In the grounds of Sant’Agnese’s is a small round church, one of the most beautiful and influential buildings in the city. It dates from the years immediately following the death of Constantine in 337, and is among the oldest Christian buildings to have survived almost complete; it is still in use as a church. We saw in Chapter One that the congregation at Sant’Agnese’s uses this church, Santa Costanza’s, as a symbolic destination for processions and for special liturgies. The rotunda is also a prized venue for the celebration of marriage services. Small gilt chairs sometimes crowd the space inside, and there are often spectacular flower arrangements, left over from weddings. Outside the hours of services, a visit to Santa Costanza’s is included in the tour of the catacombs underneath Sant’Agnese’s.
To reach Santa Costanza’s you take one of two paths, starting either from the top of the descending passageway to Sant’Agnese’s or from the present front door of the basilica. The first path passes through the vaulted space underneath a powerful medieval tower, part of the monastic complex, on the left as you leave the top of the passageway. The tower is of flat, dark Roman bricks pierced by a few irregularly placed windows. It has ancient white and coloured marble fragments gleaming here and there on its surface, like charms in a chunk of Christmas pudding. Leaving the tower behind, you take the straight, cobbled avenue, which often has motorcycles parked along it. The path turns right at an orange building, which seems to be part of a school complex. You continue along the path with the building on your left. On your right is a sports complex, with pear trees in bloom in the spring. You walk 110 yards in all to reach the church of Santa Costanza on your left.
The second route starts from the excavated piazza in front of Sant’ Agnese’s. Leaving the candle-smoke-darkened walls of the Lourdes grotto on your left, you climb some steps and follow a rising path between dense green bushes and clipped hedges (you are returning gradually to the original ground level from the excavated piazza), to approach Santa Costanza’s from the front. Below this path on your right is a tangled nursery garden. Just before reaching the round church, if you look over a low wall on your right, you will see a broad green field, bounded at one end by a massive, ancient semi-circular wall.
Santa Costanza’s1 was built as a mausoleum for Constantine’s daughter, who wished to be buried near the grave of Agnes. The building today has a plain brick exterior. All embellishment, including a columned portico that used to circle the outside of the building, has long ago been stripped away. But the exterior of the mausoleum may never have been very showy: we have seen that early Christian buildings tended to be deliberately unassuming outside, reserving decoration mainly for their interiors. Santa Costanza’s has arched windows and a belt of small white marble consoles or projecting blocks—the only remaining decoration—below the circular tiled roof. A flat brick façade reaches halfway up the cylindrical body of the building. It is pierced by a marble-framed door with two deep niches (they once held sarcophagi) sunk into the wall on either side of it. Two curving walls project from the corners of the rectangular front like a pair of brackets; the clergy at Sant’Agnese’s used to keep their beehives in the right-hand curve. These walls once formed part of a round-ended covered forecourt to the building.
You enter the church via a widening aperture, through a deep stone portal and a wall five feet thick. The space inside is cool, broad, restful, and mysterious. A sense of numinousness is aroused by the light. The building’s plan is circular, with a low vaulted ring round the circumference, and a series of twelve pairs of columns set in a circle about a tall cylindrical space topped by a hemispherical dome. The outer ring has a barrel vault covered with mosaics, which are low enough to be closely examined if you raise your head. The light in the ambulatory ring is diffused, and passes into it from between the dark verticals of the columns. The source of illumination is twelve windows set high up in the structure’s central cylinder. Light streams down from above, into the heart of the building.
At some time after the mausoleum’s completion, seventeen small windows were let into the barrel vault. They are irregularly placed, but angled so that the source of light is concealed unless you are is standing directly opposite one of them. Crude as these windows are, their makers knew that no openings should be visible in the ambulatory—light must appear to come only from the building’s centre.
The columns are of granite, all of them grey except for two pairs of pink ones that distinguish the two main points on the building’s circumference: the entrance and the niche opposite the entrance. All the columns have white marble Composite capitals, the outer ones smaller than the inner ones, creating a subtly centrifugal effect. Arches spring from elaborate entablatures that link the pairs of columns and add lightness and height; the cylindrical drum and its dome appear to be lifted with effortless grace. The columns and their acanthus-leaf capitals are thought to be of the second century:2 ancient Roman buildings were already being raided for columns.
The effect of the ambulatory is to entice the visitor to follow its curve. Your steps are slowed because this space is a circle, not a purposeful rectangle. The mosaics, set in panels overhead, beckon you on: as you move forward, the panels become more and more richly decorated. The designs cunningly stretch to cover the shapes allotted them, which both arch upward and are shorter on the inner side of the wheel than at its circumference. Bands of delicate spirals divide them. The colours of the panels are predominantly a cool green with a background of white, offsetting the dimness of the light. This is a pre-Byzantine building; it was not yet common for mosaic backgrounds to be golden.
At the middle of the perimeter, opposite the door, is a niche containing a large red sarcophagus. This is a plaster copy of the original one in porphyry, which is kept today in the Vatican Museums. A small square turret with three more windows in it rises from the ambulatory’s ceiling in front of the tomb. Over the niche containing the sarcophagus is an arched vault, once covered with dark blue stars crowded over a white sky, with the chi-rho sign like a golden sun in the middle of it. Only a patch of this decoration remains. The two letters of the Greek alphabet, X (chi) and P (rho), are the first two letters of the word XPIS?OS, “Christ.” The superimposition of one of these upon the other produces a design like a wheel with spokes: a monogram of Christ.3
It was said that Constantine was shown this sign in a vision before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 A.D., and that a voice was heard proclaiming: “By this sign you shall conquer.” Constantine won the battle, a victory that had enormous consequences for the history of Christianity. After the battle and the subsequent granting of freedom of worship to Christians, the sign stood for the triumph of Christianity in Rome. It is still a favourite Christian symbol, signifying Christ; in modern Christian minds the monogram rarely recalls Constantine.
