint of article and postscript
in Krautheimer, Early Christian, pp. 14950; 2nd postscript in Krautheimer, Ausgewhlte,
pp. 14297.
11
For recent critiques, see C. Goodson, Revival and Reality: The Carolingian Renaissance in
Rome and the Case of S. Prassede, Acta ad archaeologiam et artium historiam pertinentia 15
(2005), S. Sande (ed.), Atti del seminario in onore di Hans Peter LOrange, Istituto di Norvegia,
Roma, 2003, pp. 6192; V. Pace, La Felix Culpa di Richard Krautheimer: Roma, Santa
Prassede e la Rinascit Carolingia, in F. Guidobaldi and A. Guiglia Guidobaldi (eds),
Ecclesiae Urbis. Atti del congresso internazionale di studi sulle chiese di Roma (IVX secolo).
Roma, 410 settembre 2000, Studi di antichit cristiana 59, 3 vols (Vatican City, 2002), I,
pp. 6572.
12
Still fundamental to the study of Roman churches is Krautheimer et al., Corpus.
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6 Caroline J. Goodson
where form, almost exclusively, generates meaning. Too little attention,
it might be argued, is paid to function, materials and, most importantly, to
the diverse cult activities that coexisted in a medieval church, and the ways
in which they generated meaning in architecture. In the decades since
Krautheimers theories were published, the eld of architectural history
has concerned itself with identifying diverse cult functions coexisting in
buildings and the ways in which these might have registered with
different constituencies. Additionally, the increasing intersections between
medieval archaeology and architectural history have encouraged the
consideration of buildings within their urban contexts, as ensembles
of structures, images and performance, rather than isolated plans and
elevations that refer to each other.
13
There are greater questions to be asked of S. Cecilia than are imagined
in Krautheimers philosophy: why did Paschal rebuild this church as
opposed to another? What, if anything, did the building have to do
with Saint Cecilia? And on a more general level, what was an early
medieval viewers sense of the building history of Rome? The answer to
these questions can be found in an examination of the building with
respect to its planning, adornment and cult function. Considering these
buildings as ensembles of spatial structures, images and stages for ritual,
sheds light on a different quality of the church, beyond the buildings
formal classicism. In the case of S. Cecilia, the builders and patron had
a concern for tradition, heretofore demonstrated with respect to the
architectural plan of the building, but it will be argued that different
kinds of tradition, not just architectural, contributed to this buildings
importance in early medieval Rome. In the construction of the basilica,
textual and material sources were jointly employed to lend sacral
authenticity to the church and thus to create a shrine for a Roman
martyr and a monument to papal and saintly interaction.
The church of S. Cecilia, as Pope Paschal constructed it, takes the form
of a basilica with a wide nave, two side aisles, and a single apse (Fig. 1).
The original columns of the nave are almost all covered over by
nineteenth-century stucco and the originally open roof trusses are like-
wise covered by an early modern ceiling.
14
The columns and capitals,
13
Recent examples of these kinds of approaches to the study of medieval architecture
include P. Fergusson, Architecture of Solitude: Cistercian Abbeys in Twelfth-Century England
(Princeton, 1984); E. Fentress et al., Walls and Memory: The Abbey of San Sebastiano at Alatri
(Lazio) from Late Roman Monastery to Renaissance Villa and Beyond (Turnhout, 2005); and
C. Bruzelius, The Stones of Naples: Church Building in Angevin Italy, 12661343 (New Haven,
2004).
14
On open ceilings, see P. Liverani, Camerae e coperture delle basiliche paleocristiane,
Mededelingen van het Nederlands Instituut te Rome: Historical Studies 601 (2004), Atti del
Colloquio Internazionale Il Liber Ponticalis e la storia materiale (Roma, 2122 febbraio 2002),
pp. 1328.
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The basilica of S. Cecilia 7
where they are visible beneath their Neoclassical shroud, are a diverse
mix of marble and granite shafts with capitals of different orders. All of
these, like the columns and capitals of most early medieval buildings,
were reused construction materials from ancient buildings, that is spolia.
The church of S. Maria in Domnica, also constructed by Paschal, is
suggestive of how the interior of S. Cecilia might have looked with
respect to its regular, ordered plan and varied stone capitals (Fig. 2).
S. Maria in Domnica, however, has a matched set of granite columns
which S. Cecilia did not have; the few visible columns and capitals of
S. Cecilia are a mix of granites, marbles, smooth shafts and uted
ones.
15
The focal point of the basilicas interior is the presbytery at the end
of the nave. For the most part, the presbytery of the church is the
product of renovations to the church c.1600, which will be discussed
below. Working back through the records and descriptions of the
building prior to the renovations, key aspects of the ninth-century
presbytery can be reconstructed, including the fact that it was revetted
15
For the spolia of S. Maria in Domnica, see P. Pensabene, Il riempiego a Santa Maria in
Domnica, in A. Englan (ed.), Caelius I: Santa Maria in Domnica, San Tommaso in Formis e
il Clivus Scauri, Palinsesti Romani 1 (Rome, 2003), pp. 16695.
Fig. 1 S. Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome. 81724 (Photo: author)
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8 Caroline J. Goodson
with marble panelling and raised above the oor of the nave by several
steps.
16
In the ninth century, the altar was crowned with a ciborium,
probably a smaller version of the current late thirteenth-century ciborium
by Arnolfo di Cambio, which has a set of rare bianco e nero antico marble
columns, perhaps reused from its predecessor.
17
The ciborium was a
piece of architectural furniture common to most Roman papal churches
of the Middle Ages and served to enshrine the altar and the space
around it.
18
It monumentalizes the space at the altar for the celebrant
in this case the pope, permanently xing the altars function as
16
Krautheimer et al., Corpus, I, p. 107 cites A. Bertolotti, Curiosit storiche ed artistiche,
raccolte negli archivi romani, Archivio storico artistico, archeologico e letterario di Roma 4
(1880), pp. 11025, at p. 116.
17
P.C. Claussen, Die Kirchen der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter 10501300, Corpus Cosmatorum 2.1,
Forschungen zur Kunstgeschichte und christlichen Archeologie 20 (Stuttgart, 2002), pp. 227
64. For the columns of the ciborium, see G. Borghini (ed.), Marmi antichi (Rome, 1989),
pp. 1546.
18
For the ciboria of Rome, see L. Pani Ermini, Note sulla decorazione dei cibori a Roma
nellaltomedioevo, Bollettino darte, 5th ser. 59 (1974), pp. 11526, and in general s.v. ciborium,
Dictionnaire dArchologie Chrtienne et de Liturgie, 15 vols (Paris, 190753), 3.2, col. 15881612.
Fig. 2 S. Maria in Domnica, Rome. 81724 (Photo: Archivio Fotograco
Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Romano, no. 214306)
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The basilica of S. Cecilia 9
the site of the Eucharistic meal, the bread made esh by the bishop of
Rome.
The raised presbytery, opulently adorned, and the architectonic
structure over the altar call attention to the primary function of the
church as the house of the papal liturgy of the Eucharist. Pope Paschal,
indeed every medieval pope before and after, celebrated mass at this
church on the Wednesday after the second Sunday of Lent, as part of
the stational liturgy.
19
The stational liturgy is the pattern by which the
pope circulated through the city throughout the year, visiting the
twenty-ve tituli and the major basilicas of Rome. For each stational
celebration, the pope and his entourage processed through the city to
arrive at the church, where they were joined by the faithful of Rome,
who had processed from another church. The groups then reorganized
and processed into the church to begin the mass.
20
Just as the ciborium
marks the place of the Eucharistic celebration within the church, so the
topography of these churches marked the city of Rome with papal
presence. These station churches were the sites of occasional papal
liturgy but were permanently emblazoned with papal insignia and
imagery.
21
Even outside the scheduled services, the buildings inscribed
the city with episcopal presence. The architecture of these major
churches was often, though not always, like that of S. Cecilia: a lon-
gitudinal basilica form, with a wide central nave with a chancel barrier
to accommodate the papal entourage during a Mass, and a glorious
raised presbytery lined with marble and mosaics. The basilica of S.
Cecilia described papal authority and invoked the presence and potency
of the pontiff even in his absence. The basilica plan of the building and
the magnicence of the materials underscored the papal presence with
a degree of ancient grandeur.
Paschals church owes much of its splendour to reused ancient build-
ing materials, both elements taken from other contexts and used in the
new building and in situ structures on the site. The ninth-century
basilica sits atop ancient buildings and reuses, in part, the ancient walls
as foundations for the medieval ones (Fig. 3). These areas below the
church were brought to light in a nineteenth-century excavation of
19
A. Chavasse, La liturgie de la ville de Rome du V
e
au VIII
e
sicle, Analecta Liturgica 18 (Rome
1993); J. Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship: The Origins, Development and
Meaning of Stational Liturgy, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 228 (Rome, 1987).
20
Additionally, for certain public processions, the tituli served as meeting points for parts of
the citys population. S. Cecilia was where the poor and children gathered to join the septi-
form Letania, according to a tenth-century liturgical document, the so-called Ordo Romanus
L. See Baldovin, The Urban Character, pp. 139, 158.
21
At S. Cecilia, for example, the apse mosaics depict Pope Paschals person and name him in
the inscriptions and his papal insignia crowned the intrados of the apsidal arch.
