Main description (English)

This article re-examines the complex arrangement of sacred space in the Benedictine church of Santa Maria in Capitolio (known as Aracoeli since the twelfth century), which included a Cosmatesque slab incorporating a late-antique mensa with Achillean reliefs. One goal serves to deepen our understanding of the impact that the reuse of this artifact – and, thus, the ‘physical’ interaction with it – may have had on the production of the marble-worker who undertook the reuse, particularly on a work as dense with meaning as the front of the confessio of the ara coeli. A re-interpretation is proposed of the message that this artefact was intended to communicate, not only through iconographic analysis but also through examination of its materiality, highlighting how the Cosmatesque marbler used the mosaic in a special manner to add layers of meaning to the relief. On the basis of documentary, literary, epigraphic and material evidence, as well as stylistic-formal comparisons, we propose that the setting described by early-modern travellers was made at least in two phases: an ancient porphyry basin was reused as ara coeli (functioning as high altar) at the time of Anacletus II, ca. 1130, whilst the front of the confessio with the Augustan legend, variously dated between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, is to be attributed to Jacopo di Lorenzo, during the pontificate of Innocent III (1198-1216). This historical and art-historical re-assessment leads on to wider considerations on the transmission of ideas and artifacts across time and space, as well as to more specific acquisitions, such as the pertinence of some Cosmatesque slabs, later reused in the church floor, to a thirteenth-century ambo.