Red porphyry, from which the sarcophagus was made, was the most precious building stone of the Romans. It was associated with the power and prestige of the emperors, who wore clothes dyed with the expensive colouring (similar to that of the stone) derived from huge quantities of purple-yielding sea snails. The Greek word porphyreos, from the name of this mollusc, porphyra, is the root of “purple” in English, but in the ancient world it could mean deep red, or purple, or russet; it also included the idea of a gleaming darkness, and as such could be used to describe the sea.4 Redness evokes both fire and blood; the stone’s name refers to its colour and its sheen when polished.
The Romans obtained almost all of their finest porphyry from a single mountain in Egypt, which they called the Mons Porphyrites, and also Mons Igneus, “fiery mountain,” perhaps because of its store of porphyry. After the Arab conquest of Egypt in the seventh century, the whereabouts of the mountain were lost to the European world, until Gardener Wilkinson visited the porphyry caves in the early nineteenth century. By that time the mountain had become known in Arabic as Gebel Dokhan, “smoking mountain,” perhaps because of the earlier Roman name for it.5
The Santa Costanza sarcophagus possibly came from Alexandria, Egypt.6 Its decoration is stiff and lifeless in spite of its vigorous subject matter (porphyry is extremely hard and therefore difficult to carve), with huge acanthus volutes and grapevines, and little winged genii (the ancestors of Italian putti) picking and packing grapes. A fat-tailed ram and two peacocks appear below. On the short sides of the sarcophagus three of the winged boys tread the grapes for wine, and the juice runs out of a lion’s-head spout into three round pots. The heavy lid of the tomb has a carved head and two garlands on each of its sides. The fact that the decoration covers all sides of the stone chest has made some archaeologists think that it did not originally stand inside the niche, but in front of it, below the small turret that rises between the last two mosaic panels in the ambulatory. From there it could have been seen from all four sides and would have received extra light from the turret’s windows. The red granite slab laid in the floor between the two pairs of columns opposite the niche would have been the place marked out for it. The starry vault, however, convinces others that the niche is where the tomb was always intended to stand.
Its contents, which almost certainly included jewels, were rifled during an early barbarian invasion of Rome. In 1467 the Venetian Pope Paul II moved the sarcophagus out of the mausoleum and placed it in the square outside the Palazzo San Marco, now Palazzo Venezia in central Rome, in order to add distinction to the palace ensemble. It stood out in the open as a public monument for four years, until Pope Sixtus IV, yielding to complaints, restored it to Santa Costanza’s. In 1790 Pope Pius VI had it removed again, this time for safe keeping in the Vatican Museums; when he did so, forty oxen were required to drag it there.7
Whether you turn right on entering Santa Costanza’s, or left, a similar set of mosaic panels covering the vault above you will accompany your steps round the ambulatory towards what is at present a plaster copy of the tomb. These mosaics have been repaired and restored with considerable success: when filling in damaged patches, the restorers could use the similar panel opposite as a model.8 First, you will see, faintly glittering (unless the electric lights are turned on, in which case the effect is brilliant instead of dim), a panel filled with Greek (equal-armed) crosses, octagons, and hexagons drawn in red, green, and blue-green on white. The strategy is, in part, to move from abstract geometrical shapes to lifelike representations. Next, you will notice lozenges formed into crosses decorated with oak leaves, and star shapes each enclosing four dolphins, heads together as they attack octopi. Then comes a series of roundels large and small (straight lines here give way to curves). These are linked, and filled with crosses, dancers, naked flying genii,9 sheep, and birds: ducks both flying and standing, storks, peacocks, a heron, a blackbird, a swan.
You will then see a trellis of vine leaves with blue naked boys climbing about, and birds pecking at bunches of grapes. Fully depicted vintage scenes appear at the short and long sides of the two corresponding panels. There are oxen pulling carts loaded with fruit. Two shed roofs shelter troughs in which men in loincloths crush the grapes with their feet while waving staves—sticks with curved ends for pulling down the grapes from the high vines. They look as if they might be dancing in time to music, perhaps to their own song. It is the same scene as the one that appears on the short sides of the sarcophagus. In the middle of this panel, and the middle of its counterpart on the other side, is a portrait bust: one of a woman and the other of a man. These may represent Constantina and Hannibalianus, the first of her two husbands.
Following this fourth panel comes the fifth, a carpet of roundels filled with busts of youths, flower designs, and standing figures male and female, dressed and undressed. And finally, nearest the sarcophagus, are the two most luxurious panels, the only ones to be heightened with discreet touches of gold. They are covered with fruiting and flowering boughs of bay, apples, pine cones, grapes, quinces, pears, and pomegranates, with large, carefully depicted birds: partridges, pheasants, ducks, and peacocks. These panels follow the tradition of floor mosaics for dining rooms, called asaroton (“unswept” in Greek), where fishbones, peelings, and other remains of the meal appear to litter the floor; such pavements give us an idea of the table manners of the Greeks and Romans.10 Here on the ceiling, however, is a collection of pretty objects, far from being intended as litter: drinking horns, a bowl with doves drinking from it, phialai or flat dishes for libations, and water containers, such as fluted vessels, aguamaniles (vessels used for handwashing before, during, and after meals), vases, pans, and jugs. Greenery, fruit, flowers, birds, and plenty of liquid meant pure delight.
Although the building is round and the light comes from its centre, it nevertheless contrives to suggest a specific direction. The two halves of the ambulatory hold the centre in their embrace, while the succession of mosaic panels gently but unmistakably lead “up to” and then “down from” the sarcophagus opposite the entrance. The resting place of the dead person is in the richest, best, and happiest spot.
The wall of the cylindrical drum was once covered, below and between the windows, with coloured marble slabs; nail marks are the only traces left of them. A modern sensibility, however, is able to enjoy contemplating the beautiful brickwork in and of itself. The powerful pairs of brick arches within the fabric of the clerestory walls hold up the weighty cylinder and dome. They are entirely functional, and yet they create radiating, decorative patterns that lighten the whole and direct the eye upward. The windows in the drum were made smaller at some unknown date: people apparently came to want less light in the central cylinder and more in the ambulatory.
