Reading the Arch

The fifth-century mosaics of Santa Maria Maggiore, panel by panel: what is in each image, what it is said to show, and what that rests on.

1. What survives

The decoration commissioned by Sixtus III covered the nave walls and the arch before the apse. Not all of it is there.

Pope Nicholas IV moved the apse back about six and a half metres and inserted a transept, demolishing the old apse and its mosaic. The same changes were made at the Lateran under the same pope.

What the original apse showed is disputed. Spain states it presented an enthroned Virgin; James says the subject is unknown and that the dedication makes Mary, perhaps with her child, a possibility rather than a fact. The disagreement is recorded here rather than resolved.

The surviving panel count is also disputed. One account gives 27 of an original 42, with nine replaced by frescoes in 1593 and six destroyed for the chapel arches; James states that 42 survive. Both figures are in print and this draft does not resolve them.

A second Marian mosaic stood on the inner wall above the nave entrance, showing her with five martyrs offering their crowns. It is known from an inscription and does not survive.

2. What was restored

This chapter governs every chapter after it.

The basilica’s own account records nineteenth-century remakes that altered parts of the mosaics, particularly in the lower register, under interventions directed by Vincenzo Camuccini, and states that these complicate the philological reading of the work.

The lower register carries the Adoration, Herod, the scene called the Massacre, and the city panel. Any detail read closely in those four may be nineteenth-century work.

Modern campaigns have consolidated surfaces and maintained the colour scheme, with cleaning and non-invasive diagnostics rather than replacement. Attribution and dating remain debated for the facade; the nave and arch are generally accepted as contemporary with Sixtus III.

No panel-by-panel record of which tesserae are original was available for this draft. Until one is consulted, no argument in this memo should rest on a single small detail.

3. The panels

Each chapter below states three things in the same order: what is in the image, what it is said to show and on whose authority, and what that identification rests on.

4. The apex: the prepared throne

An unoccupied throne bearing a jewelled crown and a jewelled cross. At its foot, on a stool, a scroll sealed with seven seals. Peter and Paul stand to either side, with four winged creatures: a man, an ox, a lion and an eagle. Beneath runs XYSTVS EPISCOPVS PLEBI DEI.

It is identified as the hetoimasia, the throne prepared for Christ’s return, and the four creatures as those of Revelation 4, also read as the Evangelists. This is the earliest surviving Christian example of the motif, in the earliest surviving major scheme of church decoration.

The identification rests on the objects themselves rather than on a text about the panel: a throne, a crown, a cross, and the sealed scroll of Revelation 5.

The inscription carries two readings. One holds that it links Christ’s throne to the pope’s. James reads it differently and more sharply: by addressing the Romans as the people of God, Sixtus takes that title from the Jews of the Old Covenant and gives it to Christian Rome. On that reading the arch and the nave together argue a transfer, not simply a doctrine. Both are interpretations and neither is a statement the mosaic makes.

5. The Annunciation

A woman seated with a spindle, dressed as a Roman princess, with angels about her and a second female figure present.

Read as the Annunciation, with the spindle drawn from the apocryphal tradition in which Mary spins purple thread for the Temple veil. The detail is not in Luke.

The scene departs from the canonical account at this point, which is the first of several such departures on the arch. The Art Bulletin treatment argues that the role of the apocrypha in the programme has been widely misconstrued; that argument has not been read for this draft.

6. The Annunciation to Joseph

A male figure addressed by an angel. In the same register a woman in a blue robe faces away from the other figures, carrying a child.

The male figure is read as Joseph receiving the angel of Matthew 1. The woman in blue is commonly identified as Elizabeth, fleeing with the infant John.

Joseph’s dream is in Matthew. Elizabeth’s flight is not in any canonical gospel and comes from apocryphal infancy material.

7. The Presentation

An infant carried toward a building, with attendant figures and angels.

Read as the Presentation in the Temple, Luke 2.

This is among the few arch scenes that follow a canonical text without apocryphal supplement.

8. The Adoration

A child seated on a throne, alone, with a woman to each side. Three men in Phrygian caps approach from one side.

Read as the Adoration of the Magi. Schiller’s account holds that the arch does not narrate the infancy in sequence but selects scenes demonstrating the divinity of the Child and the opening of salvation to the world.

The enthronement is the departure. Matthew 2:11 has the Magi find the child with his mother; here he is seated on a throne of his own and she is beside it. The identity of the seated women is disputed. Spain reads the figure in gold as Sarah and argues that the figure generally called Mary cannot be Maria Regina at all; others propose Mary with a Sibyl, or a personification of the Church, or Mary shown twice — once as the earthly mother and once, in gold, as Maria Ecclesia.

