The Spolia Churches of Rome: Recycling Antiquity in the Middle Ages

by Maria Fabricius Hansen

A particularly robust approach to Rome's antique past was taken in the Middle Ages, spanning from the Late Antiquity in the fourth century, until roughly the thirteenth century AD. The Spolia Churches of Rome looks at how the church-builders treated the architecture of ancient Rome like a quarry full of prefabricated material and examines the cultural, economic and political structure of the church and how this influenced the building's design. It is this trend of putting old buildings to new uses which presents an array of different forms of architecture and design within modern day Rome. This book is both an introduction to the spolia churches of medieval Rome, and a guide to eleven selected churches.

Genres: Archaeology

255 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[John Isles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spolia churches are those that incorporate recycled structural materials from ancient Rome: columns, capitals, bases, inscriptions, or anything else. After an 82-page general discussion of the subject, the author describes in detail the spolia to be found in eleven of Rome's medieval churches, and in summary form those to be found in another twenty-eight churches. We've visited most of these over the years, and recently we revisited several with this book in hand. It pointed out to us interesting features we'd not previously noticed, notably the heads of the ancient gods Isis and Serapis who now look down upon the Christian congregation in the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere.

Much of the discussion relates to the reuse of ancient columns. I had previously supposed these had been incorporated in the churches where they would fit, without much attention paid to their exact shape and size, the type of stone, and other details. The author argues, however, that there is sometimes a deliberate progression in type from the church entrance towards the altar, but sometimes not; when columns on opposite sides of the nave match, that is intentional, for the sake of symmetry; when they don't match, that is also intentional, for the sake of variety. This strikes me as special pleading. I would like to have seen some statistics presented to support such interpretations.

The translation from the original Danish varies in quality - for example, discreet and discrete are confused, there is no such word as "irregardless" (or there shouldn't be), and the name was Pope Innocent II, not Pope Innocence II. There are errors in the Latin too: it's Forum Romanum (p. 52), not Romano, and Ara Maxima Herculis, not Hercules (p. 172). The advice that men should wear long trousers when visiting Rome's churches is out of date, since knee-length shorts are now officially OK according to the signs.

The volume is well illustrated with a large number of color photos and plans of the churches. It's a fun book to browse as well as to take along when visiting these beautiful historic buildings.