Sta.

Maria Maggiore and the Depiction of Holy Ground

Plans in Late Medieval Italy
LUC Y DONK IN University of Bristol

Abstract strates the potential of ephemeral marks on the ground to inform

R
Several medieval building miracles feature plans marked on the
ground in dew or snow, which can be understood as acheiro-
poieta, works not made by human hands. Despite a textual tra-
dition dating back to the ninth century, the earliest depiction of
such a plan may be that in the late medieval facade mosaics of
Sta. Maria Maggiore in Rome. Three catalysts for this innova-
tion are identified here: the legend, which combined a plan in
snow and foundations that opened by themselves; institutional
rivalry, as expressed in representations of church foundation
and possession of miraculously created images; and increased
ecclesiastical involvement in the initial stages of church con-
struction, including delineating the foundations. In turn, the mo-
saics inspired further depictions of the miraculous plan and set
a precedent for visualizing ground plans more widely in late
medieval and early modern Italy, since illustrations of founda-
tion rituals in pontificals arguably draw on images of the mira-
cle of the snow. Examining this legendary and liturgical material
together indicates that the plan and foundations of a church
formed a key point of encounter between its construction and
its spiritual significance. It also reveals a type of ground plan—
an image of a plan marked on the ground—that can be distin-
guished in form and associations from other small-scale plans.
Simple, schematic, and often cruciform, it was redolent of mirac-
ulous and sacred foundations. More broadly, the article demon-
lasting visual and verbal representations in more conventional
media.
omans have traditionally celebrated the ded-
ication of Sta. Maria Maggiore with a scat-
tering of white petals.1 The ceremony reflects
the medieval foundation legend of the basil-
ica, in which a miraculous snowfall marked out the site and
form of the church that the Virgin wished to have built in her
honor on the Esquiline Hill in Rome. Once Pope Liberius
(r. 352–66) had broken the ground, this was followed by a sec-
ond miracle, in which the foundations of the building opened
by themselves. First depicted in the late thirteenth- or early
fourteenth-century facade mosaics of the church, the snowy
ground plan was included in many subsequent representations
of the miracle of the snow as the feast spread throughout Italy
and beyond. Yet if Sta. Maria Maggiore stands at the begin-
ning of an artistic tradition, it is also part of a far older phe-
nomenon of foundation legends in which plans of churches
were miraculously marked on the ground, often in ephemeral
media such as snow or dew. I begin by tracing the treatment of
miraculous ground plans from the purely verbal descriptions
of the earlier medieval foundation legends to the frequently

Versions of this paper were delivered at the Medieval Art History and History of Cartography seminars, University of Cambridge; a
Centre for Medieval Studies Colloquium and the “Senses of Liturgy” conference, University of Bristol; and the Medieval Visual Culture Sem-
inar, University of Oxford. I am most grateful to the organizers of these events and to the audiences for their thought-provoking questions. I
am particularly grateful to Claudia Bolgia, Julian Gardner, Gervase Rosser, Beth Williamson, and the readers for Gesta for their helpful com-
ments on drafts of the article. I would like to thank Didier Méhu for sending me relevant publications; the libraries and other institutions that
have provided images; and Alex Hoare for her hospitality while I was consulting manuscripts in the Vatican Library. Finally, I would like to
thank the editors of Gesta, Linda Safran and Adam S. Cohen, for the care with which they have shepherded the article through the editorial
process.

1. Francesco Cancellieri, ed., Notizie storiche e bibliografiche di Cristoforo Colombo di Cuccaro nel Monferrato discopritore dell’America
(Rome: Francesco Bourlié, 1809), 198–202, traced the custom back to a reference to “nive ficta,” or artificial snow, in Ambrogio Fracco, Sacrorum
Fastorum Libri XII (Rome: Antonio Blado, 1547), index entry for p. 99. In the mid-seventeenth century, Giacinto Gigli referred to the use of
parchment: Diario di Roma, ed. Manilo Barberito (Rome: Colombo, 1994), 2:610. Carlo Bartolomeo Piazza, Emerologio di Roma cristiana,
ecclesiastica, e gentile . . . (Rome: Bernabò, 1719), 2:512, may have been the first to mention jasmine, which continued to be used along with white
rose petals during the nineteenth century.

Gesta v57n2 (Fall 2018).

0031-8248/2018/7703-0006 $10.00. Copyright 2018 by the International Center of Medieval Art. All rights reserved.

v57n2, Fall 2018 Holy Ground Plans in Late Medieval Italy D 225
illustrated Roman example. To discuss Sta. Maria Maggiore in
this wider context is, first and foremost, to value the initial act
of drawing on and marking the ground. In the foundation leg-
ends these marks are effectively acheiropoieta, works not made
by human hands, whether or not they also reflect actual con-
struction practices that involved similar markings. Depictions
of the snowy plan in mosaic and other media are thus repre-
sentations of an image drawn on the surface of the ground,
sharing the secondary status of verbal descriptions. At the same
time, setting these depictions within a previously unillustrated
tradition of miraculous plans problematizes what might other-
wise seem like a natural desire at Sta. Maria Maggiore to repre-
sent a visually striking and institutionally important event. If
similar ground plans had not previously inspired small-scale
depictions, what might have occasioned this innovation in
Rome? Catalysts for visual representation can be found in the
particular nature of the Sta. Maria Maggiore legend, with its
double miracle of snowy plan and excavated foundations. They
can also be located in the context of late medieval Rome, in-
cluding the spirit of competition among the main basilicas as
expressed in depictions of church foundation and the posses-
sion of other miraculously created images, such as the Veron-
ica and the Lateran icon of Christ. However, none of these pro-
vides a precedent for the depiction of the ground plan itself.
As another approach to this move to visual representation,
therefore, in the second part of the article I return to the sur-
face of the ground to explore connections between miraculous
plans and ecclesiastical involvement in the early stages of con-
structing a church, including marking out the site and blessing
the foundations. The two traditions share an engagement with
the prehistory of a church building and the two-dimensional
space it will occupy on the ground. The designation of the site
as found in a sixth-century canon on the building of a church
and in the tenth-century Romano-Germanic Pontifical already
informed some of the early medieval foundation legends. At-
tention paid to the location of the foundations in the rite for
the blessing of the first stone, which in the course of the thir-
teenth century became an increasingly elaborate and clerically
dominated ceremony, may have played a part in the formula-
tion, representation, and reception of the Sta. Maria Maggiore
legend. The ritual itself has a rich tradition of illustration in
manuscripts and early printed books. However, since the pon-
tificals do not include representations of the foundations per se
until after the date of the mosaics, it is the marks on the ground
themselves that can be seen to have provided a model for the
plan in the mosaics. Where existing works of art contributed
to the visualization of the legend by providing an impetus for
iconographic innovation, ephemeral images may have offered
a different kind of inspiration. At the same time, the relation-
ship between the miraculous and ritual spheres, and their de-
piction, should be understood as a reciprocal one. From at least
226 E Gesta v57n2, Fall 2018
the late fourteenth century, illustrations in Italian pontificals
include outlines of churches marked on the ground and seem
themselves to have drawn on the representational traditions
surrounding the miracle of the snow.
By examining the illustrated pontificals and the represen-
tations of the miracle together for the first time, I aim not only
to illustrate their interdependence but also to define the plan
marked on the ground as a particular kind of ground plan. As
full-scale drawings described in texts and depicted in a variety
of media, such plans have a distinctive tradition of representa-
tion, and the resulting depictions can be distinguished from
other contemporary small-scale plans in their form, function,
and associations. To date, scholarship has concentrated on
two types of medieval small-scale plan: those instrumental in
the planning of new buildings and those that served primarily
to explicate texts describing structures of biblical importance,
mainly in the Holy Land and marked by the presence of God.2
This article proposes a third type, with its own particular rela-
tionship to texts and to the built environment but also distinctive
in the way it addresses the sacred quality of ecclesiastical struc-
tures in the medieval West. Although plans marked on the
ground may have served a practical purpose for the setting out
of a building, they are primarily described and represented when
they are concerned with the designation of the site as sacred. The
representations of these plans are simple and schematic, differing
in detail without reproducing the specifics of individual churches.
Indeed, the prevalence of the form in this context means that it
almost signifies that the site and structure are divinely or eccle-
siastically sanctioned. It can thus best be construed as a holy
ground plan, and as such it would later be employed when the
church building was used as a metaphor for the human soul.
The Sta. Maria Maggiore legend and its depiction, together
with those of holy ground plans more generally, provide one
way of navigating between two approaches to medieval sacred
buildings, which on the one hand prioritize the pragmatics of
architectural design and the construction process and on the
other emphasize the symbolic or spiritual significance of the
church building. Practices of marking the ground form an area
of cross-fertilization between these spheres, constituting a stage
2. Representative of work on small-scale plans for new buildings
are Malvina Borgherini, Disegno e progetto nel cantiere medievale:
esempi toscani del XIV secolo (Venice: Marsilio, 2001); and Robert
Bork, The Geometry of Creation: Architectural Drawing and the Dy-
namics of Gothic Design (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). Examples of stud-
ies of plans that explicate texts can be found in Lucy Donkin and
Hanna Vorholt, eds., Imagining Jerusalem in the Medieval West (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2012). For the
suggestion that exegetical illustrations concentrated on places where
God was present, see Lesley Smith, “The Imaginary Jerusalem of Nich-
olas of Lyra,” in Donkin and Vorholt, Imagining Jerusalem, 77–96,
at 95.
in construction that was both recognized in the liturgy and
given a miraculous dimension in foundation legends. Small-
scale representations of these full-scale plans similarly occupy
a middle ground between designs for new church buildings
and exegetical representations of Christianity’s most sacred
structures. More fundamentally, though, this case study invites
historians of medieval art, architecture, and sacred space to
take the ground more seriously as a surface for visual expres-
sion and to treat ephemeral marks made on it as potentially
meaningful and influential. There is already interest on the
part of architects and architectural historians in historic site-
based practices.3 In what follows, however, I consider plans
drawn on the ground not as practical precursors to a three-
dimensional building but as part of a wider nexus of textual
and visual representation. I therefore propose the existence of
relationships between the ground, ephemeral media, and its
documentation in a way that reconsiders the interaction of text,
image, and ritual performance in this period, as well as the sta-
tus of the sources with which we work. I suggest that ephemeral
images had the potential to inform as well as derive from de-
scriptive and prescriptive texts, to generate mental images, and
to influence permanent works of art beyond the direct illus-
tration of particular rites. I hope this study will prompt others
to be open to the possibility of prior acts of drawing or impres-
sion when approaching surviving works of art.
Miraculous Ground Plans
The miraculous provision of a ground plan is part of a much
wider phenomenon of medieval building miracles in which di-
vine intervention in processes of construction, or indeed con-
secration, signified approval of the work at hand and some-
times served to legitimize ambitious building projects.4 At the
same time, it represented a distinctive type of interaction with
a sacred place, focused on the two-dimensional surface of the
ground. In this section, I outline some biblical precedents for
the demarcation of the site of a church before tracing the ways
in which this was described in foundation legends before the
example of Sta. Maria Maggiore. While methods encompassed
measuring and pacing out, I give particular attention to the
marking of the ground through acts of drawing and impres-
sion. I suggest that these full-scale ground plans, also present
3. E.g., Paul Emmons, “Drawing Sites::Site Drawings,” in Architec-
ture and Field/Work, ed. Suzanne Ewing et al. (London: Routledge,
2011), 119–28.
4. Carolyn M. Carty, “The Role of Medieval Dream Images in
Authenticating Ecclesiastical Construction,” Zeitschrift für Kunstge-
schichte 62, no. 1 (1999): 45–90; and Conrad Rudolph, “Building-
Miracles as Artistic Justification in the Early and Mid-Twelfth Cen-
tury,” in Radical Art History: Internationale Anthologie, Subject: O. K.
Werckmeister, ed. Wolfgang Kersten (Zurich: Zip, 1997), 398–410.
in foundation legends that claim no miraculous intervention,
may have had correspondences in contemporary construction
practice. Such plans constituted images in their own right, ex-
ecuted in various media on the surface of the ground, but the
interest shown in their delineation in early medieval textual ac-
counts can be contrasted with a lack of visual representations.
Biblical precedents for miraculous ground plans include
examples related to buildings but also the marking of the
ground in other circumstances. The most obvious point of ref-
erence was the measuring out of significant structures by fig-
ures in visions. One of these was St. John’s vision of the Heav-
enly Jerusalem in Revelation (21:10–17), in which the angel
has a golden reed to measure the length, breadth, and height
of the city and its gates and walls. Another important prece-
dent was Ezekiel’s vision of the future Temple in Jerusalem
(40–42), in which he encountered a man “with a line of flax
in his hand, and a measuring reed,” who proceeded to measure
all the constituent structures for Ezekiel to commit to mem-
ory.5 While most of the dimensions given in Ezekiel relate
to the length and breadth of the buildings, essentially forming
a ground plan, the height of some of the structures is also men-
tioned, so in fact both of these cases engage with three di-
mensions. Equally significant for the miraculous ground plans
was the episode of Gideon’s fleece, in which the ground was
marked in only two dimensions (Judg. 6:36–40). Here, in a
sign that God would save Israel, a fleece laid on the ground
one evening was found the next day to be full of dew, while
the ground around it was dry. Conversely, the next night the
fleece was dry while the ground around it was covered with
dew. The place where the fleece had been laid did not inspire
any construction activity on the site; indeed, the miracle did
not have the purpose of designating the location as sacred.
Nonetheless, the story provided a divinely produced means of
delineating space on the ground.
Medieval accounts of miraculously provided ground plans
drew variously on these biblical examples. A plan could be re-
vealed to the viewer as it was being measured or marked out,
or it could be found already complete. At the same time, where
substances such as dew and snow were employed, plans could
be imprinted by visible agents as well as appear fully formed.
Following most directly the precedent set by Ezekiel and Rev-
elation, some plans were vouchsafed by the acts of measuring
and marking out seen in visions. Early examples are found
in the Life of Symeon Stylite the Younger, who saw an angel
5. Esp. 40:3 for the quotation. Alain Guerreau has shown that bib-
lical descriptions of measuring occur particularly in relation to the
Tabernacle, Temple, and Heavenly Jerusalem and that measuring vo-
cabulary is especially concentrated in the account of Ezekiel’s dream:
Guerreau, “Mensura et metiri dans la Vulgate,” in “La Misura/Mea-
suring,” special issue, Micrologus 19 (2011): 3–19, at 14–17.
Holy Ground Plans in Late Medieval Italy D 227
with a measuring stick trace out the plan of a monastery and
church,6 and in Gregory the Great’s Life of St. Benedict, in
which the saint himself appeared in a vision and marked out
exactly (“subtiliter designauit”) the disposition of the buildings
of a monastery.7 Perhaps the best-known and most detailed in-
stance is that concerning the abbey of Cluny, in which a monk
called Gunzo saw St. Peter and other saints indicate the plan of
the church by holding measuring ropes and placing boundary
markers.8 A site could also be measured out by walking. In the
Miracles of St. Thomas Becket compiled by William of Can-
terbury, Becket and the apostle Thomas appear in a vision
and order that a chapel be built in their honor. The saints show
the place destined for the construction, indicating a trench
(“scrobe”) that had already been made and pacing out the di-
mensions of the building.9
In accounts such as these, emphasis lies on the witnessing
of the measuring process and its internalization or memoriza-
tion by the recipient of the vision, to be used as an authorita-
tive basis for inventio.10 It was also possible for a plan to be
found already marked on the ground, either as foretold in a
vision or acting as confirmation of actions seen in one, provid-
ing an external, public, and concrete sign of divine intent. The
mid-ninth-century Liber pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis con-
tains an account of the foundation of a church dedicated to
St. Zacharias some centuries earlier, in which the niece of Galla
Placidia was instructed in a vision to build a monasterium in
the place where she would find it traced out (“designatum”),
while the altar was to be positioned where she found “the like-
6. Paul van den Ven, ed. and trans., La vie ancienne de S. Syméon
Stylite le Jeune (521–592) (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1970),
2:91–92.