James notes that the panels carry no names and no guide, so a fifth-century viewer had nothing to identify them by either. That disagreement changes the subject of the panel, not a detail in it. The composition is the visual form of the Ephesus definition, made the year after the council.

9. Herod and the Magi

Five men before a seated figure. The seated man is nimbed, wears a gemmed throne’s trappings, and is labelled HERODES; BETHLEEM appears below. Three of the standing men wear Phrygian caps, two wear the senatorial dalmatic.

Read as Herod questioning the Magi and consulting the scribes, Matthew 2:3–8.

The nimbus is not a mark of sanctity here. In fifth-century usage it is an imperial attribute, adopted by Christian emperors for official portraiture and extended to Christ from the mid-fourth century as a sign of princely dignity. In these mosaics the angels carry halos and Mary and Joseph do not; Herod carries one in continuation of the imperial tradition. HERODES is fifth-century Latin labelling and is not evidence of his own titulature.

10. The panel called the Massacre

A seated nimbed figure. Soldiers, spears held vertical. One soldier steps forward with an open hand extended at waist height. Facing him, a close group of women, each holding a living child. No weapon is drawn, no figure is on the ground, and no gesture of grief appears anywhere in the panel.

Read as the Massacre of the Innocents, Matthew 2:16–18. Grabar places it in a three-register imperial scheme: recognition of Christ’s reign by his own people at the top, by foreigners in the middle, and the ruler’s enemies at the bottom, where Herod appears twice.

The extended hands have a documented reading. The soldier reaches for the first child, and the child reaches back with both hands, taken as a willingness to accept martyrdom — which is why that child wears a toga and a halo. The boy in the striped garment carries a small cross on his forehead; Schiller reads it as the sealing of the martyrs and baptism by blood.

The episode is carried by one gospel. It is absent from Mark, Luke and John, and from Josephus, who treats Herod’s reign at length and records his killings including those of his own sons. Most historians do not treat it as an event.

As for the image, Matthew describes an order given rather than an act performed, and no visual tradition for the scene yet existed. What the panel shows is a command, not a killing. Later treatments from the medieval period onward supply the swords and the bodies; this one does not.

Descriptions of the mood contradict each other. One account holds the artist was too modest to portray the slaughter and shows mothers who do not yet know. The basilica’s own account describes protective women and terrified children. The same panel, opposite readings, and this memo records both rather than choosing.

11. The city, the governor, and the two cities

A walled city with figures approaching a seated official. At the base of the arch, two gemmed cities, Jerusalem and Bethlehem, with sheep looking up at them. Accounts differ on the number; James gives six.

The city scene is identified from apocryphal material as the arrival in Egypt and the meeting with a governor, named in some accounts as Afranius Palladius, at a city called Sotinen. This is the earliest surviving appearance of the sheep-and-cities motif in mosaic.

The cities are not portraits. The same architectural type — high walls with corner towers — is used throughout the nave for Pharaoh’s city, a Canaanite city, and Jericho with its wall falling. It is a stock form meaning city. What distinguishes these two is that their walls are jewelled, which links them to the New Jerusalem of Revelation 21, whose walls are built of precious stones.

The pair are commonly read as Ecclesia ex circumcisione and Ecclesia ex gentilibus, the church from the Jews and the church from the gentiles — the same transfer argument the inscription is read as making, stated architecturally at the foot of the arch. Kessler reads the cities as a window onto another world, drawing the eye into the apse.

The sheep are read as the apostles, six to each side making twelve. Their arrangement beneath the cities is stated in the recent literature to be a problem not yet resolved.

None of the city scene is canonical. It is the clearest instance on the arch of a programme drawing on material outside the gospels, and it is a principal reason the apocrypha question is contested in the scholarship.

12. The nave

Twenty-seven panels survive of forty-two, set below the windows and framed in stucco, with traces of a mosaic scroll frieze running the length and breadth of the church beneath them.

The subjects are Old Testament and divided by wall. The north carries God’s promise to Abraham and its fulfilment; the south carries Moses and Joshua.

The arrangement is argued rather than chronological. Melchizedek offering bread and wine stands furthest east on the south wall, close above the altar, which reads as the Eucharist and the sacrifice. Directly opposite, on the north wall, Abraham entertains the three angels — the scene taken to foretell the Trinity. The two halves answer each other across the nave.

The execution is fine enough to reward close looking: chequer-boarding in the modelling of faces, and very small tesserae used for flesh and drapery.