The dome itself was decorated with a magnificent Hellenistic mosaic, which was in a very bad state of disrepair in the early seventeenth century; in 1620 it was destroyed and replaced with the fresco now in its place.11 Because of the loss of the mosaic, never has a fresco stood as little chance of approval as this one. (The work remains, perhaps fortunately for its author, anonymous.) Actually, it is not at all a bad fresco, although expressing dislike for it has become de rigueur; its colours have largely faded away. It shows Christ with his saints (including Saint Agnes) sitting in a circle in heaven, conversing.
Descriptions were written and drawings were made of the dome’s famous mosaic decoration during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, before it disappeared. The most detailed of the drawings, those by Francisco d’Ollanda who lived in Rome from 1539 to 1553, were rediscovered in the library of the Escorial, Spain, in the 1870s. From them we can see that a river or sea flowed round the base of the dome, and on it baby genii darted about in boats and rafts, played with swans and other aquatic birds, and pursued fish and octopi with nets, rods, and harpoons. Greeks and Romans traditionally thought of the earth as a flat disk surmounted by a heavenly vault; the ocean, as a river, circulated around the perimeter of the disk. In thirteenth-century Rome river scenes like this one were imitated from ancient models; examples can be seen at Santa Maria Maggiore and at the cathedral of the Lateran. We are reminded of the water that poured out of Ezekiel’s Temple and created a paradise out of the desert.12
Above this scene the blue dome, representing the heavens, was divided into twelve compartments, like a wheel with spokes, by golden caryatids supporting on their heads shafts sheathed with acanthus leaves; wild beasts crouched at their feet. The shafts resembled the Greco-Roman marble candlesticks that once stood inside Santa Costanza’s; one of these is now the support for the sanctuary lamp in Sant’Agnese’s church. In the dome’s compartments were scenes from the Old Testament: the sacrifices of Cain and Abel, Moses striking water from a rock, the sacrifice of Elijah on Mount Carmel, Susanna and the lascivious old men, Tobias with his fish.13 All the stories that we can decipher from the drawings of the mosaic—or that we know from travellers’ descriptions were once depicted here—are about prayer, faith, divine concern for humanity, and their dramatic consequences.14
By medieval times the building had become a church. The earliest extant reference to its being dedicated to “Santa Costanza” dates from 865, when Pope Nicolas I reinstated Bishop Rothad of Soissons, who had been deposed without the pope’s authority by Hincmar of Reims: for some unknown reason Santa Costanza’s was chosen as the appropriate place for the ceremony.15 An altar, probably not the first one, was constructed here in 1256 by Pope Alexander IV; it was broken open in 1605 as “research” into relics, and a new one was provided in 1620. The medieval altar had stood in front of the sarcophagus niche, under the turret with its extra windows, but it now seemed obvious where the new altar of such a church ought to go: in the middle of the central space. This is the altar in use today. It is similar in style to the one in Sant’Agnese’s church. Costanza Lepri, co-founder of the union of the Children of Mary at Sant’Agnese’s, was buried at the foot of the altar in the church of her namesake in 1867.
During the sixteenth century, when all things classical were the rage, it became fashionable to believe that Santa Costanza’s was not originally Christian at all, but a Greco-Roman Bacchic temple. The vines and the pressing of the grapes appear not only in the ambulatory mosaics but also on the sarcophagus itself; the sarcophagus was accordingly thought to be the tomb of Bacchus. The depiction of tiny dolphins in two of the ambulatory panels, and the mosaic “sea” scene round the base of the dome, were taken to refer to the story in which Dionysus, attacked by pirates while on a sea voyage, turned his molesters into dolphins. The importance of vine and wine symbolism in Christianity16 was therefore set aside, as was the well-known Christian symbol of the fish,17 and that of the “living water” pouring out of the city in the vision of Ezekiel.
A group of seventeenth-century Dutch artists living in Rome formed a club called the Bentvogels (which means “members of the Academy” in Dutch), dedicated to drinking and revelling in honour of Dionysus. They initiated new members by first drinking all night in a nearby taverna, then sneaking into Santa Costanza’s at dawn, where they celebrated “baptism,” with many a libation, in or over the sarcophagus (the original porphyry one). Their names may still be seen as graffiti scratched into the plaster of the niche.
Santa Costanza’s is, in fact, a very early Christian building. When it was designed and decorated, however, the creation of a distinctive Christian iconography was still in its infancy. Christian artists—or the pagan artists hired by the very newly Christianized (I avoid the word “converted”) imperial family—naturally used the art they knew; pagan motifs were inevitably adopted, their meanings simply changed where necessary.
Certainly greenery, especially vines, and the pressing of grapes were images used to express Dionysiac themes. Fish—less frequently—might appear in a temple to Bacchus. But the mediating culture into which Christianity was born was imbued with the same Mediterranean tradition and choice of phenomena—bread, wine, dolphins, pines, peacocks, Roman silver and ceramics, octopi, vines, pomegranates. It is no wonder that the mausoleum employs these motifs. When it was built, barely twenty-five years had passed since Christians were first permitted to produce public art. They had, however, been decorating the galleries of their underground catacombs with imagery very like that at Santa Costanza’s for 150 years.18
There was never any doubt about the Christian content of the mosaics in the two apsidal recesses to the left and right of the church’s entrance. Some have thought them later additions to the mausoleum. Those who believe that the building was made into a baptistery some time after its completion think that these mosaics were added then. They cannot have been made very much later, however, because they have white, not gold, backgrounds: they are rarely thought to be later than the second half of the fourth century.19 Unfortunately, both mosaics are in very bad shape, having been poorly restored more than once. The garlands of grapes and pomegranates underneath both compositions are probably the best-preserved sections.
The left-hand picture may well be the earliest surviving example of what became a favourite iconographical scheme.20 A youthful Christ wearing a halo stands above (probably originally on) a mountain out of which pour four rivers (only three of which remain, but this detail as well as others is known from a number of similar examples). The mountain symbolizes the Church, the rivers the four Evangelists. Without excluding this interpretation, we can also read the scene as depicting paradise regained, at the end of time; the four streams then represent the four rivers of Paradise,21 and the mountain represents Paradise itself, transfigured.