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10 Caroline J. Goodson
Fig. 3 S. Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome. Plan of building in the ninth century
(in blue for ground level and light blue for subterranean levels), with the earlier
structures underlying the edice in grey. Modern constructions are in rose
(Drawing: Author) Scale 1:400
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The basilica of S. Cecilia 11
the site aimed at locating remains of the titulus which had existed prior
to the ninth-century rebuilding.
22
The excavators claimed to have identied
a basilica of much the same shape and scale as the present one, which
they dated to the sixth century, however their conclusions were subse-
quently refuted by a reanalysis of the remains.
23
What the archaeologists
did convincingly bring to light was a second-century BCE domus that
had been rebuilt as an insula (tenement) in the second and again in the
third century CE. It may well be that the titulus which must have
existed on this site was literally built into the domestic architecture, as
the Passion stated.
24
Excavations were reopened in the 1990s, slightly to the east of the
basilica and revealed auxiliary structures to be associated with the titulus,
though frustratingly nothing to be identied as the main church.
25
The
excavations unearthed a baptismal font located in the end of a small
apsed hall lying next to but not underneath the later basilica. The
polygonal form and size of the font is typical of baptismal fonts of the
fourth or fth century in Rome, and the excavators date the structure
to the early fth century on the basis of the stratigraphy of the site.
26
A
lead stula leading to the font was discovered in the excavations and the
inscription on the pipe makes clear that the font pertained to a church
22
P. Crostarosa, Scoperte in S. Cecilia in Trastevere, Nuovo bullettino di archeologia cristiana
5 (1899), pp. 261 78; and idem, Scoperte in S. Cecilia in Trastevere, Nuovo bullettino di
archeologia cristiana 6 (1900), pp. 14360, 26570; G-B. Giovenale, Scavi innanzi alla basilica
di santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Nuovo bullettino di archeologia cristiana 3 (1897), pp. 24754;
idem, Ricerche architettoniche della basilica, Cosmos Catholicus 4:205 (15 November 1902),
pp. 64861; O. Iossi (aka Iozzi or Jossi), Cryptae Sanctae Caeciliae trans Tiberim descriptio
(Rome, 1902). Records of the excavations are held in the Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome,
Direzione Generale di Antichit e Belle Arti, II vers. II ser. b. 390, fas. 4379.
23
On the excavations, see s.v. Domus Caecilii, E.M. Steinby (ed.), Lexicon Topographicum
Urbis Romae, 6 vols (Rome, 19935), II, pp. 712; Krautheimer et al., Corpus, I, pp. 99103.
Krautheimer and his team analysed the masonry of the excavated walls to generate a different
and more plausible chronology from that provided by the original excavators, associating the
private bath with the second-century interventions, though those dates have been revised by
subsequent study, on which, see n. 25 below.
24
On the reuse of structures for the earliest tituli, see Guidobaldi, Chiese Titolari, and p. 387
for S. Cecilia in particular.
25
For the recent excavations and discussion of earlier excavations, see N. Parmegiani and A.
Pronti, S. Cecilia in Trastevere. Nuovi Scavi e ricerche, Monumenti di antichit cristiana 16
(Vatican City, 2004). The titulus must have occupied some of the structures of the insula.
The excavators suggest that the titulus must have been large enough to hold a sizable congre-
gation, which the congregation of S. Cecilia ought to have been, given the maestosit of the
baptistery. They suggest that no trace of it has been found because it was located very much
in the same place as Paschals later basilica, thus nearly entirely destroyed by the ninth-century
buildings, pp. 1001. It seems more likely, however, given the structures that do exist on the
site, that the residential buidings were modied to accommodate the ecclesiastical needs of
the titulus, much as the baptistry was created. The twentieth-century excavators, much as
their nineteenth-century predecessors, were seeking to nd a basilica where there may well
have been none.
26
Parmegiani and Pronti, S. Cecilia, p. 96.
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12 Caroline J. Goodson
of S. Cecilia; it is inscribed PET[ia] S[an]C[t]OR[um] CHRY[sogonis]
S[anctae]CECE[liae] (One parcel of San Crisogono and Santa Cecilia).
27
Also at the site of the ninth-century church was a small-scale private
bath dating from the third or fourth century. The caldarium of the bath
had been built into an upper story of the insula, so it sits nearly on the
same level as the basilica that Paschal built, while its praefurnium and
bronze water tanks lie below the oor level.
The masons of Paschals basilica made use of these structures on the
site in the construction of the ninth-century church. Paschals basilica
is centred over the atrium of the domus below, reusing some of its walls
as foundations and thus conforming to the orientation of other ancient
buildings in the neighbourhood.
28
On the south side of the basilica, in
contrast, new foundations were laid in large blocks of Capellacio tufo
stone bonded with ashy mortar; materials and techniques common to
early medieval papal buildings and elite architecture.
29

The main above-ground walls of S. Cecilia today are those of Paschals
church, as can be conrmed by analysis of the masonry of the build-
ing.
30
The masonry of the wall is recognizably early medieval in date
27
Parmegiani and Pronti, S. Cecilia, p. 90. The inscription probably refers to shared water
supply, the parcel of water perhaps designated by contractual agreement between S. Cecilia
and the neighbouring church of S. Crisogono. It is difcult to determine the date of such an
object, as few of them have inscriptions that can be dated, and the form and manufacture of
these pipes is identical throughout the classical and medieval period. The fact that it refers to
the institutions of S. Cecilia and S. Crisogono supplies a terminus post quem of the fth century.
28
The walls that formed the north and south walls of the domus atrium correspond precisely
to the colonnades of the aisles above. The exterior walls rest on other ancient walls: on the
north side of the basilica, the long side wall stands atop the remains of second-century brick
walls, restructured in the fourth century, and the north-west corner appears to be located in
correspondence to a stairwell rising from a street to the insula. The line of the wall runs ush
with the line of the pre-existing street, suggesting that even in areas not excavated, the
medieval walls follow earlier ones.
29
Crostarosa, Scoperte (1900), p. 158 noted that many such tufo blocks were found in the
excavations, giving their measurements as 1.00 .60 m each. These blocks are often known
as Servian blocks, as they indeed resemble the building materials of the Republican-era city
walls of Servius Tullus, though there is little to suggest that they came from that specic
source. The most visible example of this construction technique in an early medieval context
is the east wall of the church of S. Martino ai Monti, but large tufo blocks are also visible at
many eighth- and ninth-century churches including S. Marco, S. Prassede, S. Angelo in
Pescheria, and SS. Quattro Coronati, and known at S. Eusebio, and S. Silvestro in Capite. For
their use in walls, see R. Coates-Stephens, The Walls and Aqueducts of Rome in the Early Middle
Ages, Journal of Roman Studies 88 (1998), pp. 16678, at p. 169; S. Gibson and B. Ward-Perkins,
The Surviving Remains of the Leonine Wall, Papers of the British School at Rome 47 (1979),
pp. 3057, at pp. 501; and N. Christie, Three South Etrurian Churches: Santa Cornelia, Santa
Runa and San Liberato, Archaeological Monographs of the BSR 4 (London, 1991), p. 177.
For an example from a house, see the lower level of the house in the Forum of Nerva (second
half of the ninth century) and in the Forum Romanum (ninth or tenth century); R. Santangeli
Valenzani, I Fori Imperiali nel Medioevo, Rmische Mitteilungen 108 (2001), pp. 26983.
30
This masonry is identiable in each stretch of wall, with the exception of part of the southern
ank, which was examined by Krautheimer in his survey of the building in the 1930s,
Krautheimer et al., Corpus, I, p. 107.
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The basilica of S. Cecilia 13
because of the materials and technique of their construction. They
make use of bricks of widely ranging sizes, as well as lumpy mortar,
which create walls of undulating, sometimes overlapping, brick courses
as seen at S. Cecilia.
31
The main four walls of the basilica have this
typically early medieval masonry, as does a wall from the baptistery
excavated below the basilica. The early medieval wall in the baptistery
forms a corridor running parallel to the walls of the basilica and open-
ing into the baptistery (Figs 3, 4 and 5). Part of its original plaster
remains, as do traces of the painted ctive drapery, a typical decoration
for ecclesiastical spaces in Rome in the early Middle Ages, clearly emu-
lating the actual draperies that were hung in the church above.
32
The
adornment of the walls suggests that this part of the church was meant
to be visible to visitors, and further, that it was decorated as a sacred space.
The church incorporated this baptistery for some reason beyond the
pure economics of reusing a wall for foundations, and the subterranean
area was accessible after Paschal constructed his church. This space was
either a working baptistery, preserved some three metres below the new
church, or another kind of space, a point we shall consider shortly.
In the ninth century, Cecilia was one of Romes most popular early
saints.
33
She was a noble Roman matron, so the legend goes, who
remained chaste though married to Valerianus, and converted him and
his brother Tiburtius to the Christian faith.