The light has changed. The panels sit directly below the nave windows, and every second window is now blocked; the nave was originally far brighter than it is.

James reads the two halves as one argument: the Old Testament foreshadowing the New, and the Roman people placed at the centre of it. That placement was new, and it is one step in the process that made the Bishop of Rome the leader of Christendom.

The nave mosaics also stand apart from the arch in one respect noted in the scholarship: they follow the Old Testament narrative closely, where the arch departs from the gospels.

13. The later mosaics

Two further schemes occupy the same building, separated from Sixtus by eight centuries.

Jacopo Torriti signed the apse Coronation, made for Nicholas IV, who brought him from Assisi for the commission. His inscription gives 1296; published date ranges for the work run from about 1290 to about 1325. It is the largest single image surviving from thirteenth-century Italy.

Mary is shown as a Byzantine empress, crowned and seated beside Christ. The gem on her right wrist is a single cut rock crystal. It occupies the space of the lost fifth-century apse, on the same axis as the empty throne above it.

The Coronation itself is a new subject in the thirteenth century, derived from France and one of its earliest monumental treatments in Italy. It was popular with the Franciscans, and Nicholas IV was the first Franciscan pope; Francis had been canonised in 1228 and Anthony of Padua in 1232, and both appear in the apse.

Five scenes from Mary’s life run below it: Annunciation, Nativity, Dormition at the centre, the Coming of the Magi, and the Presentation. The Dormition sits directly beneath the Coronation, which makes the reference to the Assumption.

Vasari gave Torriti no life, which was his usual treatment of mosaicists, and little is known about him beyond his work at the Lateran and here.

A fourth mosaic is easily missed. The tomb of Bishop Gunsalves, who died in 1298, stands where the east wall meets the south. It is inscribed as the work of John, son of the Master Cosmatus, and parts of it are mosaic and parts paint — the mosaic occupying the superior position in the hierarchy.

Filippo Rusuti made the facade mosaics around 1300, sponsored by the Colonna: Christ in the middle with the cardinal brothers Giacomo and Pietro Colonna to either side, the Colonna arms at several points, and below four scenes of the foundation of the church by Liberius. Nicholas IV does not appear, so he was probably dead when it was made, and the work must predate 1305, by which time Rusuti and his workshop had left Rome for the service of Philip IV of France.

They are now behind Fuga’s eighteenth-century loggia rather than on the outside of the building, and are seen from within it.

14. The entrance wall and the old facade

The wall above the nave entrance, seen from inside, is the inner face of the medieval front. Fuga built his facade in front of it between 1741 and 1743 rather than replacing it, which is why the Romanesque circular window and the thirteenth-century mosaics survive at all.

They survive obstructed. The loggia blocks the view of Rusuti’s work from the piazza, and the window and mosaics are now visible only as fragments above the new front or from within the loggia itself.

The intervention cost a building. Fuga’s facade required the destruction of the twelfth-century entrance loggia of Eugenius III. Benedict XIV, who commissioned the work, is reported to have disliked the result and said it made the basilica look like a ballroom.

A pattern runs through the losses. Every mosaic destroyed at this church was removed for a reason: nine nave panels replaced with frescoes, six cut away for chapel arches, the apse demolished for a transept, the loggia taken down for a new facade. What survives is what was never in anyone’s way, and Rusuti’s facade work survives because Fuga built in front of it rather than through it.

The lost mosaic of the Virgin with five martyrs offering their crowns stood on this wall. It is known from an inscription alone, and what occupies the position now is eighteenth-century architecture, a coat of arms and framed paintings.

A fourth loss belongs with it. The exterior of the apse carried lunette panels showing four standing female martyrs to each side of a larger Virgin and Child, with a scene of the Magi below. That makes four separate Marian mosaic schemes recorded for this building of which only Torriti’s survives.

15. The readings, and the argument between them

The mosaics have been read for twelve centuries, and the readings disagree about something basic: whether the arch draws on texts outside the gospels.

The earliest sustained reading is a weapon. Pope Adrian I wrote at length to Charlemagne about these mosaics, and the programme was cited against the iconoclasts at the Second Council of Nicaea. The first surviving interpretation of the arch was made to win an argument about whether images should exist at all.

The modern dispute is narrower and sharper. Most scholars hold that the iconography must have been shaped by the Protevangelium of James, Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary, since several scenes have no canonical source. One recent study ties four arch scenes directly to Pseudo-Matthew and concludes from the match that the text was circulating in Rome in the first half of the fifth century.

