BMCR 2009.08.08: Dey on Nieddu, La Basilica Apostolorum sulla via Appia e l'area cimiteriale circostante. Monumenti di antichita\ cristiana, II serie, 19

Anna Maria Nieddu, La Basilica Apostolorum sulla via Appia e l'area
cimiteriale circostante. Monumenti di antichita\ cristiana, II serie,
19.  Citta\ del Vaticano:  Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia
Cristiana, 2009.  Pp. xvi, 494.  ISBN 9788885991460.  EUR 90.00.

Reviewed by Hendrik Dey, Aarhus University, Center for Advanced Study
in the Visual Arts, Washington, DC ([email protected])
Word count:  2283 words
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Table of Contents
(http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/casalini08/07940320.pdf)

The basilica apostolorum, now San Sebastiano, is a monumental (65 x
30.5m) and unusually well-preserved funerary basilica constructed
outside the walls of Rome, between the second and third milestones on
the Via Appia, early in the fourth century. Nieddu's expansive
publication of the site began life as a doctoral thesis at La Sapienza,
under the supervision of Vincenzo Fiocchi Nicolai, before reaching its
current and definitive form. It is, frankly, a book that could only
have been written in Rome, by a researcher with extensive knowledge of,
and regular access to, both the remains of the site and an enormous
assemblage of documentary materials contained in a range of libraries,
archives and private collections scattered across the city and beyond.
While large-scale excavations on the site concluded in the 1960s, much
of the massive corpus of data in existence has until now only been
published in summary form. Nieddu has systematically mined reams of
photographs, private correspondence, excavation reports and diaries,
much of it unpublished (including Antonio Ferrua's copious excavation
records), to produce an exhaustive study of the church and the funerary
structures in its immediate vicinity. Alongside the topography of the
complex, Nieddu considers also the surviving traces of the frescoes,
stucco and sculptural decoration that once adorned it, as well as the
numerous sarcophagi, inscriptions and assorted smaller finds recovered
in connection with the structural remains. While the bulk of Nieddu's
study is focused on the period between the fourth century and the
sixth, when the site was a leading center of funerary cult and saw the
installation of thousands of burials, she devotes considerable
attention both to the prior occupation of the area, as well as to its
subsequent history up to the thirteenth century, when it underwent an
extensive reconfiguration.

Much of the information that will be most useful to non-aficionados of
Roman funerary basilicas is contained in the first chapter, which
provides a general introduction to the occupational history of the
area, with particular reference to the Roman cemetery that occupied the
site of the future basilica from the first century AD, and the first
manifestations of Christian cult in the third and fourth centuries.
>From the period before the construction of the basilica, the most
remarkable feature present is the small complex of rooms arranged
around a central courtyard, dubbed by the excavators the Memoria
Apostolorum. The structure is unambiguously a site of Christian cult;
its walls are covered by hundreds of Christian graffiti; and it dates
to the mid-third century, and thus to precisely the time (AD 258) when
the relics of Peter and Paul were transferred to the site, according to
two later Roman martyrologies, probably as a result of the Decian
persecutions. While the veracity of the tradition has occasioned much
scholarly debate, Nieddu follows the tradition of Duchesne in thinking
that the relics were installed on the site for several generations,
until their eventual translation to St. Peter's and St. Paul's.[[1]]
Following the construction of the basilica, which Nieddu, in accord
with a general -- though not universal -- consensus, places early in
the reign of Constantine, the interior and environs of the church were
given over to intensive funerary use. During the remainder of the
fourth century, a remarkable concentration of often large and elaborate
mausolea was constructed abutting the church and in its immediate
vicinity, alongside hundreds of simpler burials. Many of the 25
documented mausolea, many of which preserve traces of elaborate
painted, stuccoed and sculptural decoration, housed scions of Rome's
most distinguished families, some of whose names appear among the vast
corpus of inscriptions recovered in the vicinity.

The second chapter contains an overview of the scholarly tradition on
the complex, culminating with an account of the extensive excavations
conducted between the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the
1960s.