The palm trees on either side are for life, fruitfulness, joy, and victory at the end of time. Approaching the waters are four white sheep, two on either side: the followers of the Good Shepherd, eager for the water of life.22 Sheep in scenes like this, representing either the Apostles or Christians in general, are all alike: they are meant to show that for Christians, family ties are not as important as the new notion that every believer (today Christians would say every human being) is to be thought of as “family.” On either side of Christ are Peter and Paul, Peter receiving a scroll on which is written Dominus pacem dat (The Lord gives peace) and Paul being blessed by Christ’s raised right hand. Behind the two Apostles are two houses that, as we know from other examples of the scene, represent Bethlehem (behind Paul) and Jerusalem (behind Peter). Bethlehem, the goal of the journey of the Magi—foreigners seeking truth—represents the Church of the Gentiles; Jerusalem, behind Peter, is the Church of the Jews.23 Christ’s blessing of Paul shows that Christianity welcomes people not of the original chosen race.
The mosaic opposite shows a haloed and bearded figure sitting, holding a book, on the globe of the world. He is approached by a single figure, who is receiving, with hands covered in his cloak, some object that is impossible to make out. Ten palm trees surround the two figures; some claim that one palm tree, the little one in the middle, is a restorer’s addition. This mosaic is often said to represent Christ again (an older Christ, very different from the depiction opposite—but this might be the result of over-restoration). He could be giving the Keys of the Kingdom to Peter.24
The first scene is usually said to represent the New Covenant, or traditio legis, “the granting of the law,” to the followers of Jesus; in other examples of the scene, the words on the scroll read Dominus legem (rather than pacem) dat. If this is correct, then the right-hand scene would almost certainly represent God (as a bearded, older man) giving the Law to Moses: the Old Covenant would be facing the New. If the palms originally numbered ten, as they do today, then they could refer to the Ten Commandments.
However, it is possible that Dominus pacem dat might be correctly written on Peter’s scroll in the left-hand mosaic. In that case Christ standing on the mountain of the Church between figures representing Gentiles and Jews would be the reconciler, bringing peace: “But now in Christ Jesus,” says the Letter to the Ephesians, “you [the pagans] that used to be so far apart from us [the Jews] have been brought very close, by the blood of Christ. For he is the peace between us, and has made the two into one and broken down the barrier which used to keep us apart.”25
Santa Costanza’s, because it is round with an ambulatory, is like a church surrounded by its narthex, or like a basilica with its nave wrapped around its sanctuary. The centre, here, is the “end.” The source of illumination is from “above,” which signifies the transcendent, “where God is.”
The idea of a journey of the soul around a central space is extremely old; it recalls ancient Greek ideas of moira or fate, where a person walks his “road of life” and yet must see his fate as his “portion”: an “area” or part of a whole that is “apportioned” to him. The underlying spatial metaphor for a life lived in time is easily translated into the shape of a round building; it is one of the strands of meaning at Santa Costanza’s. From this point of view, to die is to link one end of the “line” of life with the other end. An “area” is created thereby, filling out the line; and together, portion and line are the person’s fate. The porphyry sarcophagus at Santa Costanza’s stands where the “roads” to it end. The ambulatory “creates” the space within it.
The design of Santa Costanza’s is to be “read” as expressing the destiny of a soul enjoying fulfillment and peace at last. It can simultaneously evoke intimations of such a state of soul in a visitor. There is no Dionysian fury or drunkenness about the expressive features of this building, not even in the iconography, with its vines and wine-pressing. Joy is there, certainly. The objects depicted in the culminating mosaic panels in the series—the greenery in profusion, the fruit, the silver and gold vessels the colourful birds—should be understood as the late antique world’s shorthand symbols for paradise eternal, the garden of endless bliss. The wine being pressed may mean the eternal reward, the “harvest” of a life completed. The round shape of the building expresses eternity in the “unendingness” of its circular outline, and totality in its perfection.26 The illumination from the windows is the “perpetual light” shining upon a soul resting in peace.
The light-filled centre, however, is the beginning as well as the end; it is the hub of the wheel. As such, it can be felt to correspond to the soul’s core, in anyone who visits Santa Costanza’s with the intention of responding to the building’s meaning. It refers us to the part of ourselves that receives and remembers mystical experience; it is this “place” that empowers the following of the dim “road around” it, the journey that will define who we are and what our deepest intention is.27 The centre of the soul is the abode of God: “The Spirit of God,” as Paul put it, “has made his home in you.”28 Line and area, centre and circumference express fundamental oppositions which, in the language of spiritual insight, are paradoxically “the same.”
In spite of its circular form, Santa Costanza’s is also subtly cross-shaped: the columns, on closer inspection, are regularly spaced except for four points at which they stand farther apart; the arches they support spring higher at these places too. The larger spaces at these four points correspond to the entrance, the sarcophagus opposite, and the two large niches in the outer wall, to left and right as you enter, each with a mosaic-filled apse, as we have seen. There are also twelve other regularly placed niches in the wall, square in plan alternating with curved, but all arched overhead;29 these are smaller than the four main radial points. The cross that is superimposed on the circle is a sign evoking stillness.
The design of Santa Costanza’s creates a series of paradoxes: movement (the wheel’s perimeter) and the cross, a four-square design that is immovable, like the four cardinal points of a compass. The building is one, a unified circle, resting in itself—but it also expresses two30 (the columns standing in pairs, and the two enticing hemispherical “journeys” of mosaic panels). The points of the cross create a square in the circle. The building is a rotunda, but also has direction and a destination; it is a Christian building, and as such converts fate into destiny. The central space is a hub for the turning circumference, and also a stationary circle containing the intersection of the unmoving cross. The still weight of the building is as solid and as grounded as the earth—but at its core is a flood of light from the heavens.
Ancient Roman mausolea were often round. The mausoleum of Hadrian (now known as the Castel Sant’Angelo) and the mausoleum of Augustus are two spectacular examples that survive in Rome. The vast Roman baths also contained circular structures.31 From the mid fourth century, and especially from the fifth century onward, Christians made their baptisteries round.