Suzanne Spain argued the opposite in 1979. Her case is not that the scenes match scripture but that the apocrypha could not have been used: apocryphal elements in an Infancy cycle sponsored by the papacy are, in her phrase, inconceivable given the caution with which popes treated the canonical corpus. The argument is from institutional probability rather than from the images.

The consequence is concrete. Spain identifies the woman in gold beside the enthroned Child not as an imperialised Mary but as Sarah, the wife of Abraham. On her reading the Adoration is about promise and lineage; on the consensus reading it is about Mary as queen. The same tesserae, two incompatible subjects.

Margaret Miles read the programme in 1993 as an announcement of papal power, the building and its decoration consolidating a position rather than illustrating a doctrine. Krautheimer had earlier treated Sixtus’s architecture as a deliberate fifth-century renascence, against a background he described as an empire collapsed and a Roman aristocracy finished as a political force.

Two gaps remain in this account. The centuries between Adrian I and the twentieth century are not represented here, including the period when two popes cut chapels into the building and the nineteenth century when parts were remade. Somebody was interpreting the mosaics to justify that work, and this draft has not found them.

The second gap is a claim in a reference work that the decoration was executed in the fifth and eighth centuries. No other source consulted mentions an eighth-century phase. If it exists it bears on every chapter above, and it has not been pursued.

16. Sources

Reference codes read source.work.passage and resolve on the Master Source Register, which carries every source used across this series.

