The Oratorians’ Icon: The Madonna Vallicelliana in Post-Tridentine Rome Jeffrey Fraiman The Madonna Vallicelliana (Figure 1), an icon from the both its metaphysical idea and its cultic significance.”3 In The fourteenth century, is the cynosure of Peter Paul Rubens’s Self-Aware Image, Victor Stoichita writes that the Rubens was 1608 high altar program for the church of Santa Maria in Val- a “lesson with far-reaching consequences: thanks to Rubens, licella. In two lateral panels that flank the central altarpiece, icon and painting become mutually exclusive.”4 While Ru- Rubens painted Gregory the Great and five other saints, all bens’s first rejected attempt and second final project have of whom are oriented towards the icon on the high altar. In been given considerable attention in the literature, includ- the central work, Rubens portrayed in the foreground a row ing extensive publication and analysis of the records of the of six angels adoring an icon of the Virgin and Christ Child commission and how Rubens worked with the Oratorian held aloft by swirling putti (Figure 2). Typically, the altarpiece Fathers, less attention has been devoted to the Vallicella is presented with the icon simulacrum Rubens painted on icon’s status in the specific spiritual context of Rome follow- a copper sheet that can be moved aside to reveal the Ma- ing the Council of Trent.5 This essay examines the Vallicella donna Vallicelliana, the church’s prized fourteenth-century icon in the context of a post-Tridentine paleoChristian revival, icon. The aforementioned configuration is actually Rubens’s contending that the recently established Oratorian order was second attempt at what he described as the most prestigious able to link itself to the longer history of the Catholic Church commission in Rome.1 His first essay, which combined the through the Order’s appropriation of the icon, its veneration various saints, angels, putti, and icons into a single unified of relics, and its translation of the icon across various media. pala, was rejected by the Oratorian Fathers ostensibly be- The Vallicella icon is a fourteenth-century fresco cause of its illegibility in the church light.2 In the second and originally affixed to a wall outside a public bath in the Ro- final version, the Rubens cover is removed and the Vallicella man neighborhood of Parione. Parione was located in the icon is displayed on Sundays and other feast days (Figure 3). Florentine region of the city, in an inaccessible “backwater” Though the style of Rubens’s work has often been removed from the papal processional routes.6 The icon was viewed as the point of departure for so-called “high baroque” specifically located in an area called “Pozzo Bianco,” or painting, it is its bricolage-type nature—its assemblage of old white well. The area boasted a reputation for prostitution and new—that would have immense impact on both church and general ill repute: according to one writer, “Whenever decoration in seventeenth-century Rome and modern art one wanted to exaggerate some infamy, one said that it historical discourse on the religious image. In Likeness and would never have been committed even at Pozzo Bianco.”7 Presence, Hans Belting writes, “Art sets the scene for the In 1535, the Virgin began to bleed from her neck after the old, ungainly image, which is loved by the public but is now fresco was hit by a flying object, either a stone slung by an revealed through the painted poetry of Rubens’s picture in angry gambler or an errant football kicked by a young boy.8 1 “Therefore, when the finest and most splendid opportunity in all Rome 4 Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern presented itself, my ambition urged me to avail myself of the chance. Meta-Painting, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (Cambridge: Cambridge It is the high altar of the new church of the Priests of the Oratory, University Press, 1997), 76. called Santa Maria in Vallicella—without doubt the most celebrated and frequented church in Rome today, situated right in the center of 5 For the first and still most comprehensive account of the Rubens com- the city, and to be adorned by the combined efforts of all the most mission, see Jaffé, “Rubens and the Oratorian Fathers,” 209-244. able painters in Italy. Although the work mentioned is not yet begun, personages of such rank are interested in it that I cannot honourably 6 For the icon, see Maria Teresa Bonadonna Russo, “La Madonna della give up a contract obtained so gloriously, against the pretensions of Vallicella,” L’ u r b e 50, no. 2 (1987): 27-38. all the leading painters of Rome.” Quoted in Michael Jaffé, Rubens and Italy (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977), 88. 