7. “uir Domini in somnis apparuit, et loca singula, ubi quid aedi-
ficari debuisset, subtiliter designauit.” Gregory the Great, Dialogues
2.22, in Dialogues, Tome II: Livres I–III, Sources chrétiennes 260,
ed. Adalbert de Vogüé, trans. P. Antin (Paris: Cerf, 1979), 200–204,
esp. 202.
8. Gilo, Vita Sancti Hugonis abbatis, ed. H. E. J. Cowdrey, “Two
Studies in Cluniac History, 1049–1126,” Studi Gregoriani per la storia
della “Libertas Ecclesiae” 11 (1978): 41–109, at 90–92. This and the
other lives are discussed in Carolyn M. Carty, “The Role of Gunzo’s
Dream in the Building of Cluny III,” Gesta 27, nos. 1–2 (1988):
113–23.
9. “mensurasset apostolus spatium duodecim pedum pede dextro,
martyr vero tredecim dextro et sinistro, more gentis suae.” William of
Canterbury, Miracula S. Thomae 6.150, in Materials for the History of
Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury (Canonized by Pope Alex-
ander III, A.D. 1173), Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores
67, ed. James Craigie Robertson (London: Longman, 1875), 1:531.
10. Gunzo’s dream and similar examples are discussed in these
terms in Mary J. Carruthers, The Craft of Thought (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1998), 193–96, 224–28; and Paul Binski, Gothic
Wonder: Art, Artifice and the Decorated Style, 1290–1350 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2014), 13–16.
228 E Gesta v57n2, Fall 2018
ness of a cross in the ground.”11 When she went to the spot she
found the foundations already dug, as if excavated by a human
hand, and she proceeded to “build as she had found it drawn
out,” which suggests that the foundations themselves were un-
derstood as showing the form of the church.12 More com-
monly, preliminary marks on the ground showed people where
to dig the foundations themselves. These marks were generally
made by or in ephemeral substances such as dew or snow. Fa-
miliar forms of precipitation that could create patterns on the
ground naturally, these were fitting media in which to com-
municate a heavenly plan and reinforce a visionary experience.
On the one hand, they rendered aspects of individual dreams
and visions concrete and visible to others. On the other, their
essentially fleeting nature suggests that they also functioned
to extend a quality of such experiences into the material envi-
ronment, remaining visible only slightly longer than the visions
themselves and similarly acting as a prompt toward a perma-
nent marking of the ground.
An early example of a ground plan marked out in dew is
found in the Revelatio Sancti Michaelis, a ninth-century text
describing the founding of Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy.
Here St. Aubert was commanded in a dream to construct a
church in honor of the archangel Michael, with Aubert’s hes-
itancy provoking several interventions on the part of the angel.
The size and dimensions of the place needed for the church
were determined first by the circular area marked out by the
hoofprints of a bull, and second, when the bishop was still
hesitating because of the size of the church, by dew on the sum-
mit of the rocky outcrop. In an occurrence explicitly compared
with Gideon’s sign of victory, the area where the foundations
were to be was left dry, and the bishop was told to “go and
lay the foundations as you see them marked out [signatum].”13
11. “construe michi monasterium, sicut designatum inueneris. Et
ubi inueneris in terra crucis similitudinem, sit ibi altarium consecra-
tum”; Agnellus, Liber pontificalis 41, in Liber pontificalis ecclesiae
Ravennatis, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis (here-
after CCCM) 199, ed. D. Mauskopf Deliyannis (Turnhout: Brepols,
2006), 199–200; and eadem, ed. and trans., The Book of Pontiffs of
the Church of Ravenna (Washington, DC: Catholic University of
America Press, 2004), 149.
12. “Quae mox euigilans, cucurrit citius ad locum ubi designatio illi
ostensa fuerat; inuenit quasi ad manus hominis cauatum funda-
mentum fuisset”; Agnellus, Liber pontificalis 41, 199; and Deliyannis,
Book of Pontiffs, 149.
13. “Cumque jam dictus episcopus de magnitudine construendae
fabricae adhuc dubius cogitaret, nocte media, sicuti quondam Ge-
deoni in signum victoriae, ros jacuit supra verticem montis; ubi autem
fundamenta locanda erant, siccitas fuit; dictumque est episcopo: ‘Vade
et sicut signatum videris fundamenta jace.’” Revelatio ecclesiae Sancti
Michaelis 4, in Chroniques latines du Mont Saint-Michel (IXe–XIIe siè-
cle), ed. and trans. Pierre Bouet and Olivier Desbordes (Caen: Presses
Universitaires de Caen, 2009), 89–109, at 95–99.
Another early example of a ground plan marked out in dew
is found in the ninth-century life of St. Agile, abbot of Rebais
in the Île-de-France in the seventh century.14 Here the saint de-
liberately sought a divine revelation concerning the site where
the church should be built. Praying alone, he saw in the air a
bright cloud in the form of a cross, which emitted light for
three nights. Likewise, for three days dew was seen in the form
of a cross (“in modum crucis”), allowing the saint and the local
bishop to place the foundations of the church (“ecclesiae fun-
damenta locaret”), which was built in the shape of a cross (“in
schemate crucis”). Whereas the dew on the ground implicitly
recalls Gideon’s fleece, the cloud evokes the one that filled Sol-
omon’s Temple after the Ark of the Covenant was placed there,
signifying the glory of the Lord.15 At the same time, in its form
and guiding presence in the wider landscape, the cloud—which
should probably be imagined as standing upright—may also
allude to another Old Testament model of divine communica-
tion, the pillars of fire and smoke that preceded the Israelites
through the desert in the book of Exodus.
Later foundation legends employ the motif of dew or snow
in which lines are traced. In an account of the foundation of
the Benedictine abbey at Soignies, for example, the eleventh-
century Life of St. Vincent Madelgarius recounts how the saint
experienced a dream in which an angel instructed him to build
a church in honor of St. Peter, marking the dimensions of the
building (“mensuram basilicae”) by walking around the site,
drawing a reed after him. The plan of the church (“vestigium
basilicae”) was later found to be indicated by the absence of
dew on the grass where the angel had trodden.16 While vesti-
gium can mean any trace or imprint, it is significant in this
context that it is consistently used to describe the venerated
footprints of Christ, saints, and angels, suggesting that the an-
gelic steps that delineated the building also rendered it holy.17
14. De Sancto Agilo primo Resbacensi abbate in Bria Galliae pro-
vincia 12.21–22, in Acta Sanctorum Augusti 6 (Antwerp: Van der
Plassche, 1743), col. 582.
15. 1 Kings 8:10–11. On this passage and its relevance to medieval
consecration ritual, see Didier Méhu, “L’onction, le voile et la vision:
anthropologie du rituel de dédicace de l’église à l’époque romane,” Co-
dex Aquilarensis 32 (2016): 83–110.
16. Vita antiquior S. Vincentii Madelgarii 16–21, ed. A. Poncelet,
Analecta Bollandiana 12 (1893): 422–40, at 431–32; and Carty, “Role
of Medieval Dream Images,” 47–48.
17. For Christ’s footprints at the site of the Ascension, see, e.g.,
Sulpicius Severus, Chronica 2.33, in Sulpicii Severi libri qui supersunt,
Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 1, ed. K. Halm (Vienna:
Geroldus, 1866), 86; and Bede, De locis sanctis 6.1–2, in Itineraria
et alia geographica, Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 175, ed. I.
Fraipont (Turnhout: Brepols, 1965), 1:262–63. For those of the arch-
angel Michael, see, e.g., Revelatio ecclesiae Sancti Michaelis 6, in Bouet
and Desbordes, Chroniques latines du Mont Saint-Michel, 99; Libellus
de revelatione, aedificatione et auctoritate Fiscannensis monasterii,
Similarly, a twelfth-century account of the restoration of the
abbey of Mozac by King Pippin the Short describes a vision
in which an angel in the guise of a white deer marked the form
of the church to be built with its horns and hooves, creating a
“vestigium” visible in both the snow and the earth beneath.18
The king, seeing these vestigia, ordered that a basilica of “mar-
velous size” should be built on the spot.19 In this tradition, but
probably also influenced by the Sta. Maria Maggiore miracle
of the snow, is a late medieval Marian miracle in which the
site of the church of Notre-Dame at Le Puy was marked out
by a miraculous snowfall in July and the hoofprints of a deer.20
Where angels and deer acted as divine emissaries, more direct
intervention was also possible. At Hildesheim, the late eleventh-
century Fundatio ecclesiae Hildensemensis describes how the
bishop and clergy fasted while imploring God to show them
the place where they should build the church. At dawn on the
fourth day, they saw boundary lines (“limites”) marked out
in spring frost, as if God had responded, “here I am present,”
measuring a skillfully made rectangle for the excavation of
the foundations of the church.21 The limites are described as
in Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Latina, 221 vols., ed. J.-P.
Migne (Paris: Garnier, 1844–64) (hereafter Migne, PL) 151 (1853):
col. 715; Lucy Donkin, “Stones of St Michael: Venerating Fragments
of Holy Ground in Medieval France and Italy,” in Matter of Faith:
An Interdisciplinary Study of Relics and Relic Veneration in the Medi-
eval Period, ed. James Robinson and Lloyd De Beer with Anna Harn-
den (London: British Museum, 2014), 23–31; and eadem, “Following
the Footsteps of Christ in Late Medieval Italy: Pietro Pettinaio’s Vision
of St Francis,” Word & Image 32, no. 2 (2016): 163–80.
18. “quandam divisionem suo cornu ac pedibus ostentari in mo-
dum ecclesie fabricande. Et sicut in nive vestigium cornu et pedum
eiusdem cervi apparuit, ita et sub nive simili modo in terra apparuit.”
Bruno Krusch, “Reise nach Frankreich im Frühjahr und Sommer
1892 (Fortsetzung und Schluss), 3: Aufzeichnung des Abtes Lamfred
von Mozac über König Pippins Beziehungen zu seinem Kloster,”
Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde 19
(1892): 17–25, at 24.
19. “Que vestigia clementissimus rex conspiciens, iussit, ut basi-
lica mire magnitudinis construeretur in eodem loco.” Ibid., 25; on
this phrase, see Binski, Gothic Wonder, 32.
20. Aspects of the Le Puy miracle that suggest or allow for an
awareness of the Sta. Maria Maggiore legend are the Marian involve-
ment, the unseasonal nature of the snowfall, and the late date. Al-
though the French text claims to be a translation of a Latin original,
the earliest testimonies seem to be Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de
France (hereafter BnF), MS fr. 2222, fols. 16r–16v, ca. 1470, and a
printed pamphlet of ca. 1500 (London, British Library [hereafter
BL], I A.42390). David J. Shaw, “Two Unrecorded Incunables: Rouen,
Circa 1497, and Lyons, Circa 1500,” British Library Journal 19, no. 1
(1993): 1–10. The text is reprinted in Charles Rocher, ed., “Les vieilles
histoires de Notre-Dame du Puy,” Société agricole et scientifique de la
Haute-Loire: mémoires et procès-verbaux 5, no. 1 (1886–87): i–cxli, 1–
531, at 3–32.
21. “Peracto ad votum ieiunio, cum quartus illucesceret dies, quasi
ad invocantis vocem visi sunt designati et, quasi ipse, qui vocabatur,
Holy Ground Plans in Late Medieval Italy D 229
being wide and long and distant from one another in such a
manner as to indicate the thickness of the walls and the length
of the church and its capacity.
In all these cases, there is an interest in measuring or mark-
ing out the plan of a church on the ground, whether by the
presence or absence of dew, impressions in the bare earth,
snow and frost, or lines marked by ropes. While these plans
clearly are rhetorical in nature and miraculous in origin, it is
valid to ask whether they represent a stage in the construc-
tion process in which a full-scale plan was measured out on
the site, just as other building miracles reproduce or replace
tasks that would otherwise have been carried out by the build-
ers. Certainly, other foundation narratives describe plans be-
ing marked on the ground without divine intervention. A well-
known late antique example comes in the Greek version of
the Life of Porphyry of Gaza, in which the outline of the church
that replaced the Marneion was drawn in plaster on the site
following the cruciform plan that had been sent by Empress
Eudoxia, after which the community dug the foundations
and the bishop put in the first stones.22 Similarly, St. Nikon
of Sparta is said to have delineated his church with a rope,
while another saintly builder, Lazaros Galesiotes, is described
as having “delineated the length and breadth” of a refectory
building by directing works on the ground from the top of a
pillar.23 The marking of a ground plan could also be extracted
from the construction process and described in isolation. In
responderet: ‘Ecce adsum!’ ad fodiendum ecclesiae fundamentum
artificioso metientes rectangulo, limites, descripti instar vernalis prui-
nae, directi quidem a primitivo sanctae Mariae sacello versus occiden-
tem, lati quippe et longi inter seque distantes, prout muri spissitudo et
ecclesiae longitudo et capacitas poscebant.” Fundatio ecclesiae Hilden-
semensis 3, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores 30/2, ed.
A. Hofmeister (Hannover: Hahn, 1934), 941–46, at 944. Discussed
in Wilhelm Effmann and Alois Fuchs, Zur Baugeschichte des Hil-
desheimer Domes: vom 9. bis zum 12. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim: Lax,
1933), 3–4; Ulrich Knapp, “Zur Bau- und Ausstattungsgeschichte des
Doms,” in Ego sum Hildensemensis: Bischof, Domkapitel und Dom in
Hildesheim 815 bis 1810, Kataloge des Dom-Museums Hildesheim 3,
ed. Knapp (Petersberg: Imhoff, 2000), 31–92, at 37–40; and Gün-
ther Binding and Susanne Linscheid-Burdich with Julia Wippermann,
Planen und Bauen im frühen und hohen Mittelalter nach den Schrift-
quellen bis 1250 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002),
113.
22. Mark the Deacon, The Life of Porphyry, Bishop of Gaza 75–79,
in Marc le diacre, Vie de Porphyre, évêque de Gaza, ed. and trans.
Henri Grégoire and M.-A. Kugener (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1930), 59–
63; and G. F. Hill, trans., The Life of Porphyry, Bishop of Gaza, by Mark
the Deacon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), 85–90.
23. Vita Niconis 35, in The Life of Saint Nikon: Text, Translation
and Commentary, ed. Denis F. Sullivan (Brookline, MA: Hellenic Col-
lege Press, 1987), 118–19. This is discussed, along with the example of
Lazaros Galesiotes, in Robert G. Ousterhout, Master Builders of By-
zantium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 59–63.
230 E Gesta v57n2, Fall 2018
accounts of the life of the apostle Thomas, which circulated
in Greek, Syriac, and Latin versions and was incorporated into
such texts as the Golden Legend, he agrees to build a palace for
the Indian king Gundaphorus and “took a reed, measured the
place, and marked it out.”24 However, rather than proceed with
the building, he spends the money on the poor, thereby con-
structing for the king a palace in heaven. Another example that
deals only with the planning stage is Gerald of Wales’s twelfth-
century work On the Conquest of Ireland, in which he re-
counts how he dreamed of Prince John, “who seemed to be just
about to lay the foundations of a church.” John had “marked
the turf all round [cespitem undique signando] and opened
up the ground in a straight line in the way surveyors do, and
was laying out his building material around the plan as a means
of gauging the proportions.”25 The ample nave and cramped
presbytery thus revealed, indicative of John’s attitude to the
institution of the Church in Ireland, were enough to wake up
the cleric.