1. christianiconography.info, pages on the triumphal arch and the Slaughter panel — Herod on a cushion on a bejewelled throne, his halo signalling royal status; the soldier reaching for the first child and the child reaching back with both hands, read as acceptance of martyrdom; the cross on the forehead of the boy in the striped garment, with Schiller at 115 on the sealing of the martyrs. These readings are the site’s and Schiller’s, not observations made here. Supports §9 and §10.
2. André Grabar — the three registers following the pattern of imperial mosaics: recognition of the ruler by his own people, then by foreigners, then the ruler’s enemies. Supports §10.
3. The cities — the walled form with corner towers used throughout the nave for Pharaoh’s city, a Canaanite city and Jericho, and therefore a stock type rather than a depiction; the jewelled walls linking Jerusalem and Bethlehem to Revelation 21; the reading as Ecclesia ex circumcisione and ex gentilibus; Kessler on imagery as a window onto another world. The arrangement of the lambs is stated in the literature to be unresolved. Supports §11.
4. Conflicting descriptions of the massacre panel — one account has the artist too modest to show the slaughter and the mothers unaware; the basilica’s own account describes protective women and terrified children. Both are in print and this memo adopts neither. Supports §10.
5. Liz James, Medieval Mosaics (medievalmosaics.com/mosaics/41) — the nave programme divided north and south with Melchizedek above the altar answered by Abraham and the three angels; the plebs dei inscription read as the transfer of the title from the Jews to Christian Rome; Nicholas IV moving the apse back about 6.5 metres and inserting a transept; Torriti’s inscribed date of 1296; the tomb of Bishop Gunsalves; and the blocked windows. James gives 42 surviving nave panels, against 27 in other accounts. Supports §1, §4, §8, §11, §12, §13 and §16.
6. Jacopo Torriti, tomb of Bishop Gunsalves, inscribed as the work of John son of the Master Cosmatus; Gunsalves died 1298. Part mosaic, part paint. Supports §13.
7. The two facades — Fuga’s front of 1741–43 built before the medieval facade rather than replacing it; the Romanesque circular window and Rusuti’s mosaics surviving behind it; the destruction of Eugenius III’s twelfth-century entrance loggia to make room. Benedict XIV’s reported remark is repeated in several accounts and is not traced to a contemporary source here. Supports §14.
8. Lost or absent: the apse exterior lunettes — four standing female martyrs to each side of a larger Virgin and Child, with a Magi scene below. Recorded, not surviving. Supports §1 and §14.
9. Reconstruction: UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory — a 3D model of the basilica as it stood c. AD 435, built by Dean Abernathy and others for teaching. Not inspected for this draft, and its current availability is unknown; the laboratory dates from 1997. A model of this kind is itself at risk in the way excavation archives are. Supports §1.
10. Beat Brenk, Die frühchristlichen Mosaiken in S. Maria Maggiore zu Rom (Wiesbaden, 1975) — the standard monograph. Not consulted for this draft. Supports §14.
11. Margaret Miles, “Santa Maria Maggiore’s Fifth-Century Mosaics: Triumphal Christianity and the Jews”, Harvard Theological Review (1993) — the programme as an announcement of papal power. Title and argument known; text not read. Supports §14.
12. Richard Krautheimer, “The Architecture of Sixtus III: A Fifth-Century Renascence?”, in Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky (New York, 1961), 301. Supports §14.
13. The apocrypha dispute — consensus holds the arch iconography was shaped by the Protevangelium of James, Pseudo-Matthew and the Nativity of Mary; Spain denies it on grounds of institutional probability rather than from the images, and identifies the woman in gold as Sarah rather than Mary. Both positions are reported here and neither is adopted. Supports §8 and §14.
14. Unresolved: an eighth-century phase. A reference work states the mosaic decoration was executed in the fifth and eighth centuries. No other source consulted mentions it, and it has not been pursued. If correct it bears on every chapter from §4 to §13. Supports §14.
15. Adrian I, letter to Charlemagne, and the citation of the mosaics against the iconoclasts at the Second Council of Nicaea, 787. Supports §14.
16. The nave programme — 27 of 42 panels surviving, Old Testament, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob on one side and Moses and Joshua on the other; stucco framing and traces of a mosaic scroll frieze; chequer-boarding in the faces and very small tesserae for flesh and drapery. The panels have not been examined individually for this draft. Supports §12.
17. Jacopo Torriti, apse Coronation of the Virgin, inscribed 1296, for Nicholas IV; the rock-crystal gem on the Virgin’s wrist. Vasari gave him no life. Supports §13.
18. Filippo Rusuti, facade mosaics, c. 1300, Colonna patronage, now enclosed behind Fuga’s loggia. Supports §13.
19. Images. Figure slots in this memo are unfilled. Any photograph supplied must carry its photographer, date and licence, since a photograph of these mosaics records a cleaned and in places remade surface rather than the fifth-century work directly. Supports §2 and every figure.
20. The basilica’s own account — the record of nineteenth-century remakes in the lower register under Camuccini, and the statement that these complicate the philological reading; the note that facade attribution remains debated while nave and arch are accepted as contemporary with Sixtus III. Supports §2.
21. Panel counts — 42 nave panels originally, 27 surviving; nine replaced by frescoes in 1593; six destroyed in the early seventeenth century when the entrance arches for the Cappella Sistina and Cappella Paolina were cut. Supports §1.
22. Suzanne Spain, “The Promised Blessing: The Iconography of the Mosaics of S. Maria Maggiore”, The Art Bulletin 61:4 (1979), 518 — the original apse as an enthroned Virgin, and three identified misconceptions in the bibliography. Only the opening paragraph has been read for this draft; the article is outstanding and is the principal gap in this memo. Supports §1, §5 and §12.
23. Gertrud Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, I, 26–27 — the arch as doctrinal selection rather than narrative sequence. Supports §8 and §12.
24. The nimbus — adopted by Christian emperors for official portraits and extended to Christ from the mid-fourth century as an imperial attribute of princely dignity; given to angels in the fifth century; customary for the Virgin and saints only from the sixth. In these mosaics the angels are haloed and Mary and Joseph are not. Supports §9.
25. Matthew 2:16–18 — the single canonical channel for the massacre. Absent from Mark, Luke, John and from Josephus. Supports §10.
26. Lost or absent: the original apse mosaic, removed in the 1290s. Supports §1.
27. Lost or absent: the nave-entrance mosaic of the Virgin with five martyrs, known from an inscription. Supports §1.
28. Lost or absent: fifteen nave panels, nine replaced in 1593 and six destroyed for the chapel arches. What they showed is known only in part. Supports §1.
29. Source, not consulted: high-resolution photography of the arch, and any panel-level record of original against restored tesserae. Both are outstanding and both bear directly on every chapter from §4 to §11.
30. Verification register. Carried as reported and not settled: the subject of the original apse mosaic, on which sources disagree; the extent of the Camuccini intervention panel by panel; the identity of the second woman in the Adoration; the naming of the governor and the city in the flight scene; whether any detail discussed in §8 to §11 is fifth-century work; how the nave and arch programmes were intended to be read together; whether the arch draws on apocryphal texts, on which the scholarship is divided; the identity of the woman in gold; whether an eighth-century decorative phase exists; the attribution of Benedict XIV’s reported remark; the number of surviving nave panels, given as 27 in some accounts and 42 in others; the number of sheep at the base of the arch, given as six by one account and twelve by another; and whether the panel called the Massacre depicts fear or its absence, on which published descriptions conflict directly. This memo is a draft and should not be cited until the two outstanding sources are read.