Reclaiming the Roman Capitol: Santa Maria in Aracoeli From the Altar of Augustus to the Franciscans, C. 5001450 by Claudia Bolgia;

Author:Claudia Bolgia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2017-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Transmission and reception of formal ideas: Artistic exchanges between Rome and England in the Thirteenth century

It is well known that Roman marble workers were actively involved at Westminster Abbey on royal patronage between c.1265 and the early 1290s.299Pietro who signed the shrine of St Edward the Confessor as Romanus civis was undoubtedly a Roman, and so probably was Odorico, who composed the sanctuary floor by joining together the precious marbles brought from the City by Abbot Richard of Ware in 1268. The inscription on the shrine, of which only a small portion is extant, read ‘Anno milleno Domini cum septuageno / et bis centeno cum completo quasi deno / hoc opus est factum quod Petrus duxit in actum / Romanus civis. Homo causam noscere si vis / Rex fuit Henricus Sancti presenti amicus’.300 The inscription on the floor, only partially legible today, is usually recorded as ‘+ Christi milleno bis centeno duodena / cum sexageno subductis quatuor anno / tercius Henricus rex Urbs Odoricus et abbas / hos compegere porphireos lapides’ .301 However, thecity as the subject of the sentence, on the same level as the three human agents, is perplexing. It is more likely that the inscription originally read Urbe instead of Urbs: in this case the composer of the text played with the preceding word Rex to create a motion ablative (ex Urbe = from Rome). If this were the case, the translation would read ‘the third King Henry, Odorico and the Abbot joined together these porphyry stones from Rome’, and the text would also allude to the Roman provenance of the artist ‘ex Urbe Odoricus’ ,302 This marble pavement, in most of its constituent materials as well as in its design, combining larger guilloches, interlocking squares and circles with tiny geometrical, star-shaped motifs, is unquestionably Roman. More specifically — in its similarity with works produced in Rome and the Patrimony for papal and curial patronage in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — it bespeaks an overtly Roman curial language,

299 Claussen, Magistri, pp. 176—85; Binski,‘Cosmati at Westminster’, pp. 6—34; Gardner, ‘Cosmati’, pp. 201— 16; id., ‘Legates’, pp. 74—93; Carpenter, Reign, pp. 409—25; Binski, ‘Cosmati and romanitas , pp. 116—34.

300 ‘In the year of our Lord one thousand with seventy and two hundred, and ten nearly complete, this work was made which Peter, citizen of Rome, brought into being. Man, if you wish to know the instigator, it was King Henry, the friend of the present Saint’. Recorded in the fifteenth century by Richard Sporley (Brit. Lib., Ms Cotton Claudius A. VIII, fol. 59v): Binski, ‘Cosmati at Westminster’, p. 14.

301 In the one thousandth year of Christ, twice hundredth, twelfth, with the sixtieth minus four, the third King Henry, the City (Rome), Odorico and the Abbot joined together these porphyry stones’ (inscription recorded in Brit. Lib., Ms Cotton Claudius A. VIII, fol. 59, and Brit. Lib., Ms Cotton Claudius B. VI, fol. 191v).

302 I am grateful to Maurizio Campanelli for this suggestion. The verse would work perfectly, from a metrical point of view, because of the elision of the ‘e’ of Urbe with the ‘O’ of Odoricus.

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