Mar 19, 2016
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by Elisabetta Povoledo
The Santa Maria Antiqua church in the Roman forum, which dates to the first centuries of Christianity, is reopening to visitors after a 36-year restoration. An exhibition that starts Thursday and runs until Sept. 11 traces the complex history of the church, partly buried by rubble from the Palatine Hill in an earthquake nearly 1,200 years ago before being rediscovered in 1900.
Its centerpiece is a cult icon of the Virgin and Child, thought to date from the sixth century and believed to be the earliest such piece in Rome. After the earthquake, the icon had been transferred to another church in the forum. Santa Maria Antiqua offers visitors a rare glimpse of the iconography of early Christian art, illustrated through a patchwork of wall frescoes dating from the sixth to the late eighth centuries. Maria Andaloro, a historian of byzantine and medieval art and the main curator of the exhibition, described the frescoes as forming "the spinal cord of medieval painting in Rome."