The associations were not only with bathing and water (both “round” and “water” belonged together, both of them “female,” “of birth,” and “of the soul” in the ancient lists of opposites), but also with death. In baptism, as we have seen, Christians are initiated by “dying” and rising again, being reborn out of the waters. “Have you forgotten,” wrote Paul to the Christians in Rome, “that when we were baptized into union with Christ Jesus we were baptized into his death? By baptism we were buried with him, and lay dead, in order that, as Christ was raised from the dead in the splendour of the Father, so also we might set our feet upon the new path of life.”32
The first public baptistery in Rome, built by Constantine at the Lateran, is octagonal in shape, an octagon being to ancient minds “like a circle.” The walls of Constantine’s baptistery still stand; the interior was remade by Pope Sixtus III (432–440) and redecorated in the seventeenth century.33 It originally had a low vault over the ambulatory, as at Santa Costanza’s. It still has eight huge porphyry columns and steps down into the central, circular pool area for baptism by immersion; an octagonal entablature supported by the columns is inscribed with a poem on baptism, by Sixtus. Above it is another series of eight columns, and a dome in eight sections with the dove of the Spirit in the centre of it, “hovering over the waters.”34 The figure eight, as we have seen, signifies Resurrection, new life, and the new age inaugurated by Christ.35
The Lateran baptistery stands apart from the cathedral nearby: it had special requirements for the provision of water. Furthermore, catechumens were baptized before entering the Church: their solemn entry into the church building, after the ceremony in the baptistery outside, symbolized the beginning of a new “path of life.” Separate baptisteries have often been customary ever since. Even the simple arrangement at Sant’Agnese’s, with baptism in the hall next door, continues this tradition.
In Rome, during the first years after Constantine’s victory, baptism was administered only once a year, on the eve of Easter and in the presence of the bishop of Rome himself, in the baptistery of St. John at the Lateran. A great many people would be baptized at once. After the solemn rites had been accomplished in the baptistery, a procession of neophytes newly robed in white would move to the cathedral proper, where the faithful awaited them; the building would have been filled with light, to celebrate the light of Christ and the enlightened state of the Church’s new members. There Mass would be said, and the newly baptized would receive Communion for the first time. Today, adult Christian converts still try to receive baptism on the eve of Easter. In churches where catechumens are not excluded from the central part of the Mass, baptism before the united faithful takes the place of the drama of the entry into the church. Some modern parishes, however, have re-adopted the old method of initiation: catechumens leave the church before the central part of the Mass begins, until the day when they receive baptism and are admitted to the mysteries for the first time. In both cases, much is made still of the splendour of light after darkness.
In Jerusalem a huge basilica was built by Constantine on what was believed to be the hill of Golgotha, the site of the Crucifixion. Nearby, and separate from the basilica, stood the Anastasis, a round building over what they thought had been Christ’s tomb; anastasis means “resurrection” in Greek.36 This rotunda had an ambulatory around the central space inside, like Santa Costanza’s. Later, the shrines of martyrs were often round, like the Anastasis. In Rome, for instance, the round church of Santo Stefano Rotondo was built in honour of Saint Stephen, the First Martyr after Christ.37 We saw in the case of Emerentiana, who died while still a catechumen, that martyrdom could be a “baptism of blood.” A round (or octagonal) building could—without contradiction—serve Christians as a mausoleum or a baptistery. Mausoleum, baptistery, martyrium: all were buildings with meanings that predisposed them to a circular shape; and they were often buildings separate from their churches.
There are references to baptism in early times at Sant’Agnese’s. The Liber Pontificalis says that Constantina had a baptistery built there, “in the very same place,” in eodem loco, where she had been herself baptized, together with her aunt, Constantia. If this is correct, the two women were presumably baptized in some unassuming place in the grounds of the catacombs; a stream flowed nearby until the nineteenth century. Appended to the account of Constantina’s baptism in the Liber Pontificalis, and probably copied from archival sources, is a list of gifts made to the basilica she founded, in order to support its running costs. These goods include donations of land, and gold and silver lamps and altar vessels, among which is “a gold lantern with twelve wicks, above the font” (my emphasis).38
In 419 Pope Boniface I, unable to reach the Lateran because it was in the hands of the usurper Eulalius, “celebrated the baptism of Easter in the basilica of the blessed martyr Agnes, with all the customary rites.” However, the Latin record could well mean that it was baptism at Sant’Agnese’s that was customary.39 Perhaps when Pope Liberius took refuge at Sant’Agnese’s in 357–358, he chose the place not only because it was outside the walls, but also because he could properly baptize there (he was there for Easter), in spite of the anti-pope Felix’s being in possession of the Lateran.
It is perfectly understandable that people have wondered, down the centuries, whether Santa Costanza’s was built to be the baptistery mentioned or hinted at in the sources: true, it is rather far away from the church, but being separate was normal for baptisteries. It has the right shape. When the floor of the building was excavated during the nineteenth century, a small cistern was found beneath the middle of it. Some maintain that the cistern was only for collecting rain water, via a complex system of conduits running down from the roof of the rotunda into the cistern; from there, a single pipe carried the water down the hillside.40 Others think that the mausoleum was turned into a baptistery soon after its completion, although the archaeological evidence does not support the existence of an excavated pool. If the sarcophagus was moved into the niche from its original position on the red granite slab in front of it, a new use for the building as a baptistery, perhaps with a large basin instead of a pool, could explain why.
Two codices of the poet Prudentius (ca. 348-ca. 405) transcribe, together with his hymn in honour of Saint Agnes, a poem proclaiming that “Constantina, a worshipper of God and devoted to Christ, has dedicated a temple to the victorious virgin Agnes. By the will of God and thanks greatly to the help of Christ, she has with a devout heart paid for everything.” This temple is greater than all buildings, the poem goes on, religious and profane buildings alike, tall and glittering with gold though they may be. It celebrates the name of Christ, the only one who, though human (literally “sharing the name of Adam”),41 has been able to rise from the blind night of death and triumphantly enter heaven. The verses end with the desire that the building should keep alive for centuries the name of Agnes, who offered herself for Christ. The poem is an acrostic: the first letters of its verses make up the words CONSTANTINA DEO, “Constantina, to God.” The commentaries in the codices tell us that this poem was inscribed on marble and displayed inside the church Constantina founded. In the seventeenth century a fragment of the inscription was still to be seen in the church of Sant’Agnese; it has since disappeared.