34
Pope Urban baptized the
brothers, as he had earlier baptized Cecilia. Valerianus and Tiburtius
buried many Christian martyrs themselves, a popular act of piety
31
The classic text on brick construction techniques in Rome in the early Middles Ages is
G. Bertelli, A. Guiglia Guidobaldi and P. Rovigatti Spagnoletti, Strutture murarie degli edici
religiosi di Roma dal VI al IX secolo, Rivista dell Istituto nazionale darcheologia e storia dell
arte 2324 (19767), pp. 95172. For more recent studies of brick production and reuse, see
P. Novara and S. Gelichi, I laterizi nellalto medioevo italiano (Ravenna, 2000), and E. de Minicis
(ed.), I laterizi in et medievale: dalla produzione al cantiere: atti del convegno nazionale di studi,
Roma, 45 giugno 1998 (Rome, 2001). Krautheimer believed these wavy and lumpy qualities to
be the products of masons lack of skill or familiarity with simple tools such as masons levels
or plumb bobs, Krautheimer et al., Corpus, III, p. 109. I however would suggest that the effect is
generated by the use of bricks of different sizes and poorly slaked mortar which set in lumps.
32
J. Osborne, Textiles and their Painted Imitations in Early Medieval Rome, Papers of the
British School at Rome 60 (1992), pp. 30952.
33
The relics of Cecilia are recorded in all of the itineraries of early medieval Rome, including
the late sixth-century Pittacia of Monza, the seventh-century Notitia ecclesiarum urbis
romae and De locis sanctis martyrum quae sunt foris civitatis romae, and the seventh- or
eighth-century itinerary used by William of Malmesbury; Codice topograco della citt di
Roma, Fonti per la storia dItalia 81A, 88, 90, 91, eds R. Valentini and G. Zucchetti (Rome,
19403), LXXXVIII, pp. 40, 87, 110, 149. Her portrait is among the female saints decorating
the exterior walls of S. Maria Antiqua. The frescoes were dated by Wilpert to Paschals
papacy, though the condition of the frescoes renders any dating difcult; Josef Wilpert, Die
rmischen Mosaiken und Malereien der kirchlichen Bauten von IV bis XIII Jahrhunderts, 4 vols
(Freiburg, 1916), II, p. 716.
34
Delehaye, tudes sur le lgendier romain, pp. 198, 207.
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14 Caroline J. Goodson
among early saints.
35
They were soon condemned to death for their
actions.
36
A soldier, Maximus, was sent to kill them, and he too was
converted by Cecilia, baptized in the night by Cecilia and a priest and
subsequently martyred for his faith.
37
Cecilia honourably buried all
three, and excited the conversion of Christians who were baptized in
great numbers by Pope Urban in Cecilias home.
38
Eventually, she
35
Delehaye, tudes sur le lgendier romain, p. 207.
36
Delehaye, tudes sur le lgendier romain, p. 212.
37
Delehaye, tudes sur le lgendier romain, p. 213.
38
Delehaye, tudes sur le lgendier romain, pp. 214, 216.
Fig. 4 Wall painted with ctive drapery in subterranean baptistery, S. Cecilia in
Trastevere, Rome. 81724 (Photo: Author)
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The basilica of S. Cecilia 15
herself was condemned to death.
39
She was ordered to her house and
taken into the bath, where a great re was lit and she was locked inside.
She did not succumb to the heat, however, and it was then ordered that
she be decapitated.
40
After three attempts her head was not severed and
she was left half-dead and suffering for three days before she succumbed,
during which time she dispersed her possessions to the poor and
persuaded Pope Urban to dedicate her private home as a church in her
name.
41
According to a passage in Paschals biography in the Liber Ponticalis
(hereafter LP), Saint Cecilia came to the pope during a night vigil and
discussed with him his fruitless search for her body.
42
The saint told
him that the body had not been stolen by the Lombards (who had held
the city under siege some sixty years prior), but that the body was
hidden elsewhere. The saint instructed him to go to the cemetery of
Praetextatus across the street from where it had been believed that
she was buried. Searching there, Paschal found Cecilias remains still
39
Delehaye, tudes sur le lgendier romain, p. 219.
40
Delehaye, tudes sur le lgendier romain, p. 219.
41
Delehaye, tudes sur le lgendier romain, p. 219.
42
LP 100: 1517.
Fig. 5 S. Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome. 81724. Longitudinal section (Drawing: Author). Scale
1:400
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16 Caroline J. Goodson
wrapped in a blood-soaked shroud some 600 years after she had died.
Carrying her body with his own hands and with the divine sanction to
move it granted by the saint herself, Paschal relocated Cecilia to the
church he was rebuilding in her honour in Trastevere. He also trans-
ferred the bodies of Valerianus, his brother Tiburtius and Maximus, all
converted by Cecilias fervour, as well as the remains of Popes Urban
and Lucius (2534), who had been buried across the Via Appia in the
catacombs of Callixtus, in the Crypt of the Popes.
43
Early documents
attesting to the veneration of saints in Rome describe the bodies of
Valerianus, Tiburtius and Maximus grouped together at the catacombs
of Callixtus, on the Via Appia, in the same cemetery complex as the
Crypt of the Popes, near to which was the traditional burial place of
Cecilia.
44
As part of his rebuilding of the church, Paschal personally collected
the body of one highly venerated Roman virgin, along with those of the
cast of characters from her Passion story.
45
It will be useful here to look
briey at the ways in which saints were venerated in Rome, to appreci-
ate the nature of the change that Paschal brought about and the ways
in which he maintained key aspects of the traditions of veneration when
building the new church.
46
At Rome, attitudes towards relic veneration
were very different from elsewhere in the Mediterranean and Europe.
The sites of the cult of saints at Rome were located outside the city,
outside the walls, in catacomb chapels, oratories, or basilicas constructed
over cemeteries.
47
These sites were administered by suburban monas-
teries, and enjoyed a combination of individual veneration and group
43
LP 100: 17. Another source for the translation is a spurious letter, purported to be from
Paschal, though based on the LP, in Bosio, Historia passionis, pp. 425 (notes on pp. 132
52) also in G.D. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova, et amplissima collectio, 54 vols (Venice,
175998), XIV, pp. 3745. Bosio stated that Cardinal Paolo Sfondrato discovered a copy of
the letter from Paschal I among the papers left to him by his uncle, the previous cardinal,
Niccol Sfondrato (later Pope Gregory XIV), p. 154. See below, n. 85.
44
Early sources for saint veneration at Rome locate the bodies of Tiburtius, Valerianus and
Maximus at the catacombs of Callixtus, on the Via Appia, and give the dates for their
veneration. They are the Notitia ecclesiarum urbis romae, and De locis sanctis martyrum
quae sunt foris civitatis romae, both dated to the second quarter of the seventh century,
Codice topograco, LXXXVIII, pp. 86, 111. On the vexed question of Saint Cecilias burial, see
ibid., LXXXVIII, p. 110, n. 3; and Bosio, Historia passionis, pp. 13942; Duchesne, Le Liber
Ponticalis, I, pp. 656, n. 20; Delehaye, tudes sur le lgendier romain, pp. 91 2.
45
Paschal also translated the relics of over two thousand martyrs to the church of S. Prassede,
which he rebuilt on the Esquiline hill. On Paschals relic translations, see C. Goodson, The
Relic Translations of Paschal I (817824): Transforming City and Cult, in A. Hopkins and
M. Wyke (eds), Roman Bodies (London, 2005), pp. 12341.
46
For an introduction to the medieval cult of saints, see N. Herrmann-Mascard, Les reliques des
saints. Formation coutumire dun droit (Paris, 1975); F. Grossi-Gondi, Principi e problemi di
critica agiograca: Atti e spoglie dei martiri (Rome, 1919).
47
L. Reekmans, Limplantation monumentale chrtienne dans le paysage urbaine de Rome de
300 a 850, Actes du XI Congrs Internationale dArchologie Chrtienne (Lyon, Vienne, Grenoble,
Genve et Aoste, 2128 septembre 1986) (Vatican City, 1989), pp. 861 915.
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The basilica of S. Cecilia 17
remembrance and celebration of the saint, mostly on their feast days,
but also throughout the year. Bodies of Roman saints were not trans-
lated into the city, or even into churches outside the walls, with any
regularity until the ninth century.
48
This is a very particular fact of early
medieval Rome: despite numerous requests and no little incentive,
Roman clerics did not relocate the corporeal remains of Roman saints.
To understand this peculiarity of not translating relics, it might be useful
to look at papal attitudes to stories and Passions of the saints, a new and
very popular genre of literature in the early Middle Ages. A sixth-
century decretal, perhaps associated with a papal source, states that the
stories of the martyr saints are not read in the Roman church, according
to ancient custom. This is both because the names of those who wrote
them are completely unknown, and through the agency of the unfaith-
ful and uneducated [the gesta] are thought to be excessive or less tting
than the actual order of the event.
49
Indeed, Pope Gregory (590604)
was unable to nd more than one collected book of the lives and
deaths of Roman martyrs during his search of Roman archives and
libraries.
50
Around the time of Hadrian I, the reading of saints Passions came
to be permitted in St Peters, a practice apparently not common to the
Roman churches prior to this date. Masses were celebrated on the
natalicia of saints at their shrines and then collectively at certain sites
such as the oratory Pope Gregory III (73141) set up at St Peters.
51
The
conclusion of Ordo XII mentions that the Passions of the saints or the
deeds of them up to the time of Hadrian were only read at the church
of the saint or where his titulus was. During his time, Hadrian ordered
48
An important exception to this rule is Pope Pauls translation of the relics of some fty saints
to the monastery constructed in his house in the mid-eighth century. For discussion of this
and the half-dozen or so instances of relic translations into the city and the state of saint
veneration in Rome up to the ninth century, see C. Goodson, Building for Bodies: The
Architecture of Saint Veneration in Early Medieval Rome, in . Carragain and C. Neuman
de Vegvar (eds), Roma Felix: The Production, Experience and Reection of Medieval Rome
(Aldershot, forthcoming).