While these latter accounts, even if they contain visionary
or miraculous elements, do not claim divine assistance with
the plan, it would be unwise to draw too sharp a distinction
between the two sets of texts: one in which the plan is marked
on the ground through heavenly intervention and the other
in which it is not. Both have a rhetorical emphasis and draw
on the same biblical precedents, as well as on each other. Ul-
timately, it is difficult to establish how far either set reflects
actual practices of marking out buildings on the ground, not
least because such texts traditionally have themselves consti-
tuted the main evidence for these practices. For example, Gun-
zo’s dream, as illustrated in a late twelfth-century manuscript,
24. The Acts of Thomas 17–24, in The Apocryphal New Testament:
A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Transla-
tion, ed. J. K. Elliott (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 454–57, esp. 454
(Acts 18) for the quotation; and Passio Sancti Thomae apostoli 16–22,
in Die alten lateinischen Thomasakten, ed. Klaus Zelzer (Berlin: Aka-
demie, 1977), 12–17. Orderic Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica 2.8, in The
Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chib-
nall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 1:183; for full text, see Migne,
PL 188 (1855): cols. 159–60; and Jacobus da Voragine, Legenda Au-
rea 5, in Iacopo da Varazze, Legenda aurea: con le miniature dal codice
Ambrosiano C 240 inf., ed. Giovanni Paolo Maggioni, trans. Francesco
Stella (Florence: SISMEL–Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007), 1:66, 2:1472–
73. Discussed in A. Hilhorst, “The Heavenly Palace in the Acts of
Thomas,” in The Apocryphal Acts of Thomas, ed. Jan N. Bremmer
(Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 53–64.
25. “Visus sum enim mihi videre filium regis Iohannem in viridi
quadam planicie tamquam ecclesiam fundaturum, cumque metan-
cium more, cespitem undique signando, terre faciem lineariter ape-
ruisset, fabricam archetipam sensili quodam modo circumponens.”
Gerald of Wales, Expugnatio Hibernica: The Conquest of Ireland 36,
ed. and trans. A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin (Dublin: Royal Irish Acad-
emy, 1978), 237–45, at 242–43.
was interpreted as indicating the employment of squares set on
the diagonal to lay out Cluny III.26 Although this is now under-
stood as too literal a reading of the image, which overlooks the
role of the dream in justifying the church’s large dimensions,
the account has been understood as reflecting the practice of
stretching cords more generally.27 The dream recounted by
Gerald of Wales, the story of the apostle Thomas and Gun-
daphorus, and the account of the two St. Thomases were all sim-
ilarly invoked to support the use of plans marked on the ground
in mid-twentieth-century discussions of medieval building tech-
niques.28 In more recent scholarship, too, written sources are
used to support the likelihood of such plans in both Western
and Byzantine building traditions.29
The marking of a plan on the ground is also found in Re-
naissance treatises on architecture. In On the Art of Building
in Ten Books, Leon Battista Alberti describes defining the foun-
dations of a building by tracing out (“dirigere”) lines known as
baselines, executed by fixing stakes and stretching ropes be-
tween them.30 He also notes that in Antiquity, “it was cus-
tomary to mark out the line of the intended wall with a trail
of powdered white earth, known as ‘pure.’”31 Moreover, in his
1521 commentary on Vitruvius’s De architectura, Cesare Cesa-
riano derived the term ichnographia “from the Greek ichnos,
in Latin vestigium; that is to say, an impression made on the
ground or dust or plaster or snow; or on paper or other similar
things,” adding, “in popular speech these are called ‘holme’
or ‘pedane,’” and from graphia, which he defined as “a picture
26. Kenneth John Conant, “Mediaeval Academy Excavations at
Cluny, IX: Systematic Dimensions in the Buildings,” Speculum 38,
no. 1 (1963): 1–45, at 7–8; and idem, Cluny: les églises et la maison
du chef d’ordre (Mâcon: Protat, 1968), 75–77.
27. Carty, “Role of Medieval Dream Images”; and Ousterhout,
Master Builders, 60.
28. Douglas Knoop and G. P. Jones, “The Decline of the Mason-
Architect in England,” Journal of the Royal Institute of British Ar-
chitects 44, no. 19 (1937): 1004–7, at 1004; L. F. Salzman, Building
in England Down to 1540: A Documentary History (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1952), 16–17; Paul Booz, Der Baumeister der Gotik (Mu-
nich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1956), 68; and Pierre Du Colombier,
Les chantiers des cathédrales: ouvriers, architectes, sculpteurs, rev.
ed. (Paris: Picard, 1973), 87.
29. James S. Ackerman states that “according to textual evidence,
full-scale drawings (1:1) of plans for large edifices such as cathedrals
were often drawn directly on the ground”: Ackerman, Origins, Im-
itation, Conventions: Representation in the Visual Arts (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2002), 31. Robert Ousterhout (Master Builders, 64)
has discussed the Byzantine hagiographical material in the context
of construction, concluding that “Marking the plan of the building
full-scale on the site was probably a common practice.”
30. Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria 3.2, in On the Art of
Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Rob-
ert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 62–63.
31. Alberti, De re aedificatoria 4.3, in ibid., 101.
or design or drawing or sculpture.”32 The reference to snow
raises the possibility that Cesariano was thinking of miraculous
plans as well as more conventional building sites, but it is nev-
ertheless telling that he conceived of ichnographia more gen-
erally as an image of an imprint on the ground. This has been
seen as symptomatic of Cesariano’s continued adherence to the
medieval world of construction.33 However, Renaissance archi-
tectural design, despite the increased production of scale draw-
ings, was not divorced from the context of the building site; in-
deed, recent work on a plan by Alberti has indicated the extent
to which the execution of works on paper could be informed by
such site-based practices as pacing and staking.34
Even if medieval foundation accounts should not be un-
derstood as exact replications of building processes, it is pos-
sible that there was a sense in which the plan of the church
was made visible on the ground during the construction pro-
cess, whether in isolation or in conjunction with a small-scale
plan. These marks can be seen as drawings in their own right.35
When provided miraculously, such drawings can be further
understood as acheiropoieta, which perhaps not only justified
the ground plan of the church but also sanctified it, along with
the site itself. The textual accounts of these graphic entities
and acts of drawing pay attention to their visual qualities,
allowing them to be pictured easily in the imagination. Yet
32. “Ichnographia dicitur ab ιχνοσ: græce quod est uestigium la-
tinæ: cioe una impressione facta sopra il terreno aut puluere uel
pasta o neue: uel como i designo sopra il papero: & altre consimile
cose: uulgarmente si dice etiam holme seu pedane. Et γραϕια id est
pictura uel designatio seu descriptio: uel sculptura.” Cesare Cesa-
riano, Di Lucio Vitruvio Pollione De architectura libri dece traducti
de Latino in Vulgare (Como: Gottardus da Ponte, 1521), fol. 13v;
and Arnaldo Bruschi, Adriano Carugo, and Francesco Paolo Fiore,
eds., De Architectura: traslato, commentato e affigurato da Caesare
Caesariano, 1521 (Milan: Polifilo, 1981). For the original explana-
tion of the term, which refers to “the on-site layout of the design,”
see Vitruvius, De architectura 1.2, in Vitruvius: Ten Books on Archi-
tecture, ed. Ingrid D. Rowland and Thomas Noble Howe (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 24–25.
33. Maria Teresa Bartoli, “Orthographia, ichnographia, scaeno-
graphia,” Studi e documenti di architettura 8 (1978): 197–208, esp.
204–8; and Arnaldo Bruschi, “Introduction,” in Bruschi, Carugo,
and Fiore, De Architectura, lxv–lxxviii, at lxxv.
34. Paul Emmons and Jonathan Foote, “Making Plans: Alberti’s
Ichnography as Cultural Artefact,” in Reading Architecture and Cul-
ture: Researching Buildings, Spaces and Documents, ed. Adam Sharr
(London: Routledge, 2012), 197–210.
35. For Arnold Pacey, the “layout of stakes, pegs and cords on the
ground would constitute a full-size ‘drawing’ that could be discussed
and modified before the foundations were dug.” Pacey, Medieval Ar-
chitectural Drawing: English Craftsmen’s Methods and Their Later
Persistence (c. 1200–1700) (Stroud: Tempus, 2007), 63. Ousterhout
(Master Builders, 64) has also suggested that “the on-site work should
also be considered the ‘drawing.’ ”
Holy Ground Plans in Late Medieval Italy D 231
if such drawings on the ground could be witnessed in and
after visions and also visualized as mental images, they were
rarely represented before the fourteenth century. The act
of measuring is shown in the illustration of Gunzo’s dream
in a twelfth-century manuscript from the abbey of Saint-
Martin-des-Champs, where Peter and Paul, aided by a monk,
are shown uncoiling a thick measuring rope, but the rest of the
rope is arranged like netting across the gold background of the
scene rather than being stretched along the ground.36 Other ac-
counts of miraculous plans were illustrated by a scene of the
founder dreaming in bed, conforming to the model of dreams
more generally.37 The twelfth-century Mont-Saint-Michel car-
tulary represents St. Aubert in this manner, focusing on the
moment in a later amendment to the legend in which the angel
pokes the bishop in the head.38 What may come closest to a
representation of the marking of the ground is found in a Psal-
ter from the second half of the eleventh century with scenes
from the life of St. Vincent Madelgarius.39 Here too the angel
is shown appearing to the sleeping saint, but the long staff he
holds, surmounted by a cross, stretches down to the ground.
While this may be an allusion to the outlining of the church,
there is no foreground and no attempt to suggest the extent
of the building. Evidently, plans marked on the ground did
not necessarily inspire visual representation in other media.
In the next section, I consider what prompted the introduction
of such representations without attempting to explain their
prior absence. However, it is worth noting here that small-scale
ground plans of various buildings in Jerusalem are attested
from the seventh century onward, suggesting that the visual
vocabulary for such a depiction was not entirely lacking.40
36. Paris, BnF, MS lat. 17716, fol. 43r.
37. Carty, “Role of Medieval Dream Images,” esp. 50, 55–58, 80–
83, for the following examples.
38. Avranches, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 210, fol. 4v. Ursula
Nilgen, “Le Cartulaire du Mont-Saint-Michel et la miniature anglaise,”
in Manuscrits et enluminures dans le monde normand (Xe–XVe siècles):
Colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, octobre 1995; actes, ed. Pierre Bouet and
Monique Dosdat (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 1999), 29–
49; and Monique Dosdat, L’enluminure romane au Mont-Saint-
Michel: Xe–XIIe siècle, rev. ed. (Rennes: Ouest-France, 2006), 110–13.
39. Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. 774, fol. 28v. Robert
Bruck, Die Malereien in den Handschriften des Königreichs Sachsen
(Dresden: Meinhold, 1906), 19–32; and Anton von Euw, “Zur Buch-
malerei im Maasgebiet von den Anfängen bis zum 12. Jahrhundert,”
in Rhein und Maas: Kunst und Kultur, 800–1400; eine Ausstellung des
Schnütgen-Museums der Stadt Köln und der belgischen Ministerien für
französische und niederländische Kultur (Cologne: Schnütgen-Museum,
1973), 2:343–60, at 349.
40. The plans for the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Church
of the Ascension, the church at Jacob’s Well, and the basilica on
Mount Sion mentioned in Adomnán’s late seventh-century De locis
sanctis are found in manuscripts dating from the ninth century on-
232 E Gesta v57n2, Fall 2018
Sta. Maria Maggiore
The absence of depictions of miraculous church ground
plans in the central Middle Ages, despite the existence of de-
tailed verbal descriptions, makes all the more notable one case
that did produce a significant number of visual representa-
tions: the miraculous foundation of Sta. Maria Maggiore in
Rome. I begin by outlining evidence for the development of
the legend and treatment of the plan and foundations in tex-
tual accounts of the miracle. I then focus on the first depiction
of the plan in the facade mosaics of the church, reconstructing
the plan’s original appearance before surveying the approaches
taken in subsequent representations. Finally, I suggest that one
stimulus for the novel visualization of the ground plan can be
found in contemporary Rome and the competitive relationship
between its key ecclesiastical institutions. In particular, I argue
that scenes of the foundation of the Lateran basilica (now
San Giovanni in Laterano) and Old St. Peter’s, combined with
their possession of divinely authored images, provided an im-
petus for iconographic innovation at Sta. Maria Maggiore.
The foundation legend of Sta. Maria Maggiore is somewhat
later than the examples discussed previously, and even here its
translation into visual form was not immediate. The existence
of the legend is only attested from the thirteenth century, al-
though it has been suggested that it originated in the twelfth.41
The feast of the dedication of the church on 5 August first re-
ceived an indulgenced office in 1222 under Pope Honorius III
(r. 1216–27).42 However, it may only have been referred to ex-
plicitly as the “festum nivis” in the later thirteenth century,
when it appears as such in documents that include the cere-
monial of Gregory X of about 1273 and a bull by Pope Nich-
ward, and similar plans are included in copies of Bede’s work of the
same name. John Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrims before the Crusades,
rev. ed. (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 2002), 193–97, pls. 1–5; and
Thomas O’Loughlin, “Adomnán’s Plans in the Context of His Imagin-
ing ‘the Most Famous City,’ ” in Donkin and Vorholt, Imagining Jeru-
salem, 15–40. For discussion of plans of the Temple, see Catherine
Delano-Smith, “The Exegetical Jerusalem: Maps and Plans for Ezekiel
Chapters 40–48,” 41–76, Lesley Smith, “The Imaginary Jerusalem of
Nicholas of Lyra,” 77–96, and Mary Carruthers, “The ‘Pictures’ of Je-
rusalem in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 156,” 97–121, all
in Donkin and Vorholt, Imagining Jerusalem; and note 151 below.
41. Gerhard Wolf, Salus populi Romani: die Geschichte römischer
Kultbilder im Mittelalter (Weinheim: VCH, Acta Humaniora, 1990),
19, 96.
42. Pietro Pressutti, ed., Regesta Honorii Papae III, Iussu et Muni-
ficentia Leonis XIII Pontificis Maximi ex Vaticanis Archetypis Aliisque
Fontibus (Rome: Typographia Vaticana, 1895), 2:91, no. 4101; and Ste-
phen J. P. van Dijk, “Feasts of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Thirteenth-
Century Roman Liturgy,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum 48
(1955): 450–56, at 455.
olas IV (r. 1288–92) of 1288.43 The feast spread widely, not
least because of the Franciscan adoption of the liturgy of the
Roman Curia, with the celebration of Sta. Maria in Nivis being
mentioned in 1269 and prescribed in 1302.44 The earliest
known account of the miracle is given in the second redaction
of Bartolomeo da Trento’s Liber epilogorum in gesta sancto-
rum, which has been dated to 1254, and in his Liber miracu-
lorum beate Marie virginis.45 From the early fourteenth cen-
tury, versions of the miracle were included in or added to
liturgical books such as breviaries and legendaries, including
several used at Sta. Maria Maggiore.46
As described by Bartolomeo, at the time of Constantine,
the patrician John and his wife—a childless Roman couple—
asked God how they should dispose of their wealth. The Vir-
gin appeared to them to request a church in her honor, indi-
cating its extent and site by an unseasonal covering of snow
and making this known to Pope Liberius. The next morning,
the snow was discovered, and the pope was the first to break
the ground in order to lay the foundations, but in a second
miracle, the earth gave way for the foundations itself (“per
43. Stephen J. P. van Dijk and Joan Hazelden Walker, eds., The
Ordinal of the Papal Court from Innocent III to Boniface VIII and
Related Documents (Fribourg: University Press, 1975), lx, 574; Er-
nest Langlois, ed., Les registres de Nicolas IV: recueil des bulles de
ce pape (Paris: Fontemoing, 1886), 128, no. 632; and Wolf, Salus po-
puli Romani, 96, 279n25. Giovanni Ferri published the text of a bull
ascribed to Honorius in 1223 that did employ the term “in festo
nivis,” but he noted that the original manuscript was missing,
and indeed the bull is not found in the registers of Honorius. Ferri,
“Le carte dell’archivio Liberiano dal secolo X al XV,” Archivio della R.
