Santa Maria del Popolo

About

The Parish Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo (Italian: Basilica Parrocchiale Santa Maria del Popolo) is a titular church and a minor basilica in Rome run by the Augustinian order. It stands on the north side of Piazza del Popolo, one of the most famous squares in the city. The church is hemmed in between the Pincian Hill and Porta del Popolo, one of the gates in the Aurelian Wall as well as the starting point of Via Flaminia, the most important route from the north. Its location made the basilica the first church for the majority of travellers entering the city. The church contains works by several famous artists, such as Raphael, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Caravaggio, Alessandro Algardi, Pinturicchio, Andrea Bregno, Guillaume de Marcillat and Donato Bramante.

The well-known foundation legend of Santa Maria del Popolo revolves around the evil memory of Emperor Nero and the cleansing of the area from this malicious legacy by Pope Paschal II. As the story goes, after his suicide Nero was buried in the mausoleum of his paternal family, the Domitii Ahenobarbi, at the foot of the Pincian Hill. The sepulchre was later buried under a landslide and on its ruins grew a huge walnut tree that "was so tall and sublime that no other plant exceeded it in any ways." The tree soon became the haunt for a multitude of vicious demons harassing the inhabitants of the area and also the travelers arriving in the city from the north through Porta Flaminia : "some were being frightened, possessed, cruelly beaten and injured, others almost strangled, or miserably killed."

As the demons endangered an important access road of the city and also upset the entire population, the newly elected pontiff, Paschal II, was seriously concerned. He "saw the flock of Christ committed to his watch, becoming prey to the infernal wolves." The Pope fasted and prayed for three days and at the end of that period, exhausted, he dreamt of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who gave him detailed instructions on how to free the city from the demonic scourge.

On the Thursday after the Third Sunday of Lent in 1099, the Pope organised the entire clergy and populace of Rome in one, impressive procession that, with the crucifix at its head, went along the urban stretch of the Via Flaminia until it reached the infested place. There, Paschal II performed the rite of exorcism and then struck the walnut tree with a determined blow to its root, causing the evil spirits to burst forth, madly screaming. When the whole tree was removed, the remains of Nero were discovered among the ruins; the Pope ordered these thrown into the Tiber.

Finally liberated from the demons, that corner of Rome could be devoted to Christian worship. Paschal II, to the sound of hymns, placed the first stone of an altar at the former site of the walnut tree. This was incorporated into a simple chapel which was completed in three days. The construction was celebrated with particular solemnity: the Pope consecrated the small sanctuary in the presence of a large crowd, accompanied by ten cardinals, four archbishops, ten bishops and other prelates. He also granted the chapel many relics and dedicated it to the Virgin Mary.

The legend was recounted by an Augustinian friar, Giacomo Alberici in his treatise about the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo which was published in Rome in 1599 and translated into Italian the next year. Another Augustinian, Ambrogio Landucci rehashed the same story in his book about the origins of the basilica in 1646. The legend has been retold several times ever since with slight changes in collections of Roman curiosities, scientific literature and guidebooks. An example of the variations could be found in Ottavio Panciroli 's book which claimed that the demons inhabiting the tree took the form of black crows. It is not known how far the tradition goes back but in 1726 in the archive of Santa Maria del Popolo there was a catalogue of the holy relics of the church written in 1426 which contained a (lost) version of the "miracle of the walnut tree". This was allegedly copied from an even more ancient tabella at the main altar. In the 15th century the story was already popular enough to be recounted by various German sources like Nikolaus Muffel 's Description of Rome (1452) or The Pilgrimage of Arnold Von Harff (1497).

The factual basis of the legend is weak. Nero was indeed buried in the mausoleum of his paternal family, but Suetonius in his Life of Nero writes that "the family tomb of the Domitii [was] on the summit of the Hill of Gardens, which is visible from the Campus Martius." The location of the mausoleum was therefore somewhere on the higher north-west slopes of the Pincian Hill and certainly not at the foot of it where the church stands.