49
The De Libris Recipiendis reads: Gesta sanctorum martyrum . . . secundum antiquam
consuetudinem singulari cautela in sancta Romana ecclesia non leguntur, quia et eorum qui
conscripsere nomina penitus ignorantur et ab indelibus et idioitis superua aut minus apta
quam rei ordo fuerit esse putuntur, Das Decretum Gelasianum de libris recipiendis et non
recipiendis in kritischem Text, Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen
Literatur, ser. 3, vol. 8, part 4, ed. E. von Dobschtz (Leipzig, 1912), p. 9, and for a recent
discussion concerning its date and place of writing, see C. Pilsworth, Dating the Gesta
martyrum: A Manuscript-Based Approach, EME 9 (2000), pp. 30924, at p. 315. For further
discussion of the collection and reading of Passions, see C. Vircillo Franklin, Roman Hagio-
graphy and Roman Legendaries, in Roma nellalto medioevo, Settimane 48 (Spoleto, 2001),
pp. 85791; B. de Gaifer, La lecture des passions des martyrs a Rome avant le IX
e
sicle,
Analecta Bollandiana 87 (1969), pp. 6378, at pp. 634, 66.
50
MGH Gregorii I papae Registrum epistolarum, II, 8, p. 29, discussed by Pilsworth, Dating the
Gesta martyrum, p. 313.
51
LP 92: 6, 17; Duchesne, Le Liber Ponticalis, I, pp. 417, 421.
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18 Caroline J. Goodson
the reform, and in the church of St Peter he instituted readings.
52
Within his long and articulate letter concerning the Second Council of
Nicea, Pope Hadrian told Charlemagne that the lives of the church
Fathers were little read and that it was permitted that the Passions of
the martyrs be read as well, also on their feast days.
53
To read the decretal, popes tended to avoid the liturgical use and
promotion of stories of the Roman martyrs because they risked doctrinal
error, only including them gradually in the papal liturgy in the late eighth
century. For the same reasons, I believe, popes conserved the bodies of
the saints where they had originally been buried in order to assure the
faithful of the authenticity and uniqueness of the relics, commanding
their sacred capital. It was indeed the Roman bishops special concern
to safeguard dogmatic orthodoxy and popes often sought recourse in
distant Apostolic or early papal tradition.
54
The papacy had to ensure
orthodoxy and the tricky relationship between saint, relic and miracle-
working power was notoriously difcult to control.
55
Roman bishops
negotiated that relationship by insisting upon the unique and immov-
able body of the saint, where it lay in cemeteries. Papal efforts to
invigorate saint veneration were largely dedicated to encouraging people
to venerate out at suburban shrines.
56
Popes built oratories, shrines and
basilicas to accommodate crowds of people and established monasteries
to administer the sites and the spiritual care of the bodies of the saints.
52
Passiones sanctorum vel gesta ipsorum usque Adriani tempora tantummodo ibi legebantur
ubi ecclesia ipsius sancti vel titulus erat. Ipse vero tempore suo renovere iussit et in ecclesia
sancti Petri legendas esse instituit. M. Andrieu, Les Ordines romani du haut moyen age, 5 vols
(Louvain, 193161), II, pp. 45966, at p. 466.
53
. . . Vitas enim patrum sine probabilibus auctoribus minime in ecclesia leguntur. Nam ab
orthodoxis titulatas et suscipiuntur et leguntur. Magis enim passiones sanctorum martyrum
sacri canones censuentes, ut liceat etiam eas legi, cum anniversarii dies eorum celebrantur; MGH
Epistolae Karolini aevi V (Berlin, 1899), pp. 557, esp. p. 49. See also B. de Gaifer, Hagiographie
et historiographie, Quelques aspects du problem, in La storiograa altomedievale, Settimane
17 (Spoleto, 1970), pp. 13966; Gaifer, La lecture des passions. For discussion of Hadrians
letters on the Council, see K. Hampe, Hadrians I. Vertheidigung der zweiten nicnischen
Synode gegen die Angriffe Karls des Groen, Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft fr ltere deutsche
Geschichtskunde 21 (1896), pp. 83118.
54
On the popes as the guardians of the catholica des and their insistence upon tradition, see
T.F.X. Noble, The Papacy in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries, in R. McKitterick (ed.), New
Cambridge Medieval History II c.700c.900 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 56386, quotation from p. 580,
and K. Morrison, Tradition and Authority in the Western Church, 3001140 (Princeton, 1969).
55
The question of authenticity of saints relics was a concern for many rulers and bishops
in the period around the end of the eighth century and the beginning of the ninth century,
M. Van Uytfanghe, Le culte des saints et la prtendue Aufklrung carolingienne, in
R. Favreau (ed.), Le culte des saints aux IX
e
XIII
e
sicle: Actes du colloque tenu Poitiers les
151617 septembre 1993 (Poitiers, 1995), pp. 151 66.
56
This was a tendency that began as early as the fourth century and continued to the early
Middle Ages, J. Osborne, Roman Catacombs in the Middle Ages, Papers of the British School
at Rome 53 (1985), pp. 278328; Reekmans, Limplantation monumentale chrtienne; D.
Trout, Damasus and the Invention of Early Christian Rome, Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies 33:3 (2003), pp. 51736; J. Guyon, Damase et lillustration des martyrs, in
Martyrium in Multidisciplinary Perspective. Memorial Louis Reekmans (Leuven, 1995), pp. 15779.
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The basilica of S. Cecilia 19
They paved roads and built porticos passing through the city walls to
link Rome to the city of saints built up around it.
57
Until Paschal
translated relics into the city, the majority of Roman relic veneration
took place outside the city walls, at the places of each saints burial.
58
As Pope Paschal subverted this pattern, he was careful to preserve
certain key aspects of traditional saint veneration: the veneration of a
martyr identied by name and associated with a specic Passion, and
the veneration of the body, more or less intact. The LP and the apse
inscription of the church name Cecilia as the saint translated from
the catacombs to the church and the apse inscription mentions her
companions while the LP names them explicitly (Fig. 6):
He joined the bodies of Saint Cecilia and her companions; youth
blushes in its bloom. Limbs that rested before in crypts . . .
59
handling all these things [the fabric soaked in Cecilias blood and her
golden garments] himself, he gathered them and with great honour
placed that virgins body with the martyrs her dear husband Vale-
rian[us] and Tiburtius and Maximus, also the pontiffs Urban and
Lucius, under the sacred altar . . .
60
The dialogue recorded in the LP between the saint and the pope
gives numerous details which would have lent Paschals translation an
air of credibility for the saint-venerating population of early medieval
Rome. The conversation alludes to the confusion about the location of
Saint Cecilias burial, a confusion that is reected in contemporary
57
Goodson, Building for Bodies; Hermann-Mascard, Les reliques des saints; Reekmans,
Limplantation monumentale chrtienne.
58
Reekmans, Limplantation monumentale chrtienne. Until the ninth century, saints were
rarely venerated collectively at Rome, but were celebrated more or less individually at their
place of burial on their feast day. More work remains to be done on the issue, but see
P. Jounel, Le culte collectif des saints de Rome du VII
e
au IX
e
sicle, in Le Jugement, le ciel et
lenfer dans lhistoire du christianisme, Universit dAngers Publications du Centre de recherches
dhistoire religieuse et dhistoire des ides 12 (Angers, 1989), pp. 1931.
59
The inscription reads:
HAEC DOMVS AMPLA MICAT VARIIS FABRICATA METALLIS
OLIM QVAE FVERAT CONFRACTA SVB TEMPORE PRISCO
CONDIDIT IN MELIVS PASCHALIS PRAESVL OP[t]IMVS
HANC AVLAM DOMINI FIRMANS FVNDAMINE CLARO
AVREA GEMMATIS RESONANT HAEC DINDIMA TEMPLI
LAETVS AMORE DEI HIC CONIVNXIT CORPORA SANCTA
CAECILIAE ET SOCIIS RVTILAT HIC FLORE IVVENTVS
QVAE PRIDEM IN CRYPTIS PAVSABANT MEMBRA BEATA
ROMA RESVLTAT OVANS SEMPER ORNATA PER AEVVM.
60
Quae cuncta suis pertractans manibus collegit et cum magno honare eiusdem virginis corpus,
cum carissimo Valeriano sponso atque Tyburtio et Maximo martyribus, necnon Urbano et
Lucio ponticibus, sub sacrosancto altare collocavit, LP 100: 16; Duchesne, Le Liber
Ponticalis, II, p. 56; trans. R. Davis, The Lives of the Ninth-Century Popes, Translated Texts
for Historians 20 (Liverpool, 1995), pp. 1617.
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20 Caroline J. Goodson
hagiographic sources.
61
The named saints translated are characters in the
life and death of Saint Cecilia as reported in the Passion: her husband,
converted to Christianity by her and baptized by Pope Urban, her
brother-in-law, likewise converted and baptized, the Roman soldier
converted by the saints, and Pope Urban himself, Cecilias confessor
and co-founder of her church.
62
The description in the LP of Paschals
61
See above, n. 44.