Società romana di storia patria 28, nos. 1–2 (1905): 23–39, at 27–28;
taken as authentic in Victor Saxer, “La basilica dalla fine dell’Antichità
al Medioevo,” in Santa Maria Maggiore e Rome, ed. Roberto Luciani
(Rome: Palombi, 1996), 73–114, at 112. Honorius is also credited with
instituting the “festum nivis beate Marie” in an addition to the ordinal
of Innocent III: “Dominus Honorius papa precepit celebrari festum
nivis beate Marie,” in Van Dijk and Walker, Ordinal of the Papal
Court, 424; the copy dates to the mid-fourteenth century and its
model to 1302, see xx–lx, at xx.
44. Stephen J. P. van Dijk, Sources of the Modern Roman Liturgy:
The Ordinals by Haymo of Faversham and Related Documents (1243–
1307) (Leiden: Brill, 1963), 2:441, 451; idem, “Feasts of the Blessed
Virgin Mary,” 455–56; and idem, “Ursprung und Inhalt der fran-
ziskanische Liturgie des 13. Jahrhunderts,” Franziskanische Studien
51 (1969): 86–116, 192–217, at 112, 216–17.
45. Bartolomeo da Trento, Liber epilogorum 270, in Liber epilogorum
in gesta sanctorum, ed. Emore Paoli (Florence: SISMEL–Edizioni del
Galluzzo, 2001), 238, xxix–xxxii for the dating of the second redaction;
and Wolf, Salus populi Romani, 93–97, where the second redaction is
dated to 1244 (329, Q18 for the extract).
46. Saxer, “La basilica dalla fine dell’Antichità al Medioevo,” 109;
idem, Sainte-Marie-Majeure: une basilique de Rome dans l’histoire
de la ville et de son église (Ve–XIIIe siècle) (Rome: École Française
de Rome, 2001), 255–56, 320–25.
se terra fundamento iaciendo cessit”). Once built, the basilica
was said to be consecrated by a later pope, Sixtus III (r. 432–
40). The longer version of the legend describes first the snow-
fall and then the simultaneous visions of Liberius and the
couple, before treating the discovery of the miracle.47 Con-
siderable attention is given to the manner in which the snow
marks out the spot, covering the entirety of the space and in-
dicating its confines. The snowfall covers only the area to be
built on (“sollummodo locum aedificandae basilicae coope-
riens”), and when the Romans reach the place, they find it both
full of and encircled by deep snow (“in cuius quidem circuitu
tam alta nix limitem fecerat”), its presence explicitly compared
to the dew on Gideon’s fleece (“qui quondam in area Gedeo-
nis uellus rorandum caelesti pluuia euidentius consecrauit”).48
Here too Liberius started to mark out the area where the snow
had fallen by digging, but immediately the ground was open all
the way around, the foundations having been excavated by di-
vine agency, through the intercession of the Virgin.49 Here the
subsequent consecration was carried out by Liberius, rather
than Sixtus III.
Not only does the account share features with other legends
of miraculously provided ground plans, including the refer-
ence to Gideon’s fleece, but it also shows an awareness of the
tradition of the mansion marked out by the apostle Thomas
for King Gundaphorus, discussed above, in which a plan on
the ground relates to a structure in heaven. During the Virgin’s
appearance to John and his wife, she promises that while they
are building a house for her on earth, she will construct an eter-
47. The text is edited in Saxer, Sainte-Marie-Majeure, 550–59. See
also Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina Antiquae et Mediae Aetatis
(Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1901), 2:799, no. 5403; and Paolo
De Angelis, Basilicae S. Mariae Maioris de Urbe a Liberio Papa I usque
ad Paulum V Pont. Max. descriptio et delineatio (Rome: Zannetti,
1621), 19–21.
48. “Eo enim tempore, uolens beata uirgo Dei genitrix locum
aedificandae sibi basilicae hominibus demonstrare, quadam nocte
dicti mensis, id est nonis augusti, subito, contra naturam temporis,
aer nimia frigoris congelatione constringitur et tanta nubium con-
stipatione densatur, ut imbre desuper fuso, in ipso casu niuium
multitudo deflueret. Quae solummodo locum aedificandae basilicae
cooperiens, miraculum pariter et algorem subministrauit. . . . Re-
quirentes uero locum, quem sancta Dei genitrix pontifici repromiserat,
eum plenum altis niuibus inuenerunt. In cuius quidem circuitu tam
alta nix limitem fecerat, ut nulli uideretur ambiguum, quod ille hunc
locum participem niuium infusionis fecisse certius uideretur, qui
quondam in area Gedeonis uellus rorandum caelesti pluuia euidentius
consecrauit.” Saxer, Sainte-Marie-Majeure, 553, 558.
49. “Mox vero pontifex, fossorium laetus accipiens, sicut nix desig-
nauerat, propriis manibus terram cepit effodere. Quae extemplo aperta
est per circuitum, et ita huius gloriosissimae Virginis meritis archi-
tectonicis manibus diuina reserauit clementia fundamentum.” Ibid.,
558.
Holy Ground Plans in Late Medieval Italy D 233

nal dwelling for them in heaven.50 It would perhaps be going too
far to suggest that the snowfall functions as the plan for both the
church to be built on the Esquiline and the heavenly home of its
patrons. Nevertheless, the two-dimensional plan marked on the
surface of the ground can be seen to operate in relation to two
three-dimensional spaces positioned vertically above it, repre-
senting different modes of realization: the physical structure
of the church building on earth and the eternal mansion in
heaven that this terrestrial structure prefigures. The miracle
of the snow is also described in fifteenth-century vernacular ac-
counts of the city of Rome, including a long passage in John
Capgrave’s Solace of Pilgrimes. This describes the miraculous
ground plan—“sche had merkid al þe ground with snow wher
þat sche þout hir hous schuld stande”—but the opening of the
foundations is attributed to human agency alone.51
50. “dum mihi domum in terra construxeris, ego tibi in caelis
copiosum thesaurum et aeternam construam mansionem.” Ibid., 555.
51. “She had marked all the ground with snow where she thought
her house should stand.” C. A. Mills, ed., Ye Solace of Pilgrimes: A
234 E Gesta v57n2, Fall 2018
Figure 1. Miracle of the snow (a) and detail (b) of Pope Liberius
marking out the foundations of Sta. Maria Maggiore, late thirteenth–
early fourteenth century, with later restorations, facade mosaics,
Sta. Maria Maggiore, Rome (photo: author). See the electronic
edition of Gesta for color versions of these images.
Unsurprisingly, the miracle of the snow was first depicted
at Sta. Maria Maggiore itself. Toward the end of the thirteenth
century, the church underwent significant rebuilding under
the Franciscan pope Nicholas IV. Work finished after his
death, under the patronage of the Colonna family, included
the facade mosaics, the bottom tier of which depicts four
scenes from the legend: Liberius’s dream, that of the patrician
John, their meeting, and the discovery of the snow (Figs. 1a–b).52
Three main arguments have been advanced for the dating of the
mosaics. One assigns both registers to 1292–97, after the death
of Nicholas and before the fall of the Colonna; another sug-
gests that the lower register was executed after the return of
Description of Rome, circa A.D. 1450, by John Capgrave, an Austin
Friar of King’s Lynn (London: Frowde, 1911), 84.
52. Henk van Os, “Snow in Siena,” in Studies in Early Tuscan Paint-
ing (London: Pindar Press, 1992), 75–101, at 76–77 (originally pub-
lished as “Schnee in Siena,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 19
[1968]: 1–50); Julian Gardner, “Pope Nicholas IV and the Decoration
of Santa Maria Maggiore,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 36, no. 1
(1973): 1–50; Carlo Bertelli, “Römische Träume,” in Träume im
Mittelalter: ikonologische Studien, ed. Agostino Paravicini Bagliani
and Giorgio Stabile (Stuttgart: Belser, 1989), 91–112; Eric Thunø,
“The Dating of the Façade Mosaics of S. Maria Maggiore in Rome,”
Analecta Romana Instituti Danici 23 (1996): 61–82; Jens T. Wollesen,
Pictures and Reality: Monumental Frescoes and Mosaics in Rome
around 1300 (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), 105–32; Catherine Har-
ding, “Images of Authority, Identity, Power: Facade Mosaic Decora-
tion in Rome during the Later Middle Ages,” RACAR: Revue d’art
canadienne/Canadian Art Review 24, no. 1 (1997 [2000]): 15–27, at
22–24; and Julian Gardner, The Roman Crucible: The Artistic Patron-
age of the Papacy, 1198–1304 (Munich: Hirmer, 2013), 272–80.
the Colonna from exile in 1306; and a third dates both registers
to this period, with the upper one carried out in 1306–7 and the
lower one a decade or so later.53 Although the exact date is not
crucial to the core of the present discussion, the tendency to rec-
ognize stylistic differences between the two registers and to date
the lower one to the period after the pontificate of Boniface VIII
(r. 1293–1303) is significant for the way the depiction of the leg-
end can be seen to respond to works at the Lateran. The mosaics
have been affected by the addition of the loggia in the eigh-
teenth century, which truncated and damaged the scenes at ei-
ther end, and by patching and restoration in various periods.
However, representations of the facade before the construction
of the loggia help us recover the mosaics’ original appearance.
An engraving of the whole facade in Paolo De Angelis’s
Basilicae S. Maria Maioris de Urbe of 1621 includes fairly de-
tailed treatment of the mosaics, while a seventeenth-century
drawing of the mosaics, one of a group of red chalk drawings
of Roman mosaics by the same artist, shows them in even
greater detail and seems to have been particularly faithful to
the works (Fig. 2).54
In the final scene, Christ and Mary appear together in a
roundel at the top dispensing snow onto the ground below,
where Pope Liberius, the patrician John, and a crowd of clerics
and laypeople stand to the left in front of the miraculous
ground plan (Figs. 1a–b). The inscription underneath may
once have read in full, “quando papa et Iohannes patricius cum
clero et populo romano nive dealbatum invenientes locum fo-
dere volebant et terra per se aperta est.”55 The pope points at
the plan with a short stick in his left hand and makes a gesture
of blessing with his right. The plan itself is white and sharply de-
lineated, but somewhat irregular in shape. This is partly due to
the fact that the left side is hidden behind the robes of the pope
Figure 2. Miracle of the snow and Pope Liberius marking out the
foundations of Sta. Maria Maggiore, detail from a drawing of the
53. Julian Gardner (“Pope Nicholas IV” and Roman Crucible, 273–
facade mosaics, seventeenth century, Edinburgh, National Galleries
76) dates both registers of the facade mosaics to the period 1292–97.
of Scotland, D1051 (photo: by kind permission of the National
Bertelli (“Römische Träume”) and Thunø (“Dating of the Façade
Galleries of Scotland). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color
Mosaics”) have both argued that the lower register was executed after
version of this image.
1306. The latter possibility is accepted in Paul Binski, “Art-Historical
Reflections on the Fall of the Colonna, 1297,” in Rome across Time
and Space: Cultural Transmission and the Exchange of Ideas, c. 500– and the right side has been cut off by the loggia. It has a transept
1400, ed. Claudia Bolgia, Rosamond McKitterick, and John Osborne on only the top side, while the bottom left corner is uneven,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 278–90, at 284. Wol- probably because the right side and bottom have been patched.56
lesen (Pictures and Reality, 105–32) put forward the argument that The plan is surrounded by a border clear of the falling snow,
both registers postdate 1306, with the upper one carried out in 1306–7 which suggests a transept on the bottom side as well. In the De
and the lower one a decade later.
54. De Angelis, Basilicae S. Mariae Maioris de Urbe, plate
Angelis engraving figures kneel to the right of the snowfall,
“Orientalis facies Liberianae basilicae.” Edinburgh, National Galler- while the red chalk drawing closely corresponds with the ar-
ies of Scotland, D1051; reproduced in Julian Gardner, “Copies of rangement and many of the details of the surviving scene, in-
Roman Mosaics in Edinburgh,” Burlington Magazine 115, no. 846 cluding the gestures of the crowd (Fig. 2). Both, however, show
(1973): 583–91, at 586. Pope Liberius grasping a long hoe or pick with both hands.
55. Saxer, “La basilica dalla fine dell’Antichità al Medioevo,” 136.
In the drawing he is marking out the plan of a basilica with
“When the pope and the patrician John, together with the clergy
and Roman people, finding the place white with snow, were want-
ing to excavate [the foundations] and the ground opened by itself.” 56. Gardner, “Pope Nicholas IV,” 34.

Holy Ground Plans in Late Medieval Italy D 235

transept and rounded apse, with a ditch running around the
inside. The plan is currently inscribed with the word Congre-
gatoi, given as congregatorius in the drawing, probably a mis-
understanding of congregatio. Giovanni Battista de Rossi saw
notes, which he dated to the seventeenth century, that gave the
inscription as “congregatio nivis.”57
Judging from the chalk drawing, as well as from subsequent
depictions of the miracle discussed below, we can presume
that the pope was originally shown starting to mark out a
ground plan with rounded apse and transept. The transept
was added to Sta. Maria Maggiore under Nicholas IV, and it
has been suggested that its inclusion in the mosaics may have
been seen as legitimizing the recent addition.58 Although this
entailed the radical destruction of the late antique apse, it fur-
nished the basilica with a feature very much associated with
early Christianity, in keeping with the value placed on Rome’s
early Christian architecture, and the transept in particular,
in this period.59 Yet it also seems possible that the designer
of the mosaics did not intend to represent the plan of Sta. Ma-
ria Maggiore with any degree of archaeological accuracy but,
rather, wanted to show something that was easily readable as
the ground plan of a church, which might well be cruciform
even in a city of basilicas. When allegorizing the shape of
churches in his Rationale divinorum officiorum, William Du-
randus glossed only two: circular and cruciform. With respect
to the latter, he noted that “some churches are built in the form
of a cross [in modum crucis] to show that we should crucify
ourselves to the world, or that we should follow the way of the
cross.”60 We have seen that the cruciform nature of the plan
of a church as it was marked on the ground is present in other
foundation accounts, such as the Lives of Porphyry of Gaza and
St. Agile.
The Sta. Maria Maggiore facade mosaics were the first of a
number of representations of the miracle of the snow executed
as the feast spread throughout Italy and beyond, churches
were dedicated to Sta. Maria ad Nives, and confraternities
57. Giovanni Battista de Rossi, Musaici cristiani e saggi dei pavi-
menti delle chiese di Roma anteriori al secolo XV (Rome: Spithöver,
1899), n.p.
58. Gardner, “Pope Nicholas IV,” 48–49n153.
59. Sible de Blaauw, “Reception and Renovation of Early Christian
Churches in Rome, c. 1050–1300,” in Bolgia, McKitterick, and Os-
borne, Rome across Time and Space, 151–66, esp. 163–66.
60. “Quedam tamen ecclesie in modum crucis formantur ad
notandum nos mundo crucifigi seu crucifixum sequi debere.” William
Durandus, Rationale divinorum officiorum 1.1.17, in Guillelmi Du-
ranti Rationale divinorum officiorum, CCCM 140, ed. A. Davril and
T. M. Thibodeau (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), 1:18; and Timothy M.
Thibodeau, trans., The Rationale divinorum officiorum of William
Durand of Mende: A New Translation of the Prologue and Book One
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 17.