7 From the Archivio della Congregazione dell’Oratorio, at S. Maria in Vallicella, transcribed in Carlo Gasbarri, L’Oratorio romano dal 2 Michael Jaffé, “Peter Paul Rubens and the Oratorian Fathers,” Pro- cinquecento al novecento (Rome, 1962), 211; quoted in Joseph Con- porzioni: Studi di Storia dell’Arte 4 (1963): 221. Rubens’s first attempt nors, Borromini and the Roman Oratory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, is now in the Musée de Grenoble. 1980), 8. 3 Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before 8 See Russo, “Madonna della Vallicella,” 30-31. the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 294. ATHANOR XXXIII JEFFREY FRAIMAN The nebulous stories surrounding the icon’s legend align it Cesi, familiar with this model, may well have influenced the with the typical discovery pattern of miraculous icons in the Oratorians’ actions and been involved with promoting the period. They are typically found in a neglected outdoor area appropriation of the icon for the new order’s use. But unlike by a fringe member of society and taken inside where they the icon in the church in Todi, directly accessible by the laity, attract a devoted following.9 Indeed this blueprint transpired the icon in the Chiesa Nuova would be strictly controlled by with the Vallicella icon. The legend of the image spread, and the clerics, and public access would be closely mediated. it soon developed a popular cult. This mediation occurs through Rubens’s decorative scheme Perhaps fortuitously, its growing fame coincided with and the revealing of the icon only on certain occasions. In the rise of Filippo Neri’s ascendance and the founding of contrast to the situation in Todi, at the Chiesa Nuova the the Oratorian order. Neri, a Florentine, moved to Rome c. icon’s autonomous status had been filtered through the con- 1535—the same year the icon performed its miraculous ex- trolling atmosphere of post-Tridentine Rome, where bishops sanguination.10 In the following decades, as the icon attracted had final say in their church’s decorations. followers, so did Neri himself. He was ordained in 1551 and The Vallicella icon’s reliquary nature would have lent the became chaplain of the church of S. Girolamo della Carità. new order of the Oratorians an added legitimacy within the His practice of hearing confessions and his rousing sermons Catholic Church. By aligning themselves with the icon, the on scripture grew in popularity through the middle of the Oratorians could symbolically stretch their origins back to sixteenth century. Eventually, his group, who practiced in a the fourteenth century, and even earlier. A central debate be- space called an oratory, outgrew its typical meeting location tween theologians in the sixteenth century was the Catholic and was given by Pope Gregory XIII the old church of Santa Church’s reliance on history and tradition. Protestant doctrine Maria in Vallicella. The Oratorians soon built a new church included only that which could be traced to scripture. The with the same name on this site, hence its nickname—the Catholic Church, steeped in tradition, also turned to its his- Chiesa Nuova. tory to assert its superiority. One way of doing this was by In 1575, the Pope officially recognized the Oratorians as veneration of relics, a practice upheld during the 25th session a religious order. Sometime in the same period, the church’s of the Council of Trent.15 then rector Antonino Adiuti (r. 1569-75) took possession Relics were of particular significance to Filippo Neri and of the Vallicella icon for the Oratorians.11 It was moved to the Oratorians. Neri spent time at the catacombs of St. Se- the sacristy of the old church and has remained inside that bastian on the Appian Way reading, praying, and meditating building since—although it moved two or three times before alongside the bones of early Christian martyrs. In Rome, in its location on the high altar, behind the 1608 intervention 1578, a spate of catacombs was discovered, literally underlin- by Rubens, was settled (Figure 4).12 ing the city.16 Suddenly the sacrosanct nature of the physical The institutionalization of an icon found outdoors was geography of Rome reverberated with the blood, bodies, and a recurring motif in the early modern period. The new Santa bones of those fundamental to the Church’s perpetuation. Maria in Vallicella was funded in part by the Bishop of Todi, These great discoveries were the basis of a new iconogra- Angelo Cesi.13 The famous centralized church of Santa Maria phy in art. In 1599, the perfectly composed body of Santa Della Consolazione in Cesi’s hometown of Todi had been Cecilia was found preserved, undisturbed in her coffin for erected following the discovery of its own miraculous icon.14 over a millennium. Stefano Maderno famously rendered her 9 For an account of miraculous images adapted in the Renaissance, see 13 On the Cesi patronage, see Connors, Borromini, 9.