62
The inclusion of Pope Lucius among these saints and confessors is obscure, as he does not
appear to have been involved in Cecilias life or death. According to a guide to Rome and its
catacombs, written in the twelfth century using a mid-seventh-century source, Pope Lucius was
one of the saints buried near Saint Cecilia, on the one hand, and near Tiburtius, Valerianus
and Maximus, on the other, all on the Via Appia. Codice topograco, LXXXVIII, pp. 1489.
Fig. 6 Apse and presbytery, S. Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome. 81724
(Photo: Archivio Fotograco Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale
Romano, no. 235)
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The basilica of S. Cecilia 21
discovery of the body includes reference to the swath of cloth wrapped
around the saint, soaked in sacred blood from the executioners three
strokes, a direct reference to the Passion narrative.
63
This intertextual
reference is an important signal of the popes close familiarity with the
Passion story of Cecilia, or at least the intention of his biographer to
convey Paschals familiarity with the story of Saint Cecilia.
64
This
expression of Paschals knowledge of the Passion reects a change in
papal attitude towards these kinds of stories, a change that had been
gradually coming about in the eighth century.
65
Such a reference might
have been intended to assure pilgrims and the faithful of Rome that the
relics he moved were indeed those of Saint Cecilia and her companions.
Other evidence worked to create this effect of veracity and authen-
ticity. Along with the relics, it appears that Paschal brought a votive
inscription from the catacombs of Callixtus to the church of S. Cecilia.
Presently immured in the restored crypt of S. Cecilia is a votive inscrip-
tion to Saints Tiburtius, Valerianus and Maximus, naming their feast
day
66
(Fig. 7). The paleography of the inscription would suggest a date
in the fth century, and it is likely that the inscription was originally
located at the saints shrine on the Via Appia. It may be that when the
relics of those saints were translated into Trastevere, the associated
paraphernalia of their veneration such as this votive inscription was
brought along with the bodies to serve as authenticators of the identity
of the relics, with their names and the feast days when they had been
celebrated at the catacombs.
63
Quibus et linteaminibus sanguis sanctae martyris abstersus, involuta ad pedes illius corporis
sacratissimo cruore plena, de trina carnicis percussione reperta sunt. (These linens had been
used to wipe away the holy martyrs blood; soaked in sacred blood from the executioners
three strokes, they were discovered wrapped at the feet of her body.) LP 100: 17; Duchesne,
Le Liber Ponticalis, II, p. 56; trans. Davis, Lives of the Ninth-Century Popes, p. 17. Cf. Quam
speculator tertio percussit et caput eius amputare non potuit. Sic vero seminecem eam cruen-
tus carnifex dereliquit; cuius sanguinem bibleis linteaminibus populi qui per eam crediderant
extergebant, Delehaye, tudes sur le lgendier romain, p. 219.
64
It is difcult to know how the texts of the LP were disseminated and who might have read
them. There were many copies of the text circulating in monastic circles, though most of
these date from the tenth century or later. On the manuscript tradition, see Duchesne, Le
Liber Ponticalis, I, pp. cixivccvi.
65
See above, n. 48. On the possibility of lay reading of the Passions, see Pilsworth, Dating the
Gesta martyrum, pp. 1718.
66
SANCTIS MARTYRIBVS TIBVRTIO
BALERIANO ET MAXIMO QUORUM
NATALES EST XVIII KALE(x)DAS MAIAS
(To the saints and martyrs Tiburtius, Valerianus and Maximus, whose birthday is 14 April);
Ferrua and Silvagni (eds), Inscriptiones christianae urbis Romae, I, no. 93. The inscription is
described as being at the church in Laderchi, Sanctae Caeciliae acta et trans-tyberina basilica
(Rome, 17223), p. 154. De Rossi (as reported by Ferrua and Silvagni) dated it to the sixth
or, at the outside limit, the fth century. The author of a recent revision of De Rossis dating
situates the inscription rmly in the fth century on the basis of the letter forms. Luca
Cardin, pers. comm.
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22 Caroline J. Goodson
Textual and material evidence was employed to make clear that the
bodies of Saint Cecilia and her companions had been translated in their
entirety, not merely partially, and that they were not contact relics,
pieces of fabric consecrated by contact with (or proximity to) a saints
body.
67
The textual sources for the translations are very explicit about
the corporeality of the relics that were moved, referring to the relics
with words like corpora (bodies) and membra (limbs) in the apse
inscription, and corpus (body), sanguinis (blood), and cruore (blood
of a wound) in the LP.
68
In the new shrine, Paschal placed the bodies
of the saints in ancient marble sarcophagi, out of view and out of reach,
as they had been in the catacombs (Fig. 8). The bodies of Cecilia and
her companions were placed in three different ancient sarcophagi: the
rst one held the body of Saint Cecilia, and in the sarcophagus below
lay Popes Urban and Lucius. Behind these two sarcophagi was another,
holding Valerianus, Tiburtius and Maximus, placed head-to-toe atop
each other.
69
The body of Cecilia was placed by itself in the sarcophagus
closest to the door of the church, so that it was the rst one seen
through the fenestella confessionis. Fenestellae, or little windows, were
openings into the relic chambers, sealed with grates and often lined
67
On contact relics at Rome, see J.M. McCulloh, The Cult of Relics in the Letters and
Dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great: A Lexicographical Study, Traditio 32 (1976), pp. 145
84; idem, From Antiquity to the Middle Ages: Continuity and Change in Papal Relic Policy
from the 6th to the 8th Century, in E. Dassmann and K.S. Frank (eds), Pietas: Festschrift fr
Bernhard Ktting, Jahrbuch fr Antike und Christentum Ergnzungband 8 (Mnster, 1980),
pp. 31424.
68
Duchesne, Le Liber Ponticalis, I, p. 56. Denitions derive from P. Glare (ed.), Oxford Latin
Dictionary (Oxford, 1996).
69
The placement of the bodies is known from the records of their later rediscovery, Bosio,
Historia passionis, pp. 1558.
Fig. 7 Votive inscription dedicated to the saints of the church (Photo: ICCD E
104811)
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The basilica of S. Cecilia 23
with gold or silver plate. In the formal language of Roman church
architecture, these structures proclaimed the presence of the relics in the
building, but kept them out of reach, and out of harm.
70
Paschal placed the bodies of the saints underneath the main altar of
the church. Pilgrims could see the sarcophagi through the fenestella
facing the front of the church as well as circumambulate the relics by
passing down below the presbytery and into the annular crypt that
followed the walls of the apse of the church.
71
The form of this crypt
follows closely on the model of the crypt in St Peters, built there at
the very beginning of the seventh century. Gregory the Great built
two crypts at major Roman pilgrimage churches, the annular crypt at
70
On structures that housed relics in the early Middle Ages, see C. Hahn, Seeing and Believing:
The Construction of Sanctity in Early-Medieval Saints Shrines, Speculum 72 (1997), pp. 1079
106; and on issues of proximity and distance to saints relics, see P. Brown, The Cult of the
Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1981), esp. p. 88.
71
LP 100: 19; Duchesne, Le Liber Ponticalis, I, p. 57.
Fig. 8 S. Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome. Axonometric drawing of the crypt and
placement of the sarcophagi and relics under the presbytery in the ninth century
(Drawing: Author)
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24 Caroline J. Goodson
St Peters (which might in fact have been begun by Pelagius II (57990))
and the sunken chamber constructed at St Pauls when Gregory re-
located the main altar to sit directly over the body of the apostle, creating
the alignment between relic and altar that came to characterize later
medieval altars.
72
In the case of the crypt at St Pauls, we have testimony
of Gregorys desire to improve the situation at the body of the Apostle
Paul,
73
and it is generally agreed that the purpose of the annular crypt
is to locate the body of the saint directly beneath the Eucharistic altar
while preserving the axis of cattedra and altar at the centre of the nave.
Of the two models of crypt employed by Gregory, the annular crypt
of St Peters is the one most often replicated in the early Middle Ages.
By the ninth century, there were a handful of other annular crypts in
Roman churches, some of which were associated with relics of saints,
constructed around saints tombs or translated relics, such as at S.
Prassede, where Paschal had translated her and other saints relics.
74
A monumental inscription in the apse also identied the relics for a
visitor to the church (Fig. 6). The mosaic inscription describes Paschals
translations and describes his intentions in the construction of the
basilica, if in poetic language. It reads:
This spacious house, built of varied materials, shines; once in time
past it had been ruined. The generous prelate Paschal built this hall
of the Lord anew, reinforcing it on a bright foundation; these golden
mysteries resound in the jewelled precincts of the temple; serene in
the love of god. He joined the bodies of Saint Cecilia and her com-
panions; here youth blushes in its bloom. With blessed limbs that
rested before in catacombs, Rome is joyous, triumphant always,
adorned forever.
75
As much as this inscription participates in conventions of early medi-
eval poetry and epigraphy in Rome and it does it also sheds light on
72
On the crypt at St Peters, see S. de Blaauw, Cultus et decor: liturgia e architettura nella Roma
tardoantica e medievale: Basilica Salvatoris, Sanctae Mariae, Sancti Petri, Studi e testi 3556
(Vatican City, 1994), pp. 53048; for St Pauls see S. de Blaauw and G. Filippi, San Paolo
fuori le mura: La disposizione liturgica no a Gregorio Magno, Mededelingen van het Ned-
erlands Instituut te Rome, Historical Studies 59 (2000), Atti del colloquio internazionale Arredi
di culto e disposizioni litugiche a Roma da Costantinio a Sisto IV. (Roma, 34 dicembre 1999),
pp. 426, at pp. 1921.