236 E Gesta v57n2, Fall 2018
were founded in her honor.61 For the most part, studies have
focused on the choice to depict this particular miracle in the
context of patronage. The following brief overview concen-
trates on the presence and form of the ground plan. Like the
mosaics, other representations of the legend, especially on
the predellas of altarpieces, could consist of several images
and include depictions of the dreams. The majority, however,
feature a single image of the falling snow and the site of the
church, especially in illuminated initials for the feast day in li-
turgical books but also in monumental art. This constitutes a
different emphasis from the earlier legends, where visualiza-
tions tended to focus on the dream. Even here there is still con-
siderable variety in the way the scene is treated. Some exam-
ples simply show snow falling, even when closely associated
with Rome, such as the late fifteenth-century Colonna Hours.62
Others show the pope or other figures at work, with snow on
the ground but no indication of the extent of the church, such
as the fresco of 1476 in the chapel of the Madonna delle Nevi
in Sta. Maria Assunta, Campagnatico.63 Yet a significant num-
ber continue the precedent set by the mosaics at Sta. Maria
Maggiore and represent the form of the church building.
Representations that include the plan mainly show the
snow covering the entire area to be occupied by the church.
Where the scene is close to that in the facade mosaics, with
the pope and assembled company at the site, the plan gener-
ally takes the form of a basilica with a round apse and transept.
It is oriented left-to-right in such examples as a stained-glass
window in Orsanmichele, Florence, of 1380–90, and an early
61. The iconographic tradition has been discussed by Henk van Os,
in a foundational article focusing on Sienese examples, and by Hanns
Hubach in his work on the Maria-Schnee-Altar in Aschaffenburg: van
Os, “Snow in Siena”; and Hubach, Matthias Grünewald, der Aschaffen-
burger Maria-Schnee-Altar: Geschichte, Rekonstruktion, Ikonographie;
mit einem Exkurs zur Geschichte der Maria Schnee-Legende, ihrer Ver-
breitung und Illustrationen (Mainz: Gesellschaft für Mittelrheinische
Kirchengeschichte, 1996), 145–98. In her study of Sassetta’s altarpiece
of the Madonna della Neve, Machtelt Israëls also explored a range of
comparative material; Israëls, Sassetta’s Madonna della Neve: An Im-
age of Patronage (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2003), 97–144.
62. Bloomington, Indiana University, Lilly Library, MS Ricketts
141, fol. 73r; and similarly, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University,
Houghton Library, MS Typ 983, fol. 2r.
63. The work is discussed in Sandra Cardarelli, “Francesco di
Giorgio’s Frescoes and the Confraternity of the Madonna delle Nevi
in Campagnatico: Art Patronage and Ritual Celebration in Southern
Tuscany,” Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies
44 (2013): 157–86. Further examples of this approach are Madrid,
Biblioteca nacional, MS Vitr. 21 6, fol. 341v; New York, Morgan Li-
brary & Museum, MS M.799, fol. 307v; and Jerusalem, Studium
Biblicum Franciscanum, MS 7(H), fol. 48r, the latter in Nicola Bux,
Codici Liturgici Latini di Terra Santa = Liturgical Latin Codices of
the Holy Land (Fasano: Schena, 1990), 69, fig. 22.
Figure 3. Perugino, miracle of the snow and Pope Liberius marking out the foundations of Sta. Maria Maggiore, predella panel, ca. 1475–
80, Polesden Lacey (photo: © The National Trust/Lynda Hall). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.
fifteenth-century altarpiece by Masolino originally in Sta. Ma-
ria Maggiore, where the miraculous plan is the subject of the
central panel.64 A historiated initial from a Tuscan choir book
dated about 1385–1410, possibly from an Augustinian foun-
dation, also shows the plan; here the east end is hidden from
view, but the transept is clearly indicated.65 The ground plan is
oriented so the west end of the church faces the viewer in sev-
eral late fifteenth-century depictions, including a marble relief
by Mino da Fiesole in Sta. Maria Maggiore (ca. 1461); two
predella panels by Matteo di Giovanni for the altarpiece of
the Madonna della Neve made for Sta. Maria della Neve, Si-
ena, in 1477; and the predella panel at Polesden Lacey attrib-
uted to Perugino and dated about 1475–80 (Fig. 3).66 In most
of these cases Liberius is shown marking out the foundations
with a hoe, as in the mosaics, with attendants pulling his robes
back out of the way. As will be discussed below, this character-
64. Van Os, “Snow in Siena,” 80, fig. 9; and Hubach, Matthias
Grünewald, der Aschaffenburger Maria-Schnee-Altar, 162–63, 166–
77, figs. 76, 81.
65. Paintings and Works of Art from the Collections of the Late
Lord Clark of Saltwood, O.M., C.H., K.C.B. (London: Sotheby Parke
Bernet, 1984), no. 91.
66. Van Os, “Snow in Siena,” 80–82, figs. 10, 17; Hubach, Matthias
Grünewald, der Aschaffenburger Maria-Schnee-Altar, 174–77, 188–
89; and Israëls, Sassetta’s Madonna della Neve, 122–24, 134–36.
For the attribution of the predella panel at Polesden Lacey to Peru-
gino, see Pietro Scarpellini, Perugino (Milan: Electa, 1984), 71, no. 9.
istic pose is sometimes found in pontificals that illustrate the
blessing of the foundations, a rite that did not require episco-
pal involvement of this kind, thus suggesting an awareness of
the miracle of the snow. Yet it is not uniformly present in rep-
resentations of the miracle; in the Tuscan choir book, for ex-
ample, the pope is shown raising a hand in blessing while two
workmen do the digging. Where the plan is shown without the
attendant figures the format is more varied, ranging from a
simple footprint in a fifteenth-century Augustinian breviary
from Bologna or Lombardy,67 to the rectangle in Girolamo
di Benvenuto’s predella panel for the Altar of the Madonna
della Neve in San Domenico, Siena (1508),68 to the complex
trilobed east end in a mid-fifteenth-century antiphonary from
Chiusi Cathedral.69
Three late fourteenth-century representations of the mira-
cle that also show the plan in isolation delineate the outlines of
the building, allowing for the indication of doorways and in-
terior features. All take as their starting point the familiar form
of a basilica with rounded apse and transept. In a historiated
67. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canon. Liturg. 388, fol. 344r.
68. Girolamo di Benvenuto, miracle of the snow, predella panel for
the Altar of the Madonna of the Snow, Cappella Sozzini, San Dome-
nico, Siena. Van Os, “Snow in Siena,” 76, 82; and Hubach, Matthias
Grünewald, der Aschaffenburger Maria-Schnee-Altar, 189–90, fig. 103.
69. Leonardo Roselli, miracle of the snow, antiphonary, Chiusi
Cathedral, MS cor. L, fol. 127r. Van Os, “Snow in Siena,” 89, fig. 23.
Holy Ground Plans in Late Medieval Italy D 237
Figure 4. Simone Camaldolese, miracle of the snow, fol. 2v, antiphonary, 1381, Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Corali 37
(photo: Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, by kind permission of MiBACT). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.
initial in a Florentine antiphonary of 1381 (Florence, Biblio-
teca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Corali 37, fol. 2v), the ground
both inside and outside the perimeter of the church is shown
speckled with snow, and the outlines of the building are in-
dicated by a white line, with spaces left for the west entrance
and side doors (Fig. 4).70 At the chapter house of SS. Maria
Maddalena e Francesco at Pistoia, in a fresco dating to about
1390, the outlines of the building are also shown, with the altar
additionally denoted by a white rectangle; a short white line in
front of it perhaps indicates a step (Fig. 5).71 In the breviary of
Cardinal Pietro Corsini, produced in northern Italy during the
last third of the fourteenth century, the outlines of the church
70. Simone Camaldolese, miracle of the snow, antiphonary, 1381,
Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Corali 37, fol. 2v.
Van Os, “Snow in Siena,” fig. 20; and Hubach, Matthias Grünewald,
der Aschaffenburger Maria-Schnee-Altar, 148.
71. Van Os, “Snow in Siena,” 81, fig. 11; Hubach, Matthias Grüne-
wald, der Aschaffenburger Maria-Schnee-Altar, 165; and Heidrun
Stein-Kecks, Der Kapitelsaal in der mittelalterlichen Klosterbaukunst:
Studien zu den Bildprogrammen (Berlin: Deutsche Kunstverlag, 2004),
295–300, 123, fig. XI.
238 E Gesta v57n2, Fall 2018
are marked out with low white walls, presumably of snow.72
The structure has the altar suggested by a rectangle, as in Pis-
toia, and an opening in the west. The level of detail here is not
just consistent with the longer version of the Sta. Maria Mag-
giore miracle, which described the site as both covered and de-
lineated by the snow, but is also reminiscent of the earlier mir-
acles that include lines or limites marked on the ground.
As noted above, the earlier accounts of divinely inspired
ground plans demonstrate an interest in drawing likely to
have inspired mental visualization, but the plans do not find
expression in concrete representations. The descriptions of
the Roman miracle of the snow are compatible with the earlier
texts, and depictions of the event suggest the kinds of mental
images these texts might have prompted. Yet the question re-
mains: why was the Sta. Maria Maggiore mosaic seemingly the
first attempt to depict such a plan? Much of the answer must
72. Aschaffenburg, Hofbibliothek, MS 15, fol. 347v. Josef Hof-
mann and Hans Thurn, Die Handschriften der Hofbibliothek Aschaf-
fenburg (Aschaffenburg: Geschichts- und Kunstverein Aschaffenburg,
1978), 45–51; and Hubach, Matthias Grünewald, der Aschaffenburger
Maria-Schnee-Altar, 150, fig. 64.

Figure 5. Antonio Vite, miracle of the snow, ca. 1390, chapter
house, SS. Maria Maddalena e Francesco, Pistoia (photo: author,
by kind permission of the Commune di Pistoia; further reproduction
prohibited). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version
of this image.
lie in Rome, with its dynamic of competition between the great
foundations and families of the city. It is probable that the ec-
clesiastical politics of the period required some more forcible
statement than the depiction of the dream itself, especially
if the mosaics are dated after the return of the Colonna in
1306. Moreover, the turn of the fourteenth century saw the de-
piction of scenes of foundation in outward-facing positions in
at least one and probably both of the city’s most important
church complexes. Carlo Bertelli and Eric Thunø have sug-
gested that the facade mosaics at Sta. Maria Maggiore respond
to the frescoes in the loggia of the Lateran Palace created by
the Colonna’s opponent Pope Boniface VIII, which Onofrio
Panvinio records as having included the construction of the
Lateran basilica (“basilicae Lateranensis exaedificatio”).73 The
73. Onofrio Panvinio, De Praecipuis Urbis Romae, Sanctioribusque
Basilicis, quas Septem Ecclesias Vulgò Vocant: Liber (Cologne: Mater-
nus Cholinus, 1584), 225. See Bertelli, “Römische Träume,” 103, 107;
and Thunø, “Dating of the Façade Mosaics,” 74–76. On the loggia cy-
cle, discussion of which has concentrated on the debated connection
with the Jubilee of 1300, see Silvia Maddalo, “Bonifacio VIII e Jacopo
frontispiece in the treatise on the Lateran by Giuliano Dati,
published in the 1490s, has convincingly been seen to draw
on the loggia cycle.74 Of the four scenes, all taken from the story
of Pope Sylvester and Constantine, two concern the establish-
ment of the Lateran. The first shows the emperor holding a
hoe, carrying on his shoulders a basket of earth, and facing
the pope who is holding what is probably a foundation stone;
the second shows the seated emperor facing the completed
church. Already the eighth-century forgery known as the “Do-
nation of Constantine” had stated that the emperor had carried
on his shoulders twelve baskets of earth from the foundations
of the church.75 After reproducing this information in the short
Latin preface, Dati repeated it in the body of the verse text,
but here stressed the sacred quality of the foundations and
the earth: “E trasse fuor se santi fundamenti / dodici chofan
della santa terra.”76
Another foundation was also important. The idea of Con-
stantine’s participation in church construction comes origi-
nally from the fifth- or sixth-century Vita Sancti Sylvestri,
where the emperor is described as digging the foundations
for St. Peter’s.77 The passage includes a description of Con-
Stefaneschi: ipotesi di lettura dell’affresco della loggia lateranense,”
Studi romani 31, no. 2 (1983): 129–50; Gary Dickson, “The Crowd at
the Feet of Pope Boniface VIII: Pilgrimage, Crusade and the First Ro-
man Jubilee (1300),” Journal of Medieval History 25, no. 4 (1999): 279–
307, esp. 296–306; Silvia Maddalo, cat. no. 116, in Bonifacio VIII e il suo
tempo: anno 1300 il primo giubileo, ed. Marina Righetti Tosti-Croce
(Milan: Electa, 2000), 170–71; and Gardner, Roman Crucible, 289–92.
74. Giuliano Dati, Tractato di Santo Ioanni Laterano (Rome: Jo-
hann Besicken, ca. 1499), n.p. Giovanna Curcio, “Giuliano Dati: ‘Co-
mincia el tractato di Santo Ioanni Laterano,’ ” in Scrittura, biblioteche
e stampa a Roma nel quattrocento; atti del secondo seminario, 6–8
maggio 1982, ed. Massimo Miglio (Vatican City: Scuola Vaticana di
Paleografia, Diplomatica e Archivistica, 1983), 271–304, figs. 26–38;
and Jack Freiberg, The Lateran in 1600: Christian Concord in Counter-
Reformation Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
104–7.
75. “Interea nosse volumus omnem populum universarum gen-
tium ac nationum per totum orbem terrarum, construxisse nos intro
palatium nostrum Lateranense eidem salvatori nostro domino deo
Iesu Christo ecclesiam a fundamentis cum baptisterio, et duodecim
nos sciatis de eius fundamentis secundum numerum duodecim
apostolorum cophinos terra onustatos propriis asportasse humeris.”
Constitutum Constantini, in Das Constitutum Constantini (Konstan-
tinische Schenkung): Text, ed. Horst Fuhrmann (Hannover: Hahn,
1968), 84.
76. “And brought out from the holy foundations twelve baskets of
holy earth.” The Latin reads, “duodecim nos de eius fundamentis
cophinos secundum numerum duodecim apostolorum terre honus-
tos propriis asportasse humeris”; Dati, Tractato di Santo Ioanni La-
terano.
77. He is said to have done the same at the Lateran, but this is not
detailed individually, which gives the church a secondary role here.
“Exuens se chlamyden et accipiens bidentem: terram primus aperuit
Holy Ground Plans in Late Medieval Italy D 239
stantine shouldering the twelve baskets of earth. In the vita,
unlike the case in the “Donation of Constantine,” the emperor
is also explicitly said to have taken a hoe and been the first to
break the ground. Constantine’s active role was represented
in the Middle Ages, notably in the early fourteenth-century
fresco cycle at San Piero a Grado in Pisa. This shows work
on the church well under way, with the emperor holding a
hoe and Sylvester making a gesture of blessing, and the scene
is followed by one depicting the consecration of the basilica.
Since the cycle is closely based on the lost frescoes in the
atrium of St. Peter’s, dated to the 1260s, it is probable that the
construction and consecration of the basilica were also shown
there.78 Although they are not among the scenes recorded by
the Vatican archivist Giacomo Grimaldi at the time of the por-
tico’s destruction, the frescoes were already incomplete at that
time, and the subject matter is highly relevant to the site.79
Another representation of the foundation can be found in a
manuscript of the Italian version of the Historiae Romanorum,
which dates from the last quarter of the thirteenth century and
was probably produced in Rome.80 Here the emperor leans on
a staff or, more likely, a hoe or spade sunk in the ground, and
he shoulders a basket of earth against the backdrop of con-
struction work on a half-finished building. The scene is labeled
as the building of the church of SS. Peter and Paul and ac-
ad fundamentum basilicae construendum. Dehinc in numero duo-
decim apostolorum duodecim cophinos plenos suis humeris super-
positos baiulauit de eodem loco: ubi fundamentum basilicae apostolis
debuerat fundare. . . . Altera vero die similiter intra palatium suum
lateranensem basilicae fabricam coepit.” Vita Sancti Sylvestri Papae
et Confessoris, in Sanctuarium seu Vitae Sanctorum: Novam Hanc
Editionem Curaverunt Duo Monachi Solesmenses, ed. Boninus Mom-
britius (Paris: Fontemoing, 1910), 2:513.