Constantina was later believed by Christians to have been a saint, probably in large part because of this inscription, which would have said all that most people knew about her, apart from her founding a basilica and a mausoleum, and the fact that she belonged to Constantine’s family. The acrostic poem says in the first line that she was Christo dicata, which seemed to proclaim that she was a dedicated virgin; “dedication” had come to mean most obviously a vow of celibacy. Her name was suggestive too: constancy must have been her virtue. (People were expected to live up to the names given to them: one was to take one’s saintly namesake as a model, or at least to live the virtue expressed by one’s name.)
And so an inspiring legend evolved, which made her its heroine; Constantina came eventually to be known as “Santa Costanza” in Italian. Before we launch into the tale of Constantina, it is worth pausing to consider the ease with which confusion can arise out of the names of the Emperor Constantine’s family. His father was Constantius. Constantine had three sons called Constantine, Constantius, and Constans; one of his daughters was Constantina, also called Constantia, and his sister’s name was Constantia.
In the story told about her in the passio of Agnes, the heroine is called not Constantina but Constantia (which is closer to “Costanza”). She was a queen and a virgo prudentissima (which meant that she was not yet married, and was therefore a young, if precociously wise, girl). She became afflicted with a virulent scrofula: sores erupted all over her body. Advised to try praying for a cure at the grave of Agnes, Constantia went there at night, though a pagan, and besought the saint’s help. She fell asleep, and in a dream Agnes appeared to her, exhorting her to courage: “Constanter age Constantia!” (“Be constant, Constantia!”) Then she added, “Believe that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is your Saviour,42 the one who will heal you.” The voice itself woke Constantia, and she discovered that the sores had vanished from her body. She returned to the palace, and her father and brothers rejoiced.
According to the Liber Pontificalis, she was baptized a Christian near the shrine of Agnes, together with her aunt, Constantia. And not content with that, the passio adds, she decided to become a consecrated virgin, a condition that in the late antique mind epitomized constancy. She also asked her royal menfolk to build a basilica dedicated to Agnes, and demanded that a mausoleum for herself be placed next to it.
However, there were vicissitudes to come. In a different passio, that of the Roman martyrs Gallicanus, John, and Paul,43 Constantina plays an important role. Here, we are told that her father the emperor had given her as the future bride of a widowed general, Gallicanus,44 in reward for military services. Her fiancé was away at the time of her conversion, subduing Thrace. Constantina approached her father with her plan of remaining a virgin. She was not afraid of defying him, and successfully wrung from Constantine his consent to her avoidance of marriage to the worthy Gallicanus—or to anybody else. She even persuaded Gallicanus’ two daughters, Attica and Artemia, first to become Christians and then to remain virgins too. By this time Constantina had 120 virgins ready and willing to join the community she was creating in the palace. But what to do about Gallicanus?
Constantina sent her faithful eunuchs John and Paul45 to the general, who was suffering reverses at the hands of the Thracians. John and Paul told Gallicanus about Christianity, and he promised to become a Christian if he won. An angel appeared on the battlefield and led the army of Gallicanus to victory. When he returned to Rome to celebrate his triumph, the general was told that his betrothed had been cured of the scrofula, but that he could not marry her: she was, it was explained, already wedded to Christ. Far from enraged at the news, Gallicanus happily agreed to renounce her, sought baptism, and vowed to live in continence himself. After working for the poor for many years, he eventually became a hermit in Egypt, and was beheaded for his faith.
To leave the world of Christian romance and turn to the annals of the last important historian of the Roman empire, Ammianus Marcellinus (ca. 330—ca. 400), is to receive quite a shock. Ammianus, it should be noted, was a supporter, though a critical one, of Julian the Apostate;46 and Roman invective against political opponents was invariably savage. Constantina, in his account, was no pure virgin. She was first married, aged fourteen, to Hannibalianus, the son of one of Constantine’s own brothers. (The Piazza Annibaliano lies below and behind Santa Costanza’s church today; from it, you can see the sign for the Sant’Agnese Tennis Club.) Constantine made Hannibalianus ruler of Pontus, Armenia Minor, and Cappadocia, in 335. After the death of their father in 337, the sons of Constantine murdered their potential rivals, including Hannibalianus, their sister’s husband. Fourteen years later Constantina married another of Constantine’s nephews, Flavius Claudius Constantius Gallus, who had been a child at the time of the killings and therefore escaped them; Constantina was five years older than her second husband.
He was made Caesar in 351 and sent to rule at Antioch; Constantina went with him. Gallus, says Ammianus, was guilty of bloodthirsty crimes. “And his wife was a serious incentive to his cruelty,” he adds, “a woman beyond measure presumptuous.” She is accused of agreeing to have a man killed because his wife, lusting for her son-in-law, wanted him removed. Ammianus calls her “a Megaera [that is, one of the Furies] in mortal guise, one who assiduously inflamed the savagery of Gallus, being as insatiable as he in her thirst for human blood.” “The pair became ever more expert in doing harm,” he goes on. “They fastened upon innocent victims false charges of aspiring to royal power, or of practising magic… The queen pushed her husband’s fortunes headlong to sheer ruin.”47 The Emperor Constantius II decided to recall his sister from Antioch, and Constantina died on the journey home, in 354. Then Gallus was summoned to Rome. Although he blamed Constantina for his wickedness, the Emperor had him beheaded. He was twenty-nine years old.