73
Sed et ego aliquid similiter ad sacratissimum corpus s. Pauli apostoli meliorare volui. S.
Gregorii Magni Registrum Epistularum, ed. D. Norberg (Turnhout, 1982), 4.30, p. 248.
74
They included S. Pancrazio, S. Valentino, S. Crisogono, S. Susanna (?) and S. Stefano degli
Abessini. S. de Blaauw, Die Krypta in stadtrmischen Kirchen: Abbild eines Pilgerzeils, in
Akten des XII. Internationalen Kongresses, II, pp. 55968; B.M. Apollonj-Ghetti, Le Confes-
sioni semianulari nelle basiliche romane, in R. Lucani (ed.), Roma sotterranea (Rome, 1984),
pp. 20313. On S. Prassede, see Goodson, The Relic Translations.
75
See above, n. 59.
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The basilica of S. Cecilia 25
Paschals aims and ambitions in building the church.
76
This inscription
declares very specic interests on Paschals part, which do not coincide
with the old theories about Paschals desire to revive early Christian
architectural form for imperial authority. To read the inscription in the
apse of the church, Paschals interest lay in the bodies of Saint Cecilia
and her companions, celebrating the sacred history of Rome. The
inscription makes mention of the walls and the material fabric of the
new church, invoking the splendour of the new setting, including a
reference to the bright foundation, fundamine claro.
77
Considering the
attention that Paschals biographer took to making clear that Paschal
was very familiar with the details of Cecilias Passion and veneration, it
may be that this choice of phrase, too, refers to the Passion and reects
some of Paschals understanding of the history of the site.
The bright foundation (or alternately famous foundation) is argu-
ably the domestic architecture preserved below the basilica, built anew
by Paschal.
78
Re-examining underlying structures used as foundations
in the early medieval basilica in the light of the Passion narrative of the
saint with its recurring themes of baptism by bishops: rst the baptism
by Pope Urban of Cecilias companions, then the faithful baptized in
her house, suggests that Paschal might have preserved the baptistery
underneath the church because he believed it to be the baptistery that
Pope Urban used in the house of Saint Cecilia. The baptismal font
recently excavated sits in the centre of an apsed room that was part of
the Roman insula. It may have been believed that it was the very
baptismal font that Pope Urban and Saint Cecilia installed in her house.
When Paschal constructed the basilica, the early medieval wall in the
76
The vocabulary of gleaming buildings and variety of materials employed in this inscription
nds parallels in contemporary poems by Carolingian authors such as Paul the Deacon,
Alcuin of York, Angilbert of S. Riquier, the author of the Versus Sangallenses, earlier texts that
circulated in the Carolingian age, such as the Carmen Paschale by Coelius Sedulius, as well
as Roman precedents in apse mosaics and building dedications. For poetic comparanda, see
MGH Poetae Latini medii aevi. Apse inscriptions at Rome often refer to the structures of the
church, either directly (e.g. aula) or poetically (e.g. templum) and they are often described as
gleaming, glowing or sparkling, and the predecessors that they replace are often described as
ruinous. Examples of this can be seen at S. Andrea at St Peters, SS. Cosma e Damiano, S.
Pancrazio, S. Agnese fuori le mura, S. Maria in Domnica and S. Prassede, among others. For
these, see the sylloges in De Rossi, Inscriptiones christianae, II. For a brief discussion of the
precedents of this inscription, see R. Favreau, pigraphie mdivale, LAtelier du Mdiviste
5 (Turnhout, 1997), pp. 11619.
77
On early medieval uses of the word fundamens with reference to actual construction, see
R. Coates-Stephens, Dark Age Architecture in Rome, Papers of the British School at Rome 65
(1997), pp. 177232, at pp. 2247. The language of the inscription, and the LP, are notori-
ously vague about building vocabulary.
78
For alternate translations of the inscription, see M. Webb, The Churches and Catacombs of
Early Christian Rome: A Comprehensive Guide (Brighton, 2001), p. 269, and Favreau, pigraphie
mdivale, pp. 11819.
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26 Caroline J. Goodson
baptistery formed a corridor decorated with ctive drapery leading from
the basilica above. It led to the baptistery below, which might have
been believed to be the locus sanctus of the baptism of Roman martyrs
within the house of the saint, an ancient holy place annexed to the
contemporary basilica above. Thus for visitors to the church in the
ninth century, the foundation of the basilica may have been actually
the ancient titulus sanctae Caecilia, founded by the saint herself.
79
The baptistery was not the only earlier structure enshrined and
preserved at the site; there was also the private bath. It may be argued
that this too formed part of Paschals basilica and acted as a second
sanctied space attached to the medieval basilica memorializing the
Passion of Saint Cecilia, in this case the site of her martyrdom in the
caldarium of her private bath. Determining whether this structure was
accessible to Paschals church is not as straightforward as it was to
determine that the baptistery had an early medieval phase. The
difculty arises from the major renovations to the bath by Cardinal
Sfondrato around the year 1600, though it will be shown that reviewing
Sfondratos renovations provides glimmers of evidence for Paschals
church, and more to the point, a useful comparison for understanding
Paschals attempts to benet from sacred history.
Cardinal Sfondrato was the titular cardinal of S. Cecilia, a role he
took over from his uncle when the latter became Pope Gregory XIV in
1591 and then kept until his death in 1618.
80
He was a member of the
Congregation of the Oratory, a group led by Filippo Neri, among
whose aims was the return of the Roman church to the early church ad
fontes (at the sources), prior to the heresies of Protestantism, and prior
to the problems that led to the Protestant reformation. In the 1550s,
Neri reinvigorated interest in the pilgrimage to the Seven Churches of
Rome, a circuit of visits to ancient churches that on the one hand
represented a reprisal of medieval stational liturgy, but on the other hand
established, in a very direct way, lay and clerical physical and direct
79
It is not clear whether the font was in use as such through the Middle Ages. The limited
excavation reports are frustratingly silent on this issue, suggesting inconclusive archaeological
data. The ninth century was precisely the moment when baptismal practices were changing
towards infant baptism in small basin fonts from the adult-sized immersion fonts such as that
at S. Cecilia. However, a contemporary site, S. Cornelia, Capracorum, to the north of Rome,
has a clearly dated example of a monumental baptismal font in use in the late eighth century
at a papal church in the countryside, Christie, Three South Etrurian Churches, p. 180. The
restoration and preservation of the baptistery at S. Cecilia, however, need not have been
aimed exclusively at its functional use as a baptismal font. Perhaps its being old-fashioned
was desirable to Paschal and his church planners, as the baptismal font seemed more ancient,
and thus more like Saint Cecilias.
80
C. Eubel and G. van Gulik, Hierarchia Catholica Medii et Recientoris Aevi, 8 vols (Munich,
1910), III, pp. 60, 197.
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The basilica of S. Cecilia 27
contact with ancient buildings.
81
Romes most ancient churches became
important for their antiquity, and among a certain clerical intellectual
milieu, there was an eye to the ways in which that very antiquity could
return the Roman church to original grace.
82
Cesare Baronio, one of
Neris favourite penitents and followers, devoted decades to the massive
project of the Annales ecclesiastici, his universal history of the church
and the Christian world.
83
Baronio contextualized Neris aims in terms
and language of the early church: the reading of approved lives of the
saints, the Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers. The telling and
retelling of the history of the Roman church in the Oratorys meetings
was an important part of the education and communal awareness of the
spiritual sons of Neri, including Sfondrato.
84
When Sfondrato took the ofce of cardinal, he found a letter among
the papers left by his uncle who became Gregory XIV.
85
Antonio Bosio,
another member of the Oratory and a dedicated archaeologist himself,
who chronicled the events at S. Cecilia during these years, indicated
that the letter was from Pope Paschal I and that it described the events
that we know already from the LP: the appearance of the saint to the
pope, his retrieval of her body from the catacombs, and his subsequent
collection of the bodies of her companion saints, and their deposition
under the altar of the church.
86
On the basis of this letter, and with
an eye to the coming Holy Jubilee of 1600, Sfondrato undertook
renovations to the presbytery of S. Cecilia beginning in 1599, and in so
doing rediscovered the bodies of Saint Cecilia and her companions in
their sarcophagi beneath the main altar.
87
The sarcophagi were opened
81
For a general introduction to the period, see most recently S. Ostrow, The Counter Reformation
and the End of the Century, in M. Hall (ed.), Rome (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 276, 316, n. 73.
The bibliography on Neri and the Oratory is immense. For a fundamental biography of Neri
see L. Ponnelle and L. Bordet, St. Philip Neri and the Roman Society of His Times, trans. R.F.
Kerr (London, 1932) and more recently, the essays in A. Lo Bianco, La regola e la fama: San
Filippo Neri e larte (Milan, 1995).
82
A. Mengarelli, La metodologia nellazione pastorale di S. Filippo Neri (Rome, 1974), pp. 624.
83
C. Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 2nd rev. edn (Lucca, 173859). On Baronio and the Annales,
see Ostrow, The Counter Reformation.