The foundation of the chapel by Paschal II was maybe part of an effort to restore the safety of the area around Porta Flaminia which was outside the inhabited core of medieval Rome and certainly infested with bandits. Another possible source of inspiration for the legend could have been the well-documented revenge of Pope Paschal II on the body of his opponent, Antipope Clement III. The pope seized the city of Civita Castellana, had Clement's cadaver exhumed from his tomb, and ordered it thrown into the Tiber. Clement III was the protégée of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV who was often called "Nero" by the papal party.

The name del Popolo ("of the people") was most probably derived from populus meaning large rural parish in medieval Latin. In this case the name refers to the first suburban settlement around Via Flaminia that was formed after the chapel had been built in this previously deserted part of Campus Martius. Others think the denomination implied that the people of Rome were saved from the demonic scourge or it came from the Latin word pōpulus, meaning poplar. The demonic tree was a huge walnut but there might have been poplar trees growing on ancient tombs in the locality. The name S. Maria ad Flaminiam appeared in some 15th-century documents.

The name of Santa Maria del Popolo is missing in the catalogue of the churches of Rome which was written by Cencio Camerario in 1192. Later tradition held that the miraculous image of Our Lady, painted by St. Luke himself, was moved to the church by Pope Gregory IX from the Sancta Sanctorum in the Lateran. This happened after a flood of the Tiber – probably the great flood in 1230 – caused a horrible plague in the city. The pope convoked the cardinals, the whole clergy and the people of Rome and the icon was transferred in a solemn procession to Santa Maria del Popolo. After that the plague ceased and the tranquility of the city was restored. The Madonna del Popolo has certainly remained one of the most popular Marian icons through the centuries, attracted many pilgrims and assured a greater role to the geographically still remote church. In 2018, it was announced that the icon was a work of Filippo Rusuti, whose signature was discovered on the image during restoration.

The early history of Santa Maria del Popolo is almost unknown because the archives of the church were dispersed during the Napoleonic era and few documents survived from before 1500. The first references in archival sources are from the 13th century. The Catalogue of Paris (compiled around 1230 or 1272–76) listing the churches of Rome already contains the name of Santa Maria de Populo. There may have been a small Franciscan community living by the church until around 1250 but it is possible that they stayed there only temporarily.

In the middle of the 13th century the church was given to the Order of Saint Augustine which has maintained it ever since. The Augustinians were a new mendicant order established under the guidance of Cardinal Riccardo Annibaldi, probably the most influential member of the Roman Curia at the time. Annibaldi was appointed corrector and provisor of the Tuscan hermits by Pope Innocent IV in December 1243. The cardinal convened a meeting to Santa Maria del Popolo for the delegates of the hermitic communities where they declared their union and the foundation of the new order that the Pope confirmed with the bull Pia desideria on 31 March 1244.

A few years later a community of friars was established by the church and the Franciscans were compensated for their loss with the monastery of Ara Coeli. This probably happened in 1250 or 1251. The so-called Grand Union that integrated various other hermitic communities with the Tuscans by the order of Pope Alexander IV was also established on the general chapter held in Santa Maria del Popolo under the supervision of Cardinal Annibaldi in March 1256. The strong connection between the Annibaldi family and the church was attested on an inscription that mentioned two noble ladies of the family, Caritia and Gulitia who set up some kind of marble monument in the basilica in 1263. The Catalogue of Turin (c. 1320) stated that the monastery had 12 friars from the order of the hermits at the time.

In his bull Dum praecelsa Pope Boniface IX on 30 August 1400 granted a special indulgence to those who offered alms for the construction of a new tabernacle above the miraculous image of the Virgin. A marble relief depicting the Coronation of the Virgin (now preserved in the sacristy corridor) could have been part of a Gothic ciborium or cella built for the icon after that papal concession.

