James Lees-Milne fast-forwards from Early Christian (Santa Constanza) to Romanesque; Santa Maria in Cosmedin. It was built in 782 on the site of a granary and grain market. Astonishingly the church has two reminders of its mercantile past: some of the columns are incorporated into the walls and two grain measures are preserved in niches either side of the door. They look like huge black boules.
Set into the portico of the church is a marble disc depicting a river god with round eyes, dilated nostrils and crucially an open mouth. There is a superstition that if you put your hand into this aperture and tell a lie some harm will befall you, hence its name – the Bocca della Verità. There was a long queue of tourists doing this, photographing each other doing so and blocking the entrance. It is a top tip to enter the church through the exit and you will find it uncrowded as few of the tourists bother to go inside. Those that do are rewarded by seeing a medieval church that has evolved since its foundation in 782 by Pope Adrian I.
J L-M chose this church because it has retained a medieval simplicity lost in many other churches of the same period and is little changed from the 12th century. The outside was covered in scaffolding but the tower erupts above it spectacularly.
Inside the marble floor is varied and intricate.
The other side of the road from the church are two pagan temples dating from around 100 BC. We glanced at them but sped on for our next architectural appointment with James, the Renaissance Tempietto in Trastevere.
This little gem, full name the Tempietto del Bramante, was built in the first decade of the 16th century upon the supposed site of St Peter’s crucifixion. The Renaissance style of architecture originated in Tuscany and Lombardy where Bramante learned his trade. He was well into his fifties when he came to Rome and introduced this new less structured style.
The temple nestles beside Sant’ Pietro in Montorio ( seen in the background, above) and can only be seen close-up. It broke new ground architecturally although it seems familiar today from the many domed buildings it has inspired such as St Peter’s and, in England, Hawksmoor’s Mausoleum at Castle Howard, Kent’s Temple of Ancient Virtue at Stowe and Adam’s Temple of Victory at Audley End. J L-M does not disguise his admiration for this small, circular domed temple:
In the Tempietto Bramante had through the conjunction of intellect and skill achieved the purest and most lucid architectonic expression of which man is capable. He had struck a magic chord and succeeded in creating something inexplicably and indefinably great, an aesthetic abstract, a work of art.
