Altari, cripte, confessiones. Architettura e liturgia nel Seicento romano

The relationship between the architecture of church buildings and the liturgy and rites constitutes a line of research that has long been profitably pursued in the study of early Christian and medieval churches. This book extends that approach to the period, the seventeenth century, in which Rome expressed some of the highest points of Western architecture, adding the analysis of rituals, liturgy, and martyrial and Eucharistic devotion to the components generally examined in the study of a sacred architecture. It is thus intended to closely relate certain formal solutions, developed by the masters of 17th-century Roman architecture, to the component of worship. The basic elements – the altar, the crypt, the confessio – characterize the presbyteries of churches since the early Middle Ages, and are analyzed here in different modern declinations. Starting from the anomalous but fundamental model of the Sistine Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore, through Carlo Maderno's works in Santa Susanna and Saint Peter's the architectural type of the modern confessio is defined. The confessio can be recognized as a system that relates the constituent components of the dimension of celebration and worship in the churches after the Council of Trent and in the Roman context: the liturgy, Eucharistic worship, and worship for the martyrs. In addition to Maderno, the works commissioned by Paolo Emilio Sfondrati, particularly the presbytery of Santa Cecilia, stand as a reference for many of the later achievements. The theme of recovering Christian antiquity thus finds different declinations, gradually moving from a Baronio-inspired arrangement of material remains to the recovery of a liturgical and ritual system that is conceptually inspired by antiquity but appears thoroughly modern in language. Key examples are then analyzed, such as the rearrangement of San Lorenzo in Damaso, where Cardinal Francesco Barberini re-proposes architectural forms and spatial relations, such as the apse and the isolated altar, ad orientem, precisely with this in mind. The volume devotes ample space to the treatment of the liturgical space of Saint Peter's, in light of its value as a model and prototype, both in its ancient arrangement, dating back to Gregory the Great, and in its renewal with Giacomo Della Porta's altar and especially Maderno's confessio. The completion of the liturgical arrangement of the Vatican Basilica shows how, with Bernini, the symbolic dimension of the liturgical arrangement and the importance of the martyr cult were chosen to be emphasized and privileged at the expense of the papal liturgy. The liturgical and devotional dimension emerge clearly as fundamental components in the dialogue with architecture for the definition of modern ecclesiastical spaces.