Seldom does a collection of art history essays leave readers yearning for a second volume. Beautifully produced with stunning color images, although lacking sufficient comparative illustrations, Chapels of the Cinquecento and Seicento in the Churches of Rome presents nine resplendent examples—some little studied, others well known but newly interpreted. Fulfilling the promise of the introduction, readers are offered “a deeper understanding of the [chapels’] variety, richness, and complexity . . . as sites for liturgical celebration, quiet devotion, and pilgrimage; as burial places and reliquary shrines; and as expressions of individual, familial, and ecclesiastical power and spirituality” (13).
The informative introduction by the three editors explicates theological definitions, canonical rights of patronage, and chapels’ diverse architectural forms. Private chapels first proliferated in thirteenth-century Mendicant churches, then “reached [an] apogee” (10) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Despite Carlo Borromeo's directives (1577) for reforming church construction and furnishings, Roman patrons and artists felt no compulsion to conform. They explored innovative techniques for creating material splendor—in particular, encrusting walls with dazzling polychrome marble—while deriving renewed inspiration from antiquarian culture and contemporary renovations of early Christian churches.
The essays, organized chronologically, augment the authors’ previous studies and include unpublished documents, most translated into English. They offer significant perspectives on the patrons and their influential ecclesiastical, civic, and intellectual circles, and on the artists and artisans, affording new attributions and dates that clarify processes of design, construction, and decoration. Each author suggests avenues for further research.
Patrizia Tosini identifies the patron of the Frangipani Chapel in San Marcello as Curzio Frangipani, trusted advisor to the Farnese and preeminent member of the Capitoline elite. She interprets the marble decoration—“the [chapel's] most original element” (29)—as an explicit reference to the recently excavated Fasti Capitolini, which recorded supposed Frangipani forebears among the Republic's chief magistrates. Fabio Barry reappraises the Cappella Gregoriana, Gregory XIII's colossal mausoleum in St. Peter's, through two contemporary Neo-Latin ekphrases. He parses their Greek and Latin (both pagan and Christian) antecedents to evoke the experience of viewing the original (destroyed) golden mosaics and “animated marbles” (59).
To erect his chapel, Cardinal Enrico Caetani demolished the oratory at Santa Pudenziana that conserved martyrs’ bodies and blood gathered by the saintly sisters, Pudenziana and Prassede. Enrico Parlato reconsiders the decoration that linked the Caetani lineage, cult of martyrs, and Passion of Christ. The mimetic, black-and-white mixed marble background of the Arma Christi inlays, I suggest, references the Column of the Flagellation, venerated in the neighboring church of Santa Prassede.
Steven F. Ostrow illumines the catacomb-like, oval confessio beneath the chancel of Santa Susanna, which Cardinal Girolamo Rusticucci renovated, as “a recreation alla moderna of a subterranean memoria” (107). Chiara Franceschini underscores the visual dialogue between Christian past and modernity at San Gregorio al Celio, built on the site of Saint Gregory the Great's parental home where a Marian image had spoken to him. Financed by Cardinal Antonio Maria Salviati, this ruinous (actually, Trecento) image was installed in a new chapel to interact with the altarpiece depicting young Gregory, recreating the miraculous event for posterity.
Algardi's statue of St. Philip Neri and the Angel crowns the altar of the Boncompagni Chapel in the sacristy of Santa Maria in Vallicella. By revealing the little-known history of the patron, Pietro Boncompagni, a Jewish convert, Guendalina Serafinelli revises previous interpretations. Louise Rice elucidates the ingenious design of the Spada Chapel's balustrade in San Girolamo della Carità, where two marble angels suspend a length of vibrantly striped jasper “fabric”—a Communion cloth that “stretch[es] the meaning of the [altar] rail in new and imaginative ways” (171–72). Alison C. Fleming and Stephanie C. Leone demonstrate how the “integrated spatial environment” (191) of Francis Xavier's reliquary chapel in the Gesù catalyzed his cult's locus. Fabrizio Federici documents the renovation of the Cybo Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo that conveyed the overarching ambitions of the cardinal patron who challenged the supremacy of Raphael's Chigi Chapel across the nave.
These erudite, jargon-free studies will engage students and scholars alike. They attest how much remains to be mined in archives, how new evidence spurs compelling analyses and revisions, and how the palimpsest that is Rome is eternally reframed and reconstructed.