84
A. Herz, Cardinal Cesare Baronios Restoration of SS. Nereo ed Achilleo and S. Cesareo de
Appia, Art Bulletin 70:4 (December 1988), pp. 590620, at p. 591.
85
The letter as transcribed by Bosio, Bibliotheca hagiographica latina, n. 1499 is very much based
upon the text of the LP, Bosio, Historia passionis, pp. 425, notes on pp. 13254. However,
there are four known manuscripts of such a letter which predate Sfondratos cardinalate, and
so while Sfondrato and Bosio were not working from a letter in Paschals own hand, they
could well have been looking at a (relatively) ancient forgery. On the manuscripts of Cecilias
Passion, see the database at <http://bhlms.tr.ucl.ac.be/>.
86
On Bosios interest in history and archaeology, see his own posthumous work, A. Bosio,
Roma Sotterranea (Rome, 1632), and S. Ditcheld, Text Before Trowel: Antonio Bosios
Roma Sotterranea Revisited, in R.N. Swanson (ed.), The Church Retrospective, Studies in
Church History 33 (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 34360.
87
Bosio, Historia passionis, pp. 1557. On Sfondratos presbytery, see Stirrup, The Altar Sculptures,
pp. 13645; Kmpf, Framing Cecilias Sacred Body.
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28 Caroline J. Goodson
and the body of Cecilia was found miraculously intact and incorrupt.
88
Cecilias body was put on display in the church, and crowds of Romans
came to see it. She was reburied under the altar on 22 November 1599,
her feast day. Sfondrato commissioned the sculptor Stefano Maderno
to sculpt a likeness of the saints body as it appeared and the result was
presented in 1600.
89
If Sfondrato used textual sources to guide his excavations for the
relics, in his restorations to the Cappella del Bagno he relied upon the
material remains of the ancient bath structures to shape his rediscovery
of the relics of Cecilias bath. The chapel sits on a level less than half a
metre below the oor level of Paschals basilica, joined to it by a corridor
that was part of the ancient insula on the site (Figs 9 and 10). Preserved in
the walls of the chapel, up to a metres height, are the square tubi of the
bath, terracotta pipes that brought steam up from the bronze testudo
still preserved below the oor of the chapel to heat the room.
90
In the
renovations, these were covered with bronze sheets, forming a dado
panel. Above them, identical inscriptions run around each half of the
chapel, reading Pipes through which the steam and hot air came that
heated the bath, identifying them as part of the ancient bath.
91
Above
the dado, on the walls and the vaults of the chapel, are paintings both
al fresco and in oil depicting the life and martyrdom of Saint Cecilia.
92
The pavement of the oor, as well as the walls, showcase the pre-
served remains of the earlier structures. At either end of the longitudinal
chapel are grilles which let into the praefurnium of the bath (the eastern
square grille) and the bronze tub which heated the water (the western
round grille). They are labelled with inscriptions describing their function
88
It should be pointed out that Sfondrato was not the only cardinal nding incorrupt bodies in
Rome around the year 1600: Stirrup, The Altar Sculptures; G. Wolf, Caecilia, Agnes, Gregor
und Maria. Heiligenstatuen, Madonnenbilder und ihre kunstlerische Inszenierung im rmischen
Sakralraum um 1600, Zeitsprnge. Forschungen zur Frhen Neuzeit 1 (1997), pp. 75095. On the
development of the idea of incorrupt bodies of saints, see A. Angenendt, Corpus incorruptum:
Ein Leitidee der mittelalterlichen Reliquienverehrung, Saeculum 42 (1991), pp. 32048.
89
On the statue, see Kmpf, Framing Cecilias Sacred Body, pp. 14550; Stirrup, The Altar
Sculptures, and, less reliably, M. ONeil, Stefano Madernos Santa Cecilia, Antologia di Belle
Arte, ns 256 (1985), pp. 921.
90
A general introduction to Roman bath forms can be found in F. Yegl, Baths and Bathing in
Classical Antiquity (Cambridge MA, 1992).
91
CANALI PER I QUALI
VENIVANO SU I VAPORI ET AERE CALDO CHE
RISCALDAVANO IL BAGNO.
92
There is very little recent literature on the decorative programme of the Cappella. See
G. Serangeli, Roma, basilica di Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. Cappella del Bagno, Bollettino
dArte, 6th ser. 72 (1987), pp. 1038; Cellini, Stefano Maderno; S. Pepper, Baglione, Vanni
and Cardinal Sfondrato, Paragone 18:211 (1967), pp. 6974. The corridor to the chapel is
decorated with landscapes by Paul Bril that include saints. On Brils work at S. Cecilia, see
P. Jones, Two Newly Discovered Hermit Landscapes by Paul Bril, Burlington Magazine 130
(1988), pp. 324 and n. 15; A. Mayer, Das Leben und die Werke der Brder Matthus und Paul
Brill (Leipzig, 1910), pp. 2933.
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The basilica of S. Cecilia 29
in the ancient bath. The grille to the praefurnium reads Room of the
re by which the bath was heated,
93
and the tub is labelled Around
this vessel, as large as the pavement, there was a square tub to hold
water.
94
Between these two grilles, in the centre of the oor of the
ancient structure, are four panels of opus sectile pavement, a central
panel of a square enclosing four semicircles, and three rectangular panels
93
CAMERA DEL
FUOCO PER DOVE
SI SCALDAVA
IL BAGNO.
94
INTORNO A QUESTO VASO QUANTO E TUTTO IL PAVIMENTO
VI ERA QUASI UNA TINOZZA QUADRA DA TENER AQUA.
There is an intriguing possibility that the square tub mentioned is the bronze tub presently
held at the Antiquarium comunale on the Celio. According to records in the Antiquarium,
the large bronze tub measuring roughly 2 m 1.5 m 0.30 m deep was discovered near S.
Cecilia in the nineteenth century. Perhaps during the c.1600 restorations it was removed from
the chapel and stored nearby, though this cannot be conrmed.
Fig. 9 Cappella del Bagno, S. Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome. Renovated 15971602. Plan
(Drawing: Author and Marshall Hopkins). Scale 1:400
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30 Caroline J. Goodson
of small geometric patterns. The opus sectile panels were surrounded by
other marble pieces in the restoration of the oor, preserving them too
as material evidence of the ancient structures.
95
Contemporary sources
describe the renovations as a restoration of the bath of the saint herself.
95
Two of the reused marble elements are pieces of late medieval furniture, so the repaving of
the oor must post-date the creation of the opus sectile panels, and it is most probable that
the repaving took place during Sfondratos restoration.
Fig. 10 Cappella del Bagno, S. Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome. Renovated 15971602.
NE side wall of chapel (Photo: Archivio Fotograco Soprintendenza Speciale per
il Polo Museale Romano, no. 75480)
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The basilica of S. Cecilia 31
Sfondrato was lauded for having brought to light the physical elements
that witnessed the martyrdom of Cecilia.
96
What is signicant about Sfondratos restoration is the attention to
the material remains, his use of the archaeology in the fabrication of
a sacred space. Some of Sfondratos contemporaries, such as Cesare
Baronio and even Sfondrato himself in the restoration of the presbytery,
refurbished ancient churches on the basis of careful textual analysis of
associated documents and literature.
97
In the restoration of the bath of
Cecilia, Sfondrato put the archaeology of the site on display.
Sfondrato may well have believed that the medieval opus sectile pave-
ment of the chapel oor was the original Roman pavement of Cecilias
bath, or perhaps the oor that Paschal laid in the chapel. Based on our
current understanding of the technique and patterns employed, however,
it is an eleventh-century oor.
98
In the eleventh century, other renovations
took place to the bath of Cecilia which point to the same kind of
attention that Paschal had paid to the relationship between Passion text,
liturgy and archaeology. An eighteenth-century source describes a now-
lost inscription from an altar dedication in the chapel. It records that
an altar to Saint Cecilia was consecrated in 1073 in her bath, presumably
the Cappella del Bagno.
99
From 1059 the cardinal responsible for the
church was Desiderius, abbot of Montecassino, who later became Pope
Victor III. During Desideriuss tenure, six altars were consecrated by
various bishops and Pope Gregory VII, indicating a focalization of
episcopal attention to the church in these years.
100
A cycle of paintings
96
[Sfondrato] Ricacci dalle tenebre il bagno, in cui S. Cecilia f dal carnece per la santa fede
uccisa, e che prima si diceva il suo Oratorio, e fece comparire i canali, per gli quali si
mandavano li accesi vapori, e lo ridusse in forma duna bellissima cappella ornata di vaghe,
e devote pitture. ([Sfondrato] raised from the shadows the bath, in which Saint Cecilia had
been killed by butchery towards the faith, and which was rst called her oratory, and he made
appear the tubes, through which the vapours arrived, and he shaped it into a beautiful chapel,
ornate with pretty and pious pictures.) O. Pancirioli, Tesori nascosti dellalma citt di Roma:
con nuovo ordine (Rome, 1625), p. 611.
97
M.G. Turco, Il titulus dei Santi Nereo ed Achilleo emblema della riforma cattolica (Rome,
1997); A. Herz, Cardinal Cesare Baronios Restoration of SS. Nereo ed Achilleo and S.
Cesareo de Appia, Art Bulletin 70:4 (December 1988), pp. 590620.
98
Claussen, Die Kirchen der Stadt Rom, pp. 22749.