It happened that Constantina’s sister Helena was married to none other than Julian the Apostate. When Helena died in 360, Ammianus tells us, her body was sent back to Rome and interred “near the city, on the via Nomentana, where also her sister Constantina, formerly the wife of Gallus, was buried.”48 Apart from Constantina and Helena, we have heard of Constantina’s aunt Constantia, an apparently blameless woman who was baptized together with her niece. Some have wondered whether this aunt Constantia—and not “the Fury” Constantina—was, in fact, the “Constantia” of the passio of Agnes. Perhaps she was buried with Constantina as well as baptized with her. The bones now inside the altar at Santa Costanza’s are those of three women and two men;49 it has been suggested that the men might originally have occupied sarcophagi in the two niches outside, in the front of the building.50 It is tempting to imagine three sarcophagi inside for the three imperial women, one for each of the three main niches in Santa Costanza’s.
Clearly, the facts about Constantina’s morality, or lack of it, are simply not available to us. Her story has always been overshadowed by the lives of her male relatives and her husbands, as well as dramatized and fictionalized by the vituperations of Ammianus—and the equally passionate desire of the authors of the passios to make her, because she had founded a church, into a saintly virgin. Ammianus gives us a few nuggets of historical accuracy, no doubt. But who would bother to look into a passio for factual information? And yet, as we shall see, it was the passio that held the clue to the real nature of Constantina’s basilica dedicated to Saint Agnes.
The tomb of Agnes, who died in 305 A.D., lies underneath the altar of the present church of Sant’Agnese, built in the 630s. An earlier basilica, which probably replaced a small shrine, had been built over the grave in the late fourth or early fifth century. Archaeology has established that this earlier basilica had no aisles. Its length was the same as that of today’s church; its width corresponded to that of the present building’s nave. It lay in a position very slightly oblique with respect to the existing structure, and had a smaller apse, the foundations of which are underneath the present one.51
Behind the altar and in the apse the eighty-five-year-old Abbess Serena was buried in 514, and in the catacomb gallery in the same area an inscription was found which is datable to 349,52 approximately when Constantina’s basilica was being built: Constantina was living in Rome at that time. The present church façade has retained fourth-century brickwork, as has the lower left side of the passageway down into the building. Constantina’s fourth-century basilica, then, would seem to have been a disappointing affair: narrow and not very long, despite the claims of her grandiose inscription. Her mausoleum was some distance away; if it was ever used for a baptistery, the procession of neophytes would have had to walk some distance from there to the church after the ceremony.
Christians were interred in the catacombs around Agnes’s burial place and beneath the little basilica; they are also known to have been buried in the field near Santa Costanza’s.53 The enormous hemispherical wall that stands today at one end of this field delimited what was apparently a cemetery sub divo, “open to the sky.” Pagan hypogea and a pagan columbarium (a burial building with little alcoves for incinerated remains) were also found in the field; they were there before the wall was built.
In 1946 Friedrich Wilhelm Deichmann published an article that revolutionized modern ideas not only about Sant’Agnese’s, but also about the first big public buildings built by the Christians in Rome.54 On reading the passio of Agnes, he was struck by the prefix to one word. “Constantia [as the passio calls Constantina] asked her father and her imperial brothers to build a basilica to Saint Agnes, and she placed her own mausoleum next to it.” The word is collocavit: con (col-) means “with,” and implies close proximity. What if the legendary passio pointed to a physical fact?55 What if Constantina’s mausoleum really was collocatum, “attached,” to her basilica?
Deichmann looked at the front of Santa Costanza’s. He considered the big hemispherical wall marking the end of the field to his right. The wall, he realized, could be one end of a building enormous enough for Constantina’s mausoleum to cling to one side of the structure, to a wall no longer standing.56 One widely held suggestion had been that the field in front of Santa Costanza’s had been an open-air cemetery in the shape of a circus, with long straight walls and at least one rounded end. He looked again at the wall. Staring everybody in the face for centuries, without any real attention being paid to it, was a simple and obvious fact: the wall has windows in it! It is pierced by a row of rectangular openings and a round window in the middle. And that must mean that it originally supported a roof, or windows would not have been needed.57
The archaeologist realized that Constantina’s basilica was not a meagre structure built over Agnes’s tomb, as everyone had assumed, but rather an enormous roofed basilica, now in ruins, to which Constantina’s mausoleum was directly attached. When Constantina exclaimed in her inscription about the “greatness” of her church, readers had thought she must be referring to the greatness of its purpose, of honouring Christ and remembering Agnes. If Deichmann was right, she was also extolling the vast dimensions of the building she was dedicating to Christ and to the saint.
Eight years after Deichmann published his article (which was received with considerable scepticism by the scholarly community),58 excavations began. They proved him resoundingly right: the basilica of Saint Agnes that Constantina built lay under the ground in front of and beyond Santa Costanza’s church. It was about a hundred yards long and forty yards wide, with an atrium the same width and a further sixty yards long.59 Within the perimeter of its walls today are a substantial empty field, a ball court, a sports club, and an area marked out for playing calcetto (five-a-side football).
The church was what has now been named a funerary or cemetery basilica. It had side aisles that curved round the huge back wall to form a continuous ambulatory, which was presumably used for processions. (Modern funerals are also celebrated with processions. Even now, a line of cars following the coffin—its length is important—is a formal ritual, and a mark of respect and friendship for the person who has died.) Within the central body of the church was a small area with an apse, perhaps for an altar where Mass was said. The aisles were formed by square pillars rather than columns, which suggests that there were arches rather than an architrave above them, supporting the clerestory walls. If this theory is correct, the beautiful columns in Sant’Agnese’s church today would not, as it is sometimes claimed, have come from this building.60
The entire floor of the big funerary basilica would have been literally paved with the graves of people who were not buried in the catacombs, but who wanted nevertheless to be laid to rest near the body of the martyr Agnes. Christian families would visit their dead here, on the anniversaries of their deaths. The family would walk or ride out of Rome on the dies natalis of the dead relative, bringing food and drink for a feast. Inside the cemetery basilica they would gather at the graveside. The basilica was not for ordinary church services, but for these family celebrations, and for enormous concourses of people on the “birthday” of Agnes herself.