78. On the frescoes in San Piero a Grado and their relationship with
those in the portico of St. Peter’s, see Jens T. Wollesen, Die Fresken von
San Piero a Grado bei Pisa (Bad Oeynhausen: Theine, 1977), esp. 94–
98, 101–16; Irene Hueck, “Der Maler der Apostelszenen im Atrium
von Alt-St. Peter,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in
Florenz 14, no. 2 (1969–70): 115–44, at 132; and Pietro D’Achiardi,
“Gli affreschi di S. Piero a Grado presso Pisa e quelli già esistenti nel
portico della basilica Vaticana,” in Atti del Congresso internazionale
di scienze storiche (Roma, 1–9 aprile 1903), VII: atti della sezione IV,
storia dell’arte (Rome: R. Accademia dei Lincei, 1905), 193–285, esp.
233–35, 241, fig. 37. On the St. Peter’s cycle, see also Alessandro
Tomei, “Le immagini di Pietro e Paolo dal ciclo apostolico del por-
tico vaticano,” in Fragmenta picta: affreschi e mosaici staccati del Me-
dioevo romano; Roma, Castel Sant’Angelo, 15 dicembre 1989–18 feb-
braio 1990, ed. Maria Andaloro et al. (Rome: Argos, 1989), 141–46.
79. The scenes then remaining are depicted and described in Vat-
ican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (hereafter BAV), MS Barb.
lat. 2733, pt. 1, fols. 135r–143v.
80. Tilo Brandis and Otto Pächt, Historiae Romanorum: Codex 151
in scrin. der Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg (Frankfurt
a.M.: Propyläen, 1974), 1: fol. 121r, 2:27–28, 180–81.
240 E Gesta v57n2, Fall 2018
companies a description of Constantine’s actions found only
in this manuscript. There was probably some cross-fertilization
between depictions of the foundations of St. Peter’s and the
Lateran. Indeed, the description and representation of Con-
stantine with a hoe, not mentioned in texts about the Lateran,
may well have contributed to the depiction of the emperor in
Dati’s frontispiece and its sources.
It seems likely, then, that images of the foundation of the
Lateran basilica did provide a precedent for the facade mosaics
at Sta. Maria Maggiore, especially if the emperor was shown
holding a hoe, like the pope, and shouldering a basket of earth
from the foundations. If the foundation of St. Peter’s was de-
picted in the portico there, this would have been another pow-
erful point of reference. Several aspects of the Sta. Maria Mag-
giore mosaics may thus allude to the Petrine basilica, since
Catherine Harding has suggested that the Deesis imagery in
the upper register draws on the facade mosaic at St. Peter’s.81
Moreover, the Constantinian traditions are likely to have con-
tributed not only to the visualization of the miracle of the
snow but also to the pope’s role in that legend in the first place.
For all the involvement of the patrician John and his wife,
Liberius’s commencement of the opening of the foundations
provided a founder figure to set against that of Constantine,
while the miraculous Marian origins of the plan and divine
completion of the foundations trumped the circumstances
at the Lateran and St. Peter’s. A variant of the legend found
in the thirteenth-century Cantigas de Santa María, which as-
cribes the foundation of Sta. Maria Maggiore to the pope
and Constantine, perhaps reflects this Roman background of
Constantinian foundations as well as the preoccupations of
King Alfonso the Wise (r. 1252–84).82 It should be noted,
though, that the scenes at the Lateran and potentially at St. Pe-
ter’s, as reflected in the Dati frontispiece and the Pisa frescoes,
were essentially conventional scenes of construction. They did
not show the form of the foundations or engage in any way
with the ground plan of the church-to-be. In this respect, they
do not so much constitute visual models for emulation at
Sta. Maria Maggiore as provide a stimulus for artistic innova-
tion there.
Another aspect of the competition among the three main
basilicas of the city that may have acted in a similar way was
the possession of acheiropoieta. The Sancta Sanctorum at the
Lateran housed the famous icon of Christ, which was claimed
in the Descriptio lateranensis ecclesiae to have been started by
St. Luke and finished by God through an angel; it played a cen-
81. Harding, “Images of Authority, Identity, Power,” 23.
82. Mario Pelaez, “La leggenda della Madonna della Neve e la
‘Cantiga de Santa Maria,’ n. CCCIX di Alfonso el Sabio,” Studi
romani 1 (1953): 395–405.
tral role in the Assumption Day procession from the Lateran
to Sta. Maria Maggiore.83 Moreover, the bust of Christ in the
apse mosaic of the Lateran basilica was thought, since at least
the early thirteenth century, to have appeared miraculously
as Pope Sylvester (r. 314–35) was dedicating the church, and
it had been preserved in the new mosaic executed under Nich-
olas IV.84 The Vatican had the Veronica, the impression of
Christ’s face on cloth, veneration of which was growing in
the thirteenth century after the face miraculously turned up-
side down in 1216.85 At Sta. Maria Maggiore the ancient icon
of the Virgin, which met the Lateran icon of Christ at the end
of the Assumption procession, was said to have been painted
by St. Luke.86 The Marian ground plan can be understood as
complementing this icon of Mary by providing the basilica
with an image miraculously created by the Virgin herself, while
the divinely executed foundations constitute an imprint with
Christological origins. Because both had been made on the
ground, they needed to be reproduced in a further image in or-
der to be made visible. That representation, in the facade mo-
saics, enhanced the standing of the plan by including Christ in
the roundel from which the snow falls, thus claiming not only
his involvement in the miracle more generally but also his co-
authorship of the image (Fig. 1a). This was followed by other
depictions in the basilica, notably Masolino’s altarpiece and
83. Studies include Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History
of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), 64–68; Gerhard Wolf, “Christ in
His Beauty and Pain, Concepts of Body and Image in an Age of Tran-
sition (Late Middle Ages and Renaissance),” in The Art of Interpret-
ing, ed. Susan C. Scott (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univer-
sity Press, 1995), 165–97; Herbert L. Kessler and Johanna Zacharias,
Rome 1300: On the Path of the Pilgrim (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2000), chaps. 2–5; Enrico Parlato, “Le icone in processione,” in
Arte e iconografia a Roma da Costantino a Cola di Rienzo: una pre-
messa, ed. Maria Andaloro and Serena Romano (Milan: Jaca Book,
2000), 69–92; and Kirstin Noreen, “Revealing the Sacred: The Icon
of Christ in the Sancta Sanctorum, Rome,” Word & Image 22, no. 3
(2006): 228–37.
84. James M. Powell, “Honorius III’s Sermo in Dedicatione Eccle-
siae Lateranensis and the Historical-Liturgical Traditions of the La-
teran,” Archivum Historiae Pontificiae 21 (1983): 195–209, esp. 201–
2; and Gardner, Roman Crucible, 257.
85. Wolf, “Christ in His Beauty and Pain”; and idem, “La Vero-
nica e la tradizione romana di icone,” in Il ritratto e la memoria:
materiali 2, ed. Augusto Gentili, Philippe Morel, and Claudia Cieri
Via (Rome: Bulzoni, 1993), 9–35.
86. William Tronzo, “Apse Decoration, the Liturgy and the Per-
ception of Art in Medieval Rome: S. Maria in Trastevere and S. Ma-
ria Maggiore,” in Italian Church Decoration of the Middle Ages and
Early Renaissance: Functions, Forms and Regional Traditions; Ten
Contributions to a Colloquium Held at the Villa Spelman, Florence,
ed. Tronzo (Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1989), 167–93; Wolf, Salus populi
Romani, 98, 141; Belting, Likeness and Presence, 68–72; and Kessler
and Zacharias, Rome 1300, 136.
Mino da Fiesole’s relief, in which Christ acts on his mother’s
behalf.
Another context that has been suggested for the formation
and visualization of the legend is the liturgy. Victor Saxer, for
example, proposed that the miracle story was developed after
the reconsecration of the high altar by Pope Clement III
(r. 1187–91) on the feast of the dedication of the church, prob-
ably in 1190.87 Hartmut Grisar suggested that the legend of the
snow might have arisen as an explanation for a far older cus-
tom of spreading flowers on feast days.88 Conversely, Jens
Wollesen proposed that the festum nivis included some kind
of liturgical reenactment of the event and that visualization
through performance encouraged the lasting rendition in mo-
saic.89 It is also possible, however, that the inclusion of the
scene with the snowy plan had more general liturgical under-
pinnings connected to ecclesiastical involvement in the build-
ing process.
The Liturgy of Building Sites
The liturgical establishment of sacred space included ephem-
eral markings and processions that had a strong visual dimen-
sion in their own right in addition to being recorded in more
lasting media. While this aspect of church consecration has
been the focus of considerable scholarly interest, liturgical in-
volvement in building sites has received less attention. This
section therefore begins by outlining the ways in which eccle-
siastical ritual engaged with the site of a church building, fo-
cusing on the treatment of the ground. I propose that early
medieval liturgical practices already informed contemporary
accounts of miraculous plans, while a particular context for
the Sta. Maria Maggiore legend and its visualization is found
in the ecclesiastical elaboration of foundation ritual already
evident in the twelfth century and notable in the thirteenth.
This included circling and asperging the foundations, or the
place marked out for them, as well as laying the first stone. Not
only did the pope responsible for the late thirteenth-century
expansion of Sta. Maria Maggiore take part in the ritual else-
where but the papal role in the foundation legend was also un-
derstood in these terms.
87. Saxer (“La basilica dalla fine dell’Antichità al Medioevo,” 112)
cites a bull of Pope Gregory IX published in Ferri, “Le carte del-
l’archivio Liberiano,” 32–33, but no explicit reference is made there
to a rededication of the high altar. The dedication is, however, men-
tioned in a bull by Honorius III: see Pressutti, Regesta Honorii Papae
III, 2:88, no. 4092.
88. H. Grisar, Analecta romana: dissertazioni, testi, monumenti
dell’arte riguardanti principalmente la storia di Roma e dei Papi
nel Medio Evo (Rome: Desclée Lefebvre, 1899), 1:585–86.
89. Wollesen, Pictures and Reality, 120, 133.
Holy Ground Plans in Late Medieval Italy D 241
 By the early Middle Ages, a church building was conse-
crated or rendered fit for worship by a ritual process that in-
volved the cementing of relics in the altar as well as such ele-
ments as processions around the walls and the marking of
chrism on the walls and a cross of ashes on the floor, which
was inscribed with the Greek and Latin alphabets.90 Although
the ceremony might take place before the building was com-
pleted if a community seized the opportunity to involve a
high-status cleric, theoretically it took place when much of
the church had already been constructed. There are examples
of miraculous intervention in the consecration ceremony by
Christ, angels, or saints, in which proof of the miracle was pro-
vided by specific visible or physical elements of the ceremony:
at Lagrasse, the consecrated water, which later worked its own
miracles;91 at Saint-Denis, the consecration crosses marked on
the wall, which could not be removed;92 and at Westminster
Abbey, not only the signs of the chrism and the remains of
the candles on the walls but also the letters on the pavement
from the alphabet cross.93 Amy Remensnyder has suggested
that the circumambulations in church foundation legends
90. There is a large literature on the medieval consecration rite. Re-
cent studies include Ralf M. W. Stammberger and Claudia Sticher
with Annekatrin Warnke, eds., “Das Haus Gottes, das seid ihr selbst”:
mittelalterliches und barockes Kirchenverständnis im Spiegel der
Kirchweihe (Berlin: Akademie, 2006); Didier Méhu, ed., Mises en
scène et mémoires de la consécration de l’église dans l’Occident mé-
diéval (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007); Louis I. Hamilton, A Sacred City:
Consecrating Churches and Reforming Society in Eleventh-Century It-
aly (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); Helen Gittos,
Liturgy, Architecture and Sacred Places in Anglo-Saxon England (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 212–56; and Mette Birkedal
Bruun and Louis I. Hamilton, “Rites for Dedicating Churches,” in
Understanding Medieval Liturgy: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Helen
Gittos and Sarah Hamilton (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016), 177–204.
91. Gesta Karoli Magni ad Carcassonam et Narbonam, ed. F. E.
Schneegans (Halle: Niemeyer, 1898), 230, 232, 234, 236; discussed
in Amy G. Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past: Monastic Foun-
dation Legends in Medieval Southern France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1995), 81.
92. The text is edited in Charles J. Liebman Jr., “La consécration
légendaire de la basilique de Saint-Denis,” Le Moyen Âge 45 (1935):
252–64, at 262. For the dating, see L. Levillain, “Études sur l’abbaye
de Saint-Denis à l’époque mérovingienne, IV: les documents d’his-
toire économique (suite),” Bibliothèque de l’École de chartes 91 (1930):
5–65, at 8.
93. Sulcard, Prologus de construccione Westmonasterii, in Bern-
hard W. Scholz, “Sulcard of Westminster: ‘Prologus de Construccione
Westmonasterii,’ ” Traditio 20 (1964): 59–91, at 84–85. The alphabet
cross is mentioned in Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’s Life of St. Mellitus,
an extract of which is reproduced in John Flete, The History of West-
minster Abbey, ed. J. A. Robinson (Cambridge: University Press, 1909),
38–40, at 40; and Paul Binski, “The Cosmati at Westminster and
the English Court Style,” Art Bulletin 72, no. 1 (1990): 6–34, at 30.
All three examples are discussed in Matthias M. Tischler, Die Christus-
242 E Gesta v57n2, Fall 2018
such as that of Mont-Saint-Michel reflect those of the cere-
mony for dedicating a church.94 It could also be argued that
the animal, angelic, and saintly imprints reflect the impressing
of letters in the cross of ashes, part of the ceremony from at
least the early ninth century.95 However, it may be that an in-
terest in sanctifying the site of a church earlier in the construc-
tion process is also involved.
A separate sanctification process concerned the establish-
ment of the site of a new church.96 A canon on the building
of a church, “Nemo aecclesiam aedificate,” which originates
in Justinian’s Novellae, starts by stipulating that no one should
build a church before the bishop of the city has gone to the site
and publicly fixed a cross on the spot. The canon displays an
anxiety that churches were being constructed with insufficient
funds to keep them in good repair and adequately provi-
sioned.97 It was known in the West through a Latin epitome
and was incorporated into the De ordine ecclesiastico and
the legal collection of Benedictus Levita, before being included
in the tenth-century Romano-Germanic Pontifical.98 Here the
und Engelweihe im Mittelalter: Texte, Bilder und Studien zu einem
ekklesiologischen Erzählmotiv (Berlin: Akademie, 2005), 33–34, 42–
47, 62–64.
94. Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past, 58.
95. Klaus Schreiner, “Abecedarium: die Symbolik des Alphabets
in der Liturgie der mittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Kirch-
weihe,” in Stammberger, Sticher, and Warnke, “Das Haus Gottes,”
143–87; and Lucy Donkin, “Making an Impression: Consecration
and the Creation of Architectural Memory,” in Romanesque and
the Past: Retrospection in the Art and Architecture of Romanesque
Europe, ed. John McNeill and Richard Plant (Leeds: Maney for the
British Archaeological Association, 2013), 37–48.
96. Dominique Iogna-Prat, “Aux fondements de l’Église:
naissance et développements du rituel de pose de la première pierre
dans l’Occident latin (v. 960–v. 1300),” in Stammberger, Sticher,
and Warnke, “Das Haus Gottes,” 87–111; and idem, “The Consecra-
tion of Church Space,” in Medieval Christianity in Practice, ed. Miri
Rubin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 95–99. Al-
though pre-Christian foundation rituals existed, the present discus-
sion is confined to outlining key Christian traditions in the Latin
West. Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Ur-
ban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1976), still provides a useful overview of the
pre-Christian material.