99
Dedicatum est autem per Ubaldum Savinensem Episcopum. Die XVII. mensis Septembris,
tempore Gregorii VII. Papae. Anno Domini millesimo septuagesimo tertio, Indictione duo-
decima. Laderchi, Sanctae Caeciliae, p. 12, corrected the year of the indiction to undecima.
100
The inscription of the dedication of the main altar is preserved in the underground chapel:
DEDICATV[s] EST HOC ALTARE
DIE III MENSIS IVNII PER DOMNV(m)
GREGORIV(m) PP
VII
ANN[o] D[omi]NI MILL[e] LXXX
IND[ictione] III
V. Forcella, Iscrizioni delle chiese e daltri edicii di Roma dal secolo XI no ai giorni nostri
(Rome, 1873), II, p. 19. The other altars were dedicated to the Saviour (1060), the Virgin
Mary (1071), John the Baptist (1072), and Sant Andrea (1073). After the altar dedication of 1080,
however, there is no record of another altar dedication until 1098, suggesting that Desiderius
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2007 The Author. Journal Compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
32 Caroline J. Goodson
narrating Cecilias martyrdom and Urbans consecration of her home
into a church, concluding with a scene of Paschals vision of Cecilia,
was painted in the atrium of the church.
101
The near total destruction
of these paintings makes assessment of their chronology impossible, but
it has been suggested that they might date from this period of vigorous
attention to the basilica and the life, death and veneration of the
saint.
102
These renovations may be seen in light of the composition of
a major legendary compiled in the 1060s or 1070s at the monastery of
S. Cecilia in Trastevere and now located in Cape Town, South Africa.
103
That manuscript collection of Passions of saints venerated in the
liturgical calendar of S. Cecilia originally included more than 150 entries,
among which of course are the Passion of Saint Cecilia and the life of
Pope Urban. It may be that the compilation of the legendary, the
renovation of the Cappella del Bagno and the consecration of altars,
one in the bath itself, were all part of the same initiative of Cardinal
Desiderius to invigorate the veneration of saints at the church and,
perhaps, project the image of the properly pastoral bishop that Urban
represented in the Passion and even Pope Paschal might have represented
in Gregorian Rome.
104
While the eleventh-century marble oors cannot attest to Paschals
architectural treatment of the bath, these pieces of medieval ooring are
nonetheless important evidence for the presence of the chapel of the
bath in the central Middle Ages, allowing us to dismiss the Sfondratos
claims to have discovered the archaeology of the loca sancta himself.
Unfortunately, subsequent restoration has obliterated or obscured any
traces of an early medieval phase of the chapel of the bath. It is nonetheless
was very active in encouraging bishops from other Italian dioceses to contribute to the
renovations of the church, much more than his immediate predecessors and successors. The
saints to whom the altars are dedicated are biblical saints and Santa Cecilia, indicating the same
concern for orthodoxy in saint veneration that characterizes Paschals patronage.
101
Wilpert, Die rmischen Mosaiken, II, pp. 98590; S. Waetzold, Die Kopien des 17. Jahrhunderts
nach Mosaiken und Wandmalereien in Rom (Vienna, 1964), pp. 301.
102
V. Pace, Riforma della chiesa e visualizzazione della santit nella pittura romana: I casi
di SantAlessio e di Santa Cecilia, Wiener Jahrbuch fr Kunstgeschichte 46/47 (1993/1994),
pp. 5456.
103
Cape Town, National Library, Grey MS 48 b4, b5. On the legendary, see Franklin, Roman
Hagiography, pp. 8667 with citations of relevant bibliography.
104
Desiderius, famous as a patron of the arts and for his rebuilding of the abbey church of
Montecassino, imported artisans to make the opus sectile marble oors there. It has been
suggested that the oor of the Cappella del Bagno might actually be a link in the chain
between Desideriuss artisans and the early Roman oors of the Cosmati family workshop.
Claussen, Die Kirchen der Stadt Rom, pp. 2436. On Roman churches and the Gregorian
Reform, see Peter Cornelius Claussen, Renovatio Romae. Erneuerungsphasen rmischer
Architektur im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert, in B. Schimmelpfennig and L. Schmugge (eds), Rom
im hohen Mittelalter, Studien zu den Romvorstellungen und zur Rompolitik vom 10. bis zum 12.
Jahrhunderts (Sigmaringen, 1992), pp. 8894.
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2007 The Author. Journal Compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
The basilica of S. Cecilia 33
distinctly possible that Paschal incorporated the bath into the basilica,
just as he made the baptistery below part of his church.
105
In addition to this construction work on the church complex, Paschal
we can be certain brought the bodies of Saint Cecilia and her
companions to the church. His translation of the bodies was not only
the relocation of the saints bodies into an urban shrine, but also the
returning of the saints to their home, Cecilia to her place of martyr-
dom, Urban to the site where he performed the baptism of the faithful
in accordance with Cecilias wishes. Further, Paschals reuniting the
bodies of the saints in their ancient home is a gesture by which the pope
inserted himself into the sacred history of the saints. Among the good
works of Cecilia, Valerianus and Tiburtius, as well as a great number
of other saints, was the collecting and properly burying of dead Christians.
In the ninth century, Paschal undertook the same noble enterprise for
saints whose bodies had lain in destroyed cemeteries, with dutiful
concern that they should not remain neglected.
106
As pope, Paschal also
emulated the venerable example of his predecessor Urban, who, with
the agreement of Saint Cecilia, established the rst titulus Caeciliae. For
Cardinal Desiderius in the eleventh century and Cardinal Sfondrato in
the late sixteenth century, renovating the loca sancta of Cecilia and
redistributing the texts of the saints Passion effectively included the
later cardinals in Paschals chain of sacred history of venerable papal
benecence.
107
Comparing the renovations of Sfondrato and Desiderius with the
reconstructions of Paschal provides an answer to the question of why
Paschal was so interested in S. Cecilia. His attention had everything to
do with the veneration of saints, and meticulous attention to these
particular saints lives. While earlier popes had avoided saints Passion
texts as problematic because of their questionable authorship, and were
part of a popular, extraneous religious veneration, Paschal was demonstrably
familiar with these saints Passions, and he counted on contemporary
visitors to the church to know the story of the saint in some detail. This
suggests that by the ninth century, saints stories had become a prominent
part of the landscape of Christian experience in Rome. Unlike papal
ceremony, saint veneration was a popular practice: unscripted and
individual, sometimes even spontaneous. Yet in Paschals architectural
105
The orientation of the basilica and its placement adjacent to the bath structure would further
suggest that the incorporation of the bath was part of Paschals project.
106
. . . multa corpora sanctorum requirens invenit, quos et diligentius intro civtatem ad honorem
et gloriam Dei honeste recondidit, Duchesne, Le Liber Ponticalis, II, p. 52; trans. Davis, The
Lives of the Ninth-Century Popes, pp. 1011.
107
The event was so important within the clerical career of Sfondrato that the central relief of
his tomb, now located in the entrance to the church, shows him before the body of Cecilia,
in its sarcophagus before the altar of the church, revealing her body to the pope.
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2007 The Author. Journal Compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
34 Caroline J. Goodson
project of S. Cecilia, he melded the popular with the highly organized,
top-down celebration of the papal liturgy. The texts around Paschals
project carefully describe his actions as having been encouraged by the
saint herself, and in keeping with the traditions of previous popes and
old patterns of veneration. His translation of the body of Pope Urban,
Cecilias confessor, and the original pope who built the church, might
have been an attempt to underscore episcopal authority and tradition.
108
In conclusion, the Paschals basilica of S. Cecilia incorporated tradition
and innovation in form and function to create a new kind of institution
in the city of Rome. As Krautheimer pointed out long ago, the church
formally recalls ancient buildings, such as the fourth-century basilicas
of St Peters and St Pauls, expressing the prestige of the papal ofce
through long-standing architectural traditions of long basilicas with
colonnades of ancient marbles. The interior architecture of S. Cecilia
conveyed the importance of the church as a papal basilica and a station
in the liturgy of Rome. Yet the church complex also included sites
sacred to the cult of Saint Cecilia, and the papal basilica became a
saints shine with the inclusion of the bodies of Cecilia and her com-
panions. The architecture of the building combined the expression of
papal presence and also saintly praesentia. This particular combination
of saints body and papal basilica was not completely new, the prototype
of St Peters had combined the papal liturgy and the shrine of the body
of the Apostle since the fourth century. The innovative and unique
aspect of Paschals project at S. Cecilia is the considerable attention to
the gesta of a Roman martyr and the coordination of the new basilica
with the archaeological remains and corporeal relics of the saint. This
same kind of integration of text, material and relic conditioned Car-
dinal Desideriuss eleventh-century restoration and Cardinal Sfondratos
restoration of the church nearly eight hundred years later and his
project recapitulated Paschals own gesta in the lamination of the site
and shrine.
Birkbeck College, London
108
For a similar use of foundation legends of Roman churches for medieval papal politics, see
K. Cooper, The Martyr, the matrona and the Bishop: The Matron Lucina and the Politics
of Martyr Cult in Fifth- and Sixth-Century Rome, EME 8 (1999), pp. 297317; P. Llewellyn,
The Roman Church during the Laurentian Schism: Priests and Senators, Church History 45
(1976), pp. 41727.

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