The heart of the volume comes in Chapters 3-7. Chapter 3 focuses on the
church itself, and concludes with the case for dating the structure to
the early years of Constantine's reign, on the basis of circumstantial
but generally convincing indicators, in particular the marked
similarity of its masonry with the adjacent Villa of Maxentius, and the
absence of Christograms among the copious graffiti covering the
underlying Memoria Apostolorum, which must thus have been put out of
use and interred in the foundations of the Basilica before ca. 320-325.
Chapter 4 treats the series of mausolea constructed along the south
side of the church, beginning soon after its completion and terminating
at the end of the fourth century with the large semicircular structure
built adjoining the external wall of the ambulatory, the so called
Platorina or Mausoleum of Quirinus. In addition to preserving what may
well be the remains of the Saint himself, a martyred Pannonian bishop
whose relics were transferred to Rome in ca. 390, in two small boxes
interred deep beneath the floor, the structure is remarkable for its
rich painted and stuccoed decoration, which Nieddu calls 'undoubtedly
the most important preserved at Rome from the late-antique period' (p.
246). Chapter 5 is devoted to a discussion of the pre-Christian
funerary remains on the north side of the church, followed in Chapter 6
by an account of the fifteen mausolea constructed in the area in the
second half of the fourth century. Chapter 7 rounds out the
consideration of the northern sector with a discussion of the
contemporaneous reoccupation of earlier Roman burials, and the
installation of simpler tombs in the open spaces surrounding the
mausolea.

These very dense chapters are followed by a brief overview of the
Christian burials in their entirety in Chapter 8, with particular
attention given to issues of funerary cult, the identity of the
deceased, and the mechanisms of private patronage, piety and
self-representation that led to the erection of the mausolea. Finally,
Chapter 9 provides a more summary history of the occupation of the site
between the sixth century, when burials largely ceased, and its
extensive restoration in the thirteenth.

The volume is enormous, well-produced, copiously footnoted, and
furnished with good illustrations and photos (458, plus three fold-out
plans!), many of them previously unpublished. Consideration of the
massive underlying labyrinth of subterranean catacombs, which extends
over many acres on three levels, would have required another book of
similar length, which the author can hardly be expected to have
written, particularly as precisely such a volume is currently under
preparation by Raffaella Giuliani. Giuliani's study will thus be an
essential pendant to that of Nieddu, the more so given that Nieddu
focuses more than any of her predecessors on the expressly funerary
character of the church during the first two centuries of its
existence, and devotes most of her attention to the mausolea and other
burial contexts located at or near ground level. We will thus have to
wait a bit longer before the catacombs are fully integrated into the
scholarly picture of a complex known, from the time of its founding, as
the basilica ad catacumbas.

Remaining on the subject of what the book does not contain, it should
be said that Nieddu's analytical and interpretive focus is closely tied
to the structures and materials for which material documentation
exists: vanished features attested only by vague textual references,
therefore, receive only summary consideration, and no systematic
attempt is made to explain why the complex as a whole remained so
unusually vibrant over the longue dure/e.  Nieddu makes it quite clear
that the basilica and its surroundings have been intensely and quite
continuously frequented from late antiquity to the present (apart from
St. Peter's, St. Paul's and San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, it seems in fact
to have been the only one of Rome's great extramural sanctuaries to
remain an important focus of cult practice in the early Middle Ages,
when it seamlessly transformed from a funerary complex to a center of
veneration for its associated saintly burials), but she does not offer
a developed thesis on why this may have been the case. My sense -- and
I presume Nieddu's as well, in light of her repeated emphasis on the
lasting importance of the cult of Peter and Paul -- is that the durable
tradition that linked the relics of these saints to the site was
sufficient to endow it with a status unmatched by the remaining
funerary basilicas and martyrial shrines in the Roman suburbs. As the
'basilica of the apostles,' as it was still called under Pope Hadrian I
at the end of the eighth century, it constituted a third privileged
focus of Petrine and Pauline cult, and thus followed an historical
trajectory that linked it more closely with St. Peter's and St. Paul's
than with the remaining fourth-century funerary basilicas. The scope
for further reflections along these lines seems wide indeed.

