Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

St Paul’s Within the Walls, one of the loveliest churches in Rome

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(We had two laptops, one ipod and one ipad stolen in Sweden which had ALL the photographs from our trip in April to Ravenna and Bologna, our July trip to Strasbourg, and half our August trip in Sweden. So we’ve got motivated to post our pictures from our other trips online.
My husband Roy has helped me a lot–a lot!–with this post. Just in case you notice any difference in style. Just saying:-)

On arriving in Rome our first stop was–wait for it!–St Paul’s Within the Walls, the American Episcopal Church in Rome—the first non-Catholic church in Rome.  An unusual lovely little church decorated by the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones in mosaics.  It is not well known, and rather hard to find in guidebooks.  (If you are interested in visiting, it is on Via Nazionale, Rome). Remarkably we had seen the painting these mosaics were based on up close at an exbibition at the Ashmolean museum in Oxford a few months earlier.  The mosaics are much more striking than the paintings.

The dome above the altar in St. Paul’s within the Walls

 Just above the arc of flowing water there are inscriptions in Hebrew and Greek — the former the beginning of Genesis, and the latter the beginning of Revelation.  Here are some details

Detail — angelic choir

Even higher than the angelic choir, Burne-Jones placed a mosaic of Christ crucified on the Tree of Life with Adam and Eve (and Cain and Abel, who are very rarely pictured, let alone as babies.)  The inscription, in Latin this time is
IN MUNDO PRESSURAM HABEBITIS SED CONFIDITE EGO VICI MUNDUM
(‘In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.’ John 16.33)

The catalog from the Oxford exhibition states

Burne-Jones was especially pleased with the design ‘it said as much as anything I have ever done’ … but acknowledged that ‘everything is done to make it not a picture … and few will understand it’. When the large body colour version was shown at the New Gallery in 1888 ‘no one even looked at it’.

Apparently
The last and most dramatic design was never executed: an apocalyptic vision of Satan and his angelic army swarming out from the gate of heaven, a dark regiment of beautiful knights who might have stepped straight from the chorus of Parsifal.
The walls are decorated with tiles by William Morris.
A delightful and truly unique church to discover in Rome, the city of churches.
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Comments

  2. Lovely photos Anita. I have not yet been to Rome -it has always seemed such a 'grown-up' place to go to! I think I may finally have got to a place I can now appreciate it!! 🙂