Descrizione
Storia dell’arte 153, Gennaio – Giugno 2020
Manuela Gianandrea
Aggiunte alla fase altomedievale della chiesa dei Ss. Nereo e Achilleo a Roma: ipotesi per l’evergetismo di papa Leone III
In the ninth century the church of Ss. Nereo e Achilleo, in Rome, was the object of the patronage of Pope Leo III, to whom are attributed the reconstruction of the building, the mosaic decoration and the reuse of monumental Roman spolia. At the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, the archival fond of Ferdinando Mazzanti – an architect who at the end of the nineteenth century made numerous drawings of early medieval Roman sculptures for a pioneering study of these testimonies -, the Author has found two documents concerning the basilica of Ss. Nereo e Achilleo: the spolvero of a marble floor and the design of a carved fragment of a small arch, both attributable, for stylistic and typological reasons, to the early Middle Ages. The article aims to present this unpublished documentation, critically framing the materials designed by Mazzanti in the context of the historical and artistic events of the basilica and in the wider context of the so-called “Carolingian Renaissance” in Rome.