In the 15th century the friary of Santa Maria del Popolo joined the observant reform movement that tried to restore the original purity of monastic life. The general chapter of the Augustinian observants in May 1449 established five separate congregations for the observant friars in Italy. That of Rome-Perugia was sometimes named after Santa Maria del Popolo although the monastery never had the official position of a mother-house. In 1472 the friary was given over by Pope Sixtus IV to the Lombard Congregation, the most important and populous of all, and it became its Roman headquarter and the seat of its procurator general (ambassador) at the Roman Curia.

Soon after its transfer to the prestigious Lombard Congregation Santa Maria del Popolo was reconstructed between 1472 and 1477 on the orders of Pope Sixtus IV. This was part of the ambitious urban renovation program of the pope who presented himself as Urbis Restaurator of Rome. The medieval church was entirely demolished and a new three-aisled, Latin cross shaped basilica was built with four identical chapels on both sides, an octagonal dome above the crossing and a tall Lombard style bell-tower at the end of the right transept. The result of this reconstruction was an early and excellent example of Italian Renaissance architecture in Rome. In spite of the many later changes the basilica essentially kept its Sistine form until today.

The architect or architects of this innovative project remain unknown due to a lack of contemporary sources. Giorgio Vasari in his Lives attributed all the important papal projects in Rome during Sixtus IV to a Florentine, Baccio Pontelli including the basilica and monastery of Santa Maria del Popolo. Modern researchers deemed this claim highly dubious and proposed other names among them Andrea Bregno, a Lombard sculptor and architect whose workshop certainly received important commissions in the basilica. The fundamental differences between the façade and the interior suggest that maybe more than one architect was working on the building.

The year of completion is indicated on the inscriptions above the side doors of the façade. The one on the left reads "SIXTUS·PP·IIII·FVNDAVIT·1477", the other on the right reads "SIXTUS·PP·IIII·PONT·MAX·1477". Jacopo da Volterra recorded in his diary that the pope visited the church that "he rebuilt from the ground up a few years ago" in 1480. The pope was so strongly attached to the church, that he went there to pray every Saturday and celebrated mass in the papal chapel every year on September 6, the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin. On 2 June 1481 when the rumour about the death of Mehmed the Conqueror was confirmed, the pope went to the Vespers at Santa Maria del Popolo in thanksgiving with the cardinals and the ambassadors. Another occasion when the pope celebrated an important event in the basilica was the victory of the papal troops against the Neapolitans at Campomorto on 21 August 1482.

The reconstruction also had a symbolic message that the evil walnut tree of Nero was supplanted by the beneficent oak of the Della Rovere. The papal coats of arms were placed on the façade and the vaults as "symbols of eternal happiness and protection from lightning", as Landucci explained praising the transposition of the two trees. Another important aspect of the Sistine reconstruction was that it made the basilica – the first church for the pilgrims arriving in Rome from the North – a dynastic monument of the Della Rovere family. This was reinforced by relatives of the pope and other personages of his court who bought chapels and built funeral monuments. "Santa Maria del Popolo became a place to unite visually the universal domination of the church with the della Rovere, a totemic symbol that would associate the della Rovere with Rome and allowed them to co-opt its magnificience and glory", claimed Lisa Passaglia Bauman.

The new high altar for the icon of the Madonna was commissioned by Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, the nephew of the pope, or Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia in 1473. Another relative, Cardinal Domenico della Rovere bought two chapels on the right side. He transformed the first one into a funeral chapel and sold the other one to Cardinal Jorge da Costa in 1488. The next papal family, the Cybos furnished the second chapel on the right in the 1490s, and also the third chapel on the left, while the third chapel on the right went to another cardinal-nephew of Pope Sixtus, Girolamo Basso della Rovere. In the first chapel on the left a confidant of the pope, Bishop Giovanni Montemirabile was buried in 1479. Another confidant, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Mellini was buried in the third chapel on the left after his death in 1478. The two artists most closely associated with this period of the church were the sculptor Andrea Bregno and the painter Pinturicchio.