97. Novella 67. Rudolf Schoell and Wilhelm Kroll, eds., Corpus
Iuris Civilis, vol. 3, Novellae, 6th ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1954),
344–47; and Iogna-Prat, “Aux fondements de l’Église,” 101.
98. Pontificale Romano-Germanicum 36, in Le pontifical romano-
germanique du dixième siècle, vol. 1, Le texte, ed. Cyrille Vogel and
Reinhard Elze (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1963),
122–23. The composition of the Romano-Germanic Pontifical has
traditionally been ascribed to the mid-tenth century. On the com-
plexities of dating the work, see Henry Parkes, “Questioning the
Authority of Vogel and Elze’s Pontifical romano-germanique,” in
Gittos and Hamilton, Understanding Medieval Liturgy, 75–101,
which speaks instead (100) of a “textual tradition [that] rose to prom-
cross is said to be placed in the spot where the altar would be
situated. After this, the bishop sprinkles the site with holy
water, to the accompaniment of an antiphon that asks Christ
to put a sign of salvation in that place (“Signum salutis pone
domine, Iesu Christe, in loco illo”). A prayer is then said for
the consecration of the place, which asks God to purify and
protect it. An indication that such rites were carried out in
practice can be found in an account of Pope Urban II (r. 1088–
99) ordering the building of a church at Tarascon in 1095, in
which he sprinkled the site with consecrated water and erected
a cross.99
Already in this relatively simple form, connections can be
made with the miraculous ground plans and designations of
the sites of churches. Notably, the account of the foundation
of St. Zacharias in the Liber pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis
has been seen to reflect the passage in Justinian’s Novellae.100
Since the mid-ninth-century text includes reference to the
likeness of a cross occupying the place where the altar is to
be situated, it might indicate that this practice predates the
Romano-Germanic Pontifical. Arguably, we can also see some
reflection of the practice stipulated by the canon in the Life of
St. Agile, in which not only is the cruciform plan of the church
marked out on the ground but a cross-shaped cloud is also seen
in the sky. More generally, in establishing the site as divinely
chosen, the miraculous plans mirror and replace this ecclesias-
tical ceremony of approval and sanctification, providing the li-
cense for work to begin on the foundations. Insofar as they re-
fer to practices outside the logic of the narrative, they could
thus be seen as representing a stage in the process of sancti-
fication as well as construction. Although the prayer in the
Romano-Germanic Pontifical ends with the church that will
inence in late tenth- or early eleventh-century Germany.” On the
transmission of the canon, see Karl Josef Benz, “Ecclesiae pura
simplicitas: zu Geschichte und Deutung des Ritus der Grundstein-
legung im Hohen Mittelalter,” Archiv für mittelrheinische Kirchenge-
schichte 32 (1980): 9–25, at 13–14.
99. Benjamin E. C. Guérard, ed., Cartulaire de l’Abbaye de Saint-
Victor de Marseille (Paris: Lahure, 1857), 1:242–44, at 243, no. 220;
and Élisabeth Zadora-Rio, “Lieux d’inhumation et espaces consacrés:
le voyage du pape Urbain II en France (août 1095–août 1096),” in
Lieux sacrés, lieux de culte, sanctuaires: approches terminologiques,
méthodologiques, historiques et monographiques, ed. André Vauchez
(Rome: École Française de Rome, 2000), 197–213, at 204–6. I am
grateful to Didier Méhu for this reference.
100. Friedrich Wilhelm Deichmann, Ravenna: Hauptstadt des
spätantiken Abendlandes, vol. 2, Kommentar, pt. 2 (Stuttgart: Steiner,
1976), 20, 375; followed by Jean-Charles Picard, “Les maîtres d’oeuvre
de l’architecture ravennate au Haut Moyen Âge,” in Artistes, artisans
et production artistique au Moyen Âge: Colloque international, Centre
national de la recherche scientifique, Université de Rennes II, Haute-
Bretagne, 2–6 mai 1983, ed. Xavier Barral i Altet (Paris: Picard, 1987),
2:39–43, at 39.
rise up (“resurgat”), the ritual as a whole is more concerned
with the two-dimensional area the building will occupy than
with its three-dimensional form.
The canon “Nemo aecclesiam aedificat” is not found in Ro-
man pontificals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but the
latter do engage with the construction process through two
short blessings, one of the “first stone” and one of “a stone
for the building of a church.”101 This appears to be a rather late
and limited reflection of the popular ceremony of laying one
or more foundation stones, attested from the eleventh century
onward, in which laypeople could play a prominent role.102
Scholars have noted that the laying of the first stone represents
a moment different from the designation of the site antici-
pated in the earlier legal and liturgical sources, one that fo-
cuses instead on the beginning of the building works.103 The
extent to which this involved or facilitated a visualization of
the form of the church-to-be has not been discussed, however.
Certainly it is in the context of the laying of the first stone that
we first find liturgical attention paid to the foundations of a
church. In the mid-twelfth century John Beleth briefly noted
the asperging of the foundations and placing of the first stone
in his De ecclesiasticis officiis.104 A fuller passage, which spec-
ifies that the place of the foundations should be asperged to
rid it of demons and gives an indication of readings, can be
found in the late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century Mitrale of
Sicardus of Cremona, suggesting that the ceremony was becom-
ing codified, moving from paraliturgical to liturgy proper.105
The two elements seem first to have been brought together
in a liturgical book in the pontifical of William Durandus, a
101. “Benedictio lapidis primarii que non est in ordinario papali”
and “Benedictio lapidis pro ecclesia edificanda.” M. Andrieu, Le
pontifical romain au Moyen-Âge, vol. 2, Le pontifical de la Curie ro-
maine au XIIIe siècle (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,
1940), 420–21.
102. Iogna-Prat, “Consecration of Church Space,” 97–98.
103. For discussions of the practice, see Benz, “Ecclesiae pura
simplicitas”; Binding, Linscheid-Burdich, and Wippermann, Planen
und Bauen, 169–78; Iogna-Prat, “Aux fondements de l’Église”; and
Nick Holder, “Medieval Foundation Stones and Foundation Cere-
monies,” in Memory and Commemoration in Medieval England: Pro-
ceedings of the 2008 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Caroline M. Barron
and Clive Burgess (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2010), 6–23.
104. “Parato loco fundamenti primo episcopus debet ibi aspergere
aquam benedictam et primum lapidem cruce inpressa in fundamento
ponere.” John Beleth, Summa de ecclesiasticis officiis, in CCCM 41A,
ed. H. Douteil (Turnhout: Brepols, 1976), 2:6–7.
105. “Preparatum locum fundamenti aqua benedicta pontifex ab
abigendas demonum fantasias . . . aspergat et lapidem, cruce impressa
in fundamento, ponat.” Sicardus of Cremona, Mitrale 1.2, in Mitralis
de officiis, CCCM 228, ed. G. Sarbak and L. Weinrich (Turnhout:
Brepols, 2008), 8–9; xii–xvii for the dating of the work to the end of
the twelfth and first years of the thirteenth century.
Holy Ground Plans in Late Medieval Italy D 243
compilation made in the 1290s that became widely popular in
the following century. “On the blessing and laying of the first
stone in the foundations of a church” comes at the beginning
of the second book. Where the Romano-Germanic Pontifical
focuses on the site of the altar, this one gives a greater sense of
the form of the church, stating that “no one should build a
church before the place and atrium are marked out [desig-
nentur] by the judgment of the bishop,” reflecting an expan-
sion of the canon already present in the work of Burchard
of Worms (d. 1025).106 It goes on to stipulate that the cross
should be erected on the site of the altar and, on the next
day, the first stone laid in the foundations. After this “the
bishop sprinkles holy water on all the foundations if they
are open or, if they are not yet open, he circles and asperges
all the places marked out [designata] for the foundations of
the church.”107 Elements of the prayers, antiphons, and psalms
recited en route, including Psalm 87—“His foundation is in
the holy mountains”—will later be repeated in the dedication
ceremony itself. Indeed, the whole circling procession makes it
seem as though the rituals of church consecration have been
anticipated so as to apply to the building site. This procedure
is also touched on in Durandus’s Rationale divinorum offi-
ciorum.108 It is difficult to know what exactly is meant by “loca
ad fundamenta . . . designata.” It could simply mean the places
appointed for the foundations, or it could refer to places visi-
bly marked on the ground, perhaps points between which
ropes might be stretched or lines drawn as discussed above.
At the same time, whatever the visibility of these places, and
thus of the extent of the foundations, the processional circuit
itself acted as an even more ephemeral marking or visualiza-
tion. Of course, even with the foundations already opened,
we should not imagine that they necessarily encompassed an
entire church building. Nevertheless, given the stage at which
the ceremony takes place, the form of the church is likely to
106. “Nemo ecclesiam edificet priusquam episcopi iudicio locus et
atrium designentur.” Pontificale G. Durandi 2.1.1, ed. M. Andrieu, Le
pontifical romain au Moyen-Âge, vol. 3, Le pontifical de Guillaume
Durand (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1940), 451–
55, at 451. Burchard of Worms, Decretum 3.6, in Migne, PL 140
(1853): col. 675; and Iogna-Prat, “Aux fondements de l’Église,” 101,
110.
107. “Deinde pontifex spargit aquam benedictam per omnia
fundamenta si sunt aperta, vel, si non sunt aperta, circuit aspergendo
universa loca ad fundamenta ecclesie designata.” Pontificale G. Du-
randi 2.1.14, in Andrieu, Le pontifical de Guillaume Durand, 454.
108. “Est autem ecclesia sic edificanda: parato namque fundamenti
loco iuxta illud: ‘Bene fundata est domus Domini super firmam petram,’
debet episcopus uel sacerdos de eius licentia, ibi aquam aspergere
benedictam ad abigendas inde demonum fantasias, et primarium
lapidem, cui impressa sit crux, in fundamento ponere.” Durandus,
Rationale divinorum officiorum 1.1.7, in Davril and Thibodeau, Guil-
lelmi Duranti Rationale divinorum officiorum, 1:14.
244 E Gesta v57n2, Fall 2018
have been more evident, and the liturgy displays a greater inter-
est in it, than was possible in the initial marking of the site pre-
scribed in the Romano-Germanic Pontifical.
Although the growing complexity and codification of these
rituals is indicative of increasing ecclesiastical interest, pre-
scriptive material always raises the question of its observance
in practice. It is therefore important to note that there is evi-
dence beyond the spheres of liturgy and liturgical commen-
tary to indicate that the ceremony was carried out in Italy to-
ward the end of the thirteenth century. For example, in 1275
the bishop of Fiesole granted permission for the construction
of a new church in Montevarchi, blessed the first stone, and
sent it to be laid in the foundations.109 Similarly, a decree
passed by the archbishop of Milan in 1283 apparently in-
structed an archpriest to go in his name to a church under
construction in order to place the first stone and designate
the limits of the cemetery with his pastoral staff.110 In both
cases bishops intervened at a distance in what seem likely to
have been fairly minor projects. However, higher-status build-
ings could attract more direct involvement. In 1290 Pope Nich-
olas IV himself, along with cardinals and other priests, went
down into the foundations of Orvieto Cathedral and laid the
first stone.111
Increased ecclesiastical interest in foundation rituals has
to be seen in conjunction with lay involvement. Dominique
Iogna-Prat has noted that in neither the Roman pontifical of
the thirteenth century nor the far fuller account by Durandus
109. Paolo Pirillo, “Montevarchi: nascita, sviluppo e rifondazione
di un centro del Valdarno,” in Lontano dalle città: il Valdarno di
sopra nei secoli XII–XIII; atti del Convegno di Montevarchi-Figline
Valdarno (9–11 novembre 2001), ed. Giuliano Pinto and Pirillo
(Rome: Viella, 2005), 343–77, at 372–73, doc. 1.
110. The document, later lost, was described by Giorgio Giulini,
ed., Memorie spettanti alla storia, al governo ed alla descrizione della
città, e della campagna di Milano ne’ secoli bassi (Milan: Bianchi,
1760), 8:349, 684; and E. Lattes, ed., Repertorio diplomatico visconteo:
documenti dal 1263 al 1402, raccolti e pubblicati in forma di regesto
dalla Società storica lombarda (Milan: Hoepli, 1911), 1:3.
111. “Et die XV octubris, incepta sunt fundamenta Sancte Marie
nove de Urbeveteri, que fuerunt profunda terribiliter. Die quintade-
cima novembris, dictus dominus Nicolaus papa quartus cum cardi-
nalibus et aliis prelatis, sollempniter parati, presente populo, viris et
mulieribus, descenderunt ad fundamenta dicte ecclesie: et dominus
papa posuit primum lapidem.” Annales Urbevetani, in Ephemerides
urbevetanae: dal codice Vaticano urbinate 1745, Rerum Italicarum
Scriptores, n.s., 15/5, ed. Luigi Fumi (Città di Castello: Lapi, 1903),
1:125–98, at 162. I am grateful to Julian Gardner for this reference.
See also Julian Gardner, “The Façade of the Duomo at Orvieto,” in
De l’art comme mystagogie: iconographie du Jugement dernier et des
fins dernières à l’époque gothique; actes du Colloque de la Fondation
Hardt tenu à Genève du 13 au 16 février 1994, ed. Yves Christe (Poi-
tiers: Université de Poitiers, CNRS, Centre d’Études Supérieurs de
Civilisation Médiévale, 1996), 199–209.
is there any mention of lay founders or builders, suggesting
that the laity were being written out of the rite.112 Yet the
silence of the liturgical sources in this respect does not imply
that lay interest or participation in foundation rituals dimin-
ished. Other accounts, verbal and visual, indicate that promi-
nent members of the laity continued to take part in church
foundation ceremonies, suggesting that the promotion of ec-
clesiastical authority in this sphere did not go uncontested.113
During the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, there developed
a ritual engagement with the foundation of secular structures,
partly inspired by classical precedents, which included the dep-
osition of coins and medals.114 Already in the late thirteenth
century, the Carrara family of Padua placed their own coins
in the foundations of fortifications and a church.115 While the
nature of these ceremonies is beyond the scope of the present
article, their very existence provided a context within which
there was a need to distinguish rituals for sacred buildings.
It is possible, therefore, that the impetus toward the visual-
ization of the Roman miracle of the snow was partly informed
by growing ecclesiastical desire for control over sanctifying
rituals in church building sites, which included the circling
and asperging of the foundations as well as the laying of the
first stone. Through the double miracle of the snowy ground
plan and the divinely opened foundations, the Sta. Maria
Maggiore legend brings together the two moments of liturgi-
cal involvement in a site—the initial designation and the bless-
ing of the foundations—found in the Romano-Germanic Pon-
tifical and the works of Beleth and Sicardus, later assigned by
Durandus to subsequent days. It is also worth noting that
some twelfth-century accounts of the laying of the foundation
stone explicitly present the lay founder as a new Constantine,
carrying twelve baskets of stones for the foundations much as
the emperor had carried away twelve baskets of earth.116 The
minimization of the role of the lay founder in the later medi-
eval liturgical sources means that the substitution of pope for
emperor at Sta. Maria Maggiore corresponds not only to local
competition with the Lateran but also to a wider shift in the
112. Iogna-Prat, “Aux fondements de l’Église,” 109–11; and idem,
“Consecration of Church Space,” 98–99.
113. For the involvement of the Visconti in the foundation of the
Certosa near Pavia, for example, see Berthold Hub, “Founding an
Ideal City in Filarete’s Libro Architettonico (c. 1460),” in Founda-
tion, Dedication and Consecration in Early Modern Europe, ed.