It was here that Gregory the Great twice delivered sermons on the feast day of Saint Agnes61—and not, as used to be thought, in a small church over the grave. We can imagine him looking out over the packed crowd as he remarked on “the disappointment any Christian in Rome must have been feeling if he or she had not been able to come.” Constantina’s mausoleum was the largest and finest tomb at the site, but it was still only a tomb, attached to a cemetery basilica. When the Liber Pontificalis said that Pope Liberius stayed “in the cemetery” of holy Agnes because the anti-pope Felix had usurped his place in Rome, it did not mean that he took refuge in the catacombs: it meant that the pope temporarily lived at, or even in, the cemetery basilica. (The picture of the pope living “in the cemetery,” when it was believed that the only cemeteries in this area were an open field and the catacombs, was the kind of idea that had helped give rise to the modern myth that early Christians routinely hid in the catacombs during the persecutions.)
Why was the cemetery basilica built so far away from the grave of Agnes? The answer is simple: it wasn’t. Its remaining foundations establish that the basilica was so immense, in fact, that the passageway down into the present church of Sant’Agnese leads from what was a corner of the atrium of Constantina’s building. The big basilica faced via Nomentana, whereas the present church is oriented in the opposite direction, with its back to the road. The two pathways now taken from Sant’Agnese’s to Santa Costanza’s pass either diagonally across the giant basilica, or along the front of its atrium and then along part of its side. The mausoleum was added after the cemetery basilica’s completion, by means of a so-called forceps atrium: the two curving walls in front were once covered with a roof that collected rain from the large building as well as the small one, and ran the water off and away from the walls, perhaps via the cistern inside Santa Costanza’s. As catacombs continued to be built under the area, one late gallery was dug underneath the basilica to join up with the spiral staircase inside Constantina’s mausoleum.
People find, on the whole, what they are looking for; conversely, if they do not suspect the existence of something, they may not see it even if it lies in front of them. After the discovery at Sant’Agnese’s, other giant cemetery basilicas started to come to light outside the walls of Rome. It was soon realized that one such basilica was, in fact, still standing: its central nave is today the church of San Sebastiano, along the via Appia, at the site where underground cemeteries first received the name “catacombs.”62
San Sebastiano’s had always been a puzzle because there was nothing, architecturally, quite like it, with its piers and arcades instead of an architrave, its U-shaped ambulatory, now outside the present church,63 its tombs covering the floor and stacked along the walls both above and below ground, and the mausolea clinging to the outside of the building like limpets.64 The building can now be identified as perhaps the oldest of the cemetery basilicas so far discovered at Rome; Christians might even have begun to build it before Constantine entered the city.
Constantine was known to have founded a basilica beside the mausoleum of Helena, his mother, in the grounds of the present church of Saints Marcellinus and Peter on the via Labicana southeast of Rome; inside Constantine’s ruined rotunda stands a small seventeenth-century church. The porphyry sarcophagus of Helena, taken from this mausoleum, is now in the same room as Constantina’s sarcophagus in the Vatican Museums. It has carvings on it of a battle, and was probably originally intended for Constantine himself, before he left Rome to found Constantinople. When Helena died in 330, her body was brought back to Rome and laid in the sarcophagus, within the massive brick rotunda. The mausoleum stood before the atrium of what we now recognize was once a huge cemetery basilica. Catacombs spread out all round the site, as at San Sebastiano’s and Sant’Agnese’s; the shrine of the martyrs Marcellinus and Peter65 remained a chapel inside the catacombs, with steps down to it.
Another cemetery basilica was found alongside the present church of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura to the east of Rome. It was separate from, though situated alongside, the shrine in the catacombs, to which there was a descent by means of steps; the present church was later built over the grave. Along the via Prenestina a rotunda known as Tor de’Schiavi has recently been found to have yet another cemetery basilica nearby; the mausoleum lies behind the building’s apse. So far, no written sources have been discovered about the building—we have no idea what saint might have been venerated there, or who was buried in the mausoleum. There are two catacombs in the area.66 An epitaph found in the floor of San Paolo fuori le Mura in the sixteenth century, and now in the Lateran collections, proclaims that one Eusebius had repaired “the entire cemetery,” including fixing its windows; it seems as though here was yet another cemetery basilica, still unexcavated.67
The great apse at the end of the field stretching away from Santa Costanza’s church stands at the extreme edge of a hill. The hilltop was levelled for the basilica’s foundations, and the surface then extended with filling to support the apse. The walls of this apse reach to the bottom of the hill and shore up its flank. The enormous earthworks can best be appreciated when you stand behind and below the structure, in the Piazza Annibaliano. Great supporting buttresses have been added. They were obviously needed, given the precarious site of the apse. The entry for Pope Symmachus (498–514) in the Liber Pontificalis says, “This man restored the apse of the holy Agnes, which was threatening to fall into ruins, and the entire basilica.”68 It is for this reason that the mysterious pope accompanying Pope Honorius in the mosaic of Sant’Agnese’s apse today is commonly said to be Symmachus. But it seems likely that Symmachus restored the cemetery basilica and its teetering apse, not the present church of Sant’Agnese.
Even in Symmachus’ own time, Rome’s funerary basilicas were being gradually abandoned. Christians had ceased digging catacombs, and soon the catacombs themselves would be forgotten. It was the memorials of the martyrs, and the churches built over them, that would continue to be remembered. A hundred years after Symmachus, Pope Honorius decided to leave the cemetery building to its fate and concentrate on beautifying the shrine of Agnes; he pulled down the church over the grave69 and replaced it with the present basilica of Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura. Sant’Agnese’s cemetery basilica was the largest and the last to be built, in the series known to us. Thanks perhaps to Symmachus’ restoration, the apse walls have withstood the wear and tear of fifteen centuries, most of them without a roof.
It has now been proven that Constantina’s mausoleum was added on to a huge Christian basilica.70 Perhaps that fact might help allay scholarly doubts as to whether the building was meant to be Christian or not. And as for the elusive baptistery: if it was not the present church of Santa Costanza itself, then perhaps it awaits discovery somewhere nearby, possibly within the perimeter of the cemetery basilica’s enormous atrium or “paradise.”