In practical terms, the maintenance of the site, the supervision of the
shrines of its most famous martyrs, and the performance of a continuous
regime of prayer and services at their tombs will have fallen largely
to the monks residing in the adjacent monastery established ad
catacumbas by Pope Sixtus III (432-440; it is in fact the earliest
monastic foundation attested at Rome, another significant indicator of
the prestige of the basilica).[[2]] As no traces of the original
foundation, which was subsequently restored by Pope Nicholas I
(856-67), according to the Liber Pontificalis, have been plausibly
identified, Nieddu concentrates almost exclusively on the remains of
the early-thirteenth century cloister, which was erected ex novo on the
south side of the church (pp. 479-90). Thus, as they do not appear in
the material record, the monks who were likely so instrumental in
ensuring the remarkable upkeep of the site over the course of eight
centuries have largely disappeared from the historical panorama traced
in Chapter 9.

With regard to the historical context of the basilica's construction,
Nieddu notes that its location immediately across the Via Appia from
the Villa of Maxentius likely results in part from a desire on the part
of Constantine, newly sympathetic to the Christian faith, to supersede
the villa and the legacy of its founder (pp. 143-45). Given the pivotal
significance of the epoch in which the church was evidently founded
(Nieddu's case for the date of construction makes it very probably the
first large Christian basilica in Rome), a few further remarks are
perhaps warranted. Recent excavations in the villa have in fact shown
that it was never finished, and that the technical characteristics of
the masonry are even more similar--effectively identical--to the
masonry of the church than previously acknowledged, both points which
provide considerable support for Nieddu's proposition that the same
building crews employed in the villa worked on Constantine's new
foundation across the road.[[3]] Indeed, what begins to emerge is a
sense that the builders were summarily transferred from the villa
project, leaving off work almost from one day to the next and beginning
anew on the basilica. The case thus grows in support of the idea that
Constantine was directly involved in the foundation of the basilica,
and that the project may have been undertaken very soon after his
arrival in Rome, as the decision to cease work on an imperial project
of the magnitude of Maxentius's villa, and the apparent reassignment of
the workforce, can only have come from the very highest levels of the
administration, in all probability from the emperor himself. The latest
archaeological work at the villa thus lends substantial weight -- and
color -- to Nieddu's inclination to see the basilica apostolorum as a
remarkably precocious testament to Constantine's new sympathy for the
Christian cause (pp. 144-45), begun in the years -- or even, we might
now say, months? -- immediately following his victory at the Milvian
Bridge.

The preceding remarks are not criticisms per se, or if they are, they
are so chiefly in that most churlish sense of "attacks for not being
the book you would have written" which BMCR reviewers are explicitly
admonished to avoid. Nieddu clearly made a conscious decision to limit
her analysis primarily to the physical contours of the complex that are
either extant or for which extant documentation exists, and she has
done so with great success. The topographical, architectural,
archaeological, epigraphic and literary data she marshals demonstrate
with new and lapidary clarity the lasting importance of the basilica
and its associated tombs, and the extent to which it flourished in the
early Middle Ages and beyond, relative to the other late-antique
funerary basilicas erected on the Roman periphery. In an understated
but very compelling way, Nieddu thus provides the most comprehensive
case yet formulated for just how exceptional the basilica apostolorum
really was; and in the process, she opens the way for new
considerations of the all-important question of why (and how) this
should have been so. Her study should thus become the essential point
of departure for future reconsiderations of the impact of the site on
the topographical and spiritual horizons of the city as a whole, which
will have to range farther beyond its documented remains if the
remarkable fact of their existence is to be more fully explained.

With regard to the physical contours of the basilica and its immediate
surroundings, however, this book will be the standard resource for a
very long time, barring the unlikely possibility of substantial new
discoveries in the area. Nieddu has admirably fulfilled her objective
of providing a comprehensive synthesis of the massive corpus of
evidence pertinent to the physical configuration of the site; and in
her punctilious sifting of the sources and their presentation in a
cohesive, lavishly documented and illustrated format, she has performed
a labor as herculean as it is useful for anyone with an interest in
this remarkable complex.


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Notes:


1.   L. Duchesne, Le Liber Pontificalis, Texte, Introduction et
Commentaire, rev. ed., Paris, 1955-7, pp. CVI-CVII.

2.   Ferrari, G. Early Roman monasteries. Notes for the history of the
monasteries and convents at Rome from the V through the X century,
Vatican City, 1957, pp. 163-65.

3.   Conlin, D., A. Haeckl and G. Ponti, 'The Villa of Maxentius on the
Via Appia: Report on the 2005 Excavations,' Memoirs of the American
Academy in Rome 51-52 (2007), 347-70.