Maarten Delbeke and Minou Schraven (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 17–
57, at 28–30.
114. Ibid.; and Minou Schraven, “Out of Sight, Yet Still in Place:
On the Use of Italian Renaissance Portrait Medals as Building De-
posits,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 55–56 (2009): 182–93.
115. Schraven, “Out of Sight,” 190–91.
116. Binding, Linscheid-Burdich, and Wippermann, Planen und
Bauen, 174; and Benz, “Ecclesiae pura simplicitas,” 21–24.
Church’s presentation of construction. Later building mira-
cles attest to continued interest in foundation liturgy. Indeed,
an early fifteenth-century manuscript describes the Virgin
appearing in visions to indicate the site of a Lady Chapel at
Thetford (Norfolk), built in the first half of the thirteenth
century, temporarily marking with a jeweled cross the place
where the foundation stone should be placed.117
The reception of the Roman miracle of the snow certainly
suggests that it was understood in terms of ritual ecclesiastical
involvement in building sites. In the German-language ver-
sion of the Mirabilia Romae vel potius Historia et descriptio
urbis Romae, found in printed books dating from the 1470s
on, the pope’s role would be seen explicitly in relation to the
ceremony of laying the foundation stone: “Da kam der pabst
mit den cardinalen vnd mas die weit vnd lenge vnd leget da
den ersten stein.”118 It is not clear whether the pope’s act of
measurement was seen to belong to that ritual or to respond
instead to the miraculous plan.119 In the illustration of the mir-
acle in the Breviary of Mary of Savoy, produced in Milan about
1430 (Chambéry, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 4, fol. 556v),
construction is already under way, but the fact that one of
the builders conspicuously holds a single stone to which the
pope gestures may also allude to the blessing of the foundation
stone (Fig. 6).120 An early sixteenth-century booklet of the
Hystoria de festo nivis compiled by Canon Heinrich Reitz-
mann shows the pope breaking the ground for the foundations
with the outlines of the church marked out with ropes and
pegs, perhaps a visualization of the “loca ad fundamenta . . .
designata.”121
However, there is a complication in pointing to the blessing
of the foundations as a stimulus to representation. As dis-
cussed in the following section, this too is a textual tradition
that remains without illustration for some time. Any influence
on the visualization of the miraculous ground plan and foun-
117. The account is found in the early fifteenth-century Cam-
bridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 329, pp. 206–9. It is attributed
to John Brame in Francis Blomefield, An Essay towards a Topo-
graphical History of the County of Norfolk, 2nd ed. (London: Miller,
1805), 2:117–18; and discussed in Binski, Gothic Wonder, 196.
118. Nine Robijntje Miedema, Rompilgerführer in Spätmittelal-
ter und früher Neuzeit: die “Indulgentiae ecclesiarum urbis Romae”
(deutsch/niederländisch); Edition und Kommentar (Tübingen: Nie-
meyer, 2003), 254; text also in Hubach, Matthias Grünewald, der
Aschaffenburger Maria-Schnee-Altar, 283–84.
119. A link between consecration and measurement is discussed
in Binski, Gothic Wonder, 13.
120. Chambéry, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 4, fol. 556v. Caro-
line Heid-Guillaume and Anne Ritz, Manuscrits médiévaux de
Chambéry: textes et enluminures (Paris: CNRS, 1998), 30–43, fig. 52.
121. Heinrich Reitzmann, Hystoria de festo nivis gloriosissime dei
genitricis et virginis Marie . . . (Basel: Pforztheim, 1515).
Holy Ground Plans in Late Medieval Italy D 245

Figure 6. Miracle of the snow, fol. 556v, Breviary of Mary of
Savoy, ca. 1430, Chambéry, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 4 (photo:
by kind permission of the Bibliothèque municipale, Médiathèque
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Chambéry). See the electronic edition of
Gesta for a color version of this image.
dations must thus come from the ceremony itself, rather than
from representations of it. The ritual provides a closer visual
model than the works of art that can be seen to have encour-
aged the depiction of the legend in the mosaics: the foundation
scenes and acheiropoieta. This valorizes the marks on the sur-
face of the ground as images in their own right and, more
broadly, suggests a way that the visual impact of rituals, and
the ephemeral markings these might involve, could inform
the sphere of concrete image-making. At the same time, the
close relationship between the liturgical and the legendary is
confirmed by the visual evidence of illuminated pontificals.
When the blessing of the foundations does come to be depicted
in liturgical books, the format seems to be affected by the tra-
ditions of representing the miraculous plan of Sta. Maria Mag-
giore.
Illustrated Pontificals
This final section traces the representation of foundation
rituals in pontificals, with particular attention to the treatment
of the foundations and the form of the church-to-be. It begins
by discussing illustrations of the blessing of the first stone in
pontificals associated with the Roman Curia, further evidence
for interest in the rite around the time of the creation of the
Sta. Maria Maggiore mosaics. It then surveys images in Du-
randus pontificals and others containing longer treatments
of the ceremony. While these pay more attention to the foun-
246 E Gesta v57n2, Fall 2018
dations, they display considerable variety in their approach. It
is therefore significant that three Italian manuscript pontifi-
cals of different types include schematic ground plans, all of
which find parallels in Italian depictions of the miracle of
the snow. These confirm that a certain commonality was rec-
ognized between ground plans sanctioned by the Church and
those provided miraculously. The manuscript pontificals them-
selves formed a precedent for the inclusion of woodcuts show-
ing the plan and foundations of a new church in sixteenth-
century printed pontificals, which enjoyed a wide circulation
throughout Europe.
The ceremony of the blessing of the foundation stone and
foundations is not always illustrated when miniatures or his-
toriated initials are included in a pontifical containing the rit-
ual.122 However, there was already interest shown in illustrat-
ing the blessing of the first stone in some pontificals of the
Roman Curia of the thirteenth century, despite their short ver-
bal treatment of the rite. Pontificals of this kind have been di-
vided into two groups: an initial recension probably assembled
under Innocent III (r. 1198–1216) and a longer one produced
in the mid-thirteenth century. Éric Palazzo has shown that
pontificals containing the longer recension of the text were
the first to contain a lengthy cycle of images illustrating the
different rituals; subsequently, similar cycles were also pro-
vided in pontificals with the shorter recension.123 In a late
thirteenth-century example that combines elements of the
two types, possibly used at the Lateran, both blessings are pro-
vided with historiated initials (BAV, MS Vat. lat. 1155, fol. 83r;
Fig. 7).124 The first shows the bishop blessing a round stone
held by another cleric, while the second depicts him leaning
forward slightly to bless the ground at his feet, which reveals
just a suggestion of an opening. This might reflect a desire
to indicate the stone in situ, but it also implies that even here
the foundations themselves were significant. It is notable,
therefore, that the pontifical is sometimes dated to the pon-
tificate of Nicholas IV, under whom the reconstruction of
Sta. Maria Maggiore was started and who is mentioned above
122. On illustrated pontificals, see Franz Niehoff, “Pontifikale,” in
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana: Liturgie und Andacht im Mittelalter,
ed. Joachim M. Plotzek and Ulrike Surmann (Stuttgart: Belser, 1992),
40–43; and Éric Palazzo, L’évêque et son image: l’illustration du pon-
tifical au Moyen Âge (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999). As the starting point
for a wide, though not comprehensive, survey of images of founda-
tion rituals in pontificals I have used Richard Kay, Pontificalia: A
Repertory of Latin Manuscript Pontificals and Benedictionals (2007),
https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/handle/1808/4406.
123. Palazzo, L’évêque et son image, 148–76.
124. Vatican City, BAV, MS Vat. lat. 1155, fol. 83r. Michela Tor-
quati, cat. no. 131, in Righetti Tosti-Croce, Bonifacio VIII e il suo
tempo, 184–85.
Figure 7. Initials for the blessing of the first stone (top) and of the stone for the construction of a church (bottom), fol. 83r, pontifical of the
Roman Curia, late thirteenth century, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. lat. 1155 (photo: by permission of the Biblioteca
Apostolica Vaticana, with all rights reserved). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.
as having gone down into the foundations at Orvieto.125 An
early fourteenth-century example of the shorter recension,
probably produced in Umbria, used in the papal chapel, and
taken to Avignon by a member of the Curia, contains a
historiated initial with a bishop holding a single stone.126 An-
other pontifical of the Roman Curia, produced for the bishop
of Parma in 1325, again provides two initials. Here the bishop
is shown first blessing the stone placed on an altar and then
placing it in the foundations, accompanied by a monk holding
a censer.127 These images support the impression that the
blessing of the first stone was of interest in Rome and Italy
more generally in the period surrounding the execution of
the Sta. Maria Maggiore mosaics, despite its relatively brief
textual treatment in the curial pontificals. Some depictions
also indicate that the ritual was seen not just in terms of the
stone itself but also as encompassing an engagement with the
foundations. Palazzo has argued that the initial aim of the illus-
trated pontificals was to present papal liturgy as a model for
episcopal ritual, equating the Ecclesia Romana with the Univer-
sal Church. The visual treatment of the blessing of the first stone
suggests that ecclesiastical involvement in building sites was
part of this papal self-projection. The fact that a bishop is shown
performing this rite and others in the pontifical potentially used
at San Giovanni in Laterano, in which popes are depicted, indi-
cates that the presentation of papal liturgy as a model was partly
expressed through an episcopal identity shared by the bishop of
Rome with those of other sees.128 Since the blessing of the first
stone continued to be illustrated as this type of pontifical was
adopted more widely, some bishops evidently were receptive
to this visualization of their authority.
125. This dating is suggested in Marie-Thérèse Gousset, “Mano-
scritti miniati a Roma nei fondi della Bibliothèque nationale di
Parigi,” in Righetti Tosti-Croce, Bonifacio VIII e il suo tempo, 107–
10. Maria Alessandra Bilotta favors a date in the 1260s: “Pontificali
duecenteschi secundum consuetudinem et usum Romanae Curiae:
contributi per la storia della produzione miniata ad uso del Papato
nel Medioevo,” Arte medievale, n.s., 7, no. 1 (2008): 55–80, at 60–63;
and eadem, I libri dei Papi: la Curia, il Laterano, e la produzione
manoscritta ad uso del papato nel medioevo (secoli VI–XIII) (Vatican
City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2011), 149–56, esp. 153–54.
The manuscript is also discussed in Palazzo, L’évêque et son image,
151, 202, 212, 272, 276.
126. Avignon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 203, fol. 94v. Pa-
lazzo, L’évêque et son image, 166; Patricia Stirnemann, cat. no. 127,
in Righetti Tosti-Croce, Bonifacio VIII e il suo tempo, 180; and
Bilotta, I libri dei Papi, 167–70.
127. London, BL, Add. MS 39760, fol. 70r. On this manuscript, see
Giuseppa Z. Zanichelli, I conti e il minio: codici miniati dei Rossi,
1325–1482 (Parma: Università di Parma, Istituto di Storia dell’Arte,
1996), 18–20, 131–34, no. 3, 196–97, figs. 6–10.
128. For examples of depictions of the pope, see Vatican City,
BAV, MS Vat. lat. 1155, fols. 61r, 65v. Palazzo, L’évêque et son
image, 272–76, figs. 75–76.
248 E Gesta v57n2, Fall 2018
That said, Durandus pontificals and others containing the
more elaborate ritual regarding the laying of the foundation
stone are more likely than pontificals of the Roman Curia to
contain an illustration; indeed, its position at the beginning
of the second book of the pontifical meant that it was some-
times pictured when other ceremonies were not.129 These il-
lustrations are also more likely to engage with the wider land-
scape setting, although even here most still focus on the
blessing of the stone itself. Among the earliest examples is a
French Durandus pontifical from the first quarter of the four-
teenth century, in which a workman holds the stone while
the bishop blesses it.130 Set against a gold background, the ac-
tion takes place near the entrance to a building with other cler-
ical participants and lay onlookers. In addition to providing
variously complex and naturalistic settings, individual artists
could emphasize different elements of the ceremony. For ex-
ample, a Durandus pontifical produced in Avignon in 1339
shows the bishop blessing the stone at a site marked by a cross,
reflecting the initial canonical prescription.131 Other represen-
tations display an interest in both stone and foundations, in-
cluding a French pontifical from the second half of the four-
teenth century that shows the bishop holding one stone and
bending over what may represent others laid in a trench132
and an Italian Durandus pontifical from the first half of the
fifteenth century that depicts a workman cutting the trench
and the bishop asperging it and the stone.133 Some indication
of the form of the foundations, or the place marked out for
them, is given in a fourteenth-century French Durandus pon-
tifical in which a small but detailed initial shows the bless-
ing of the stone taking place on yellowish ground marked
with a darker green square with two white crosses (BL, Add.
MS 39677, fol. 75r; Fig. 8).134
At least three manuscript pontificals, all produced in
northern Italy, depict the foundations as a plan, without any
attention to the first stone. The earliest is a late fourteenth-
century pontifical of the Roman Curia, possibly from Modena.135
129. E.g., Paris, BnF, MS lat. 1226, fol. 1v.
130. Cambrai, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 180, fol. 63v (France,
first quarter of the fourteenth century).
131. Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Clm 10073, fol. 122v.
Elisabeth Remak-Honnef and Hermann Hauke, Katalog der lateini-
schen Handschriften der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek München: die
Handschriften der ehemaligen Mannheimer Hofbibliothek, Clm 10001–
10930, ausgenommen die Codices Lullani (Clm 10493–10658) und die
Sammlung Camerarius (Clm 10351–10431) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,
1991), 46–47.
132. Paris, BnF, MS lat. 9479, fol. 150v.
133. Boulogne-sur-Mer, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 85, fol. 112v.
134. London, BL, Add. MS 39677, fol. 75r.
135. Vatican City, BAV, MS Vat. lat. 4748, pt. 2, fol. 86r. Gio-
vanni Morello and Silvia Maddalo, eds., Liturgia in figura: codici
Figure 8. Blessing of the first stone and foundations, fol. 75r,
Durandus pontifical, fourteenth century, London, British Library,
Add. MS 39677 (photo: © British Library Board).
Here, although the text refers only to the blessing of the first
stone, the bishop is shown blessing the foundations of a church
filled in with stones (BAV, Vat. lat. 4748, pt. 2, fol. 86r; Fig. 9).
This takes the form of the eastern half of a simple basilica, po-
sitioned with the apse to the left; the western part of the nave lies
beyond the letter frame. Given the nature of the text, it is prob-
able that the artist had in mind images in Durandus pontificals,
which explicitly called for episcopal attention to the founda-
tions or place marked out for them. Certainly, other examples
of ground plans are found in pontificals containing the canon
“Nemo aecclesiam aedificate” and relevant rituals, although
these manuscripts are of a later date. One is a pontifical made
in the 1450s in Bergamo for Giovanni Barozzi, bishop of Ber-
gamo (r. 1449–65) and subsequently patriarch of Venice (1465–
66), which draws largely on the Durandus pontifical.136 This
provides a more elaborate representation, showing the whole
outline of a basilica—with apse and transept—positioned with
the east end pointing away from the viewer (BAV, MS Vat.
lat. 1145, fol. 76v; Fig. 10). The bishop kneels in the center, sur-
rounded by other clerics and facing a cross set at the location of
the altar; additional figures kneel outside. It is difficult to tell
whether the foundations are marked, dug, filled in, or even
shown as a low wall, but a space has been left for the west door
and the impression is very much that of a tangible imprint on
liturgici rinascimentali della Biblioteca apostolica Vaticana (Vatican
City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1995), 97–98, no. 5.
136. Vatican City, BAV, MS Vat. lat. 1145, fol. 76v; and Morello
and Maddalo, Liturgia in figura, 121–26, no. 14.
Figure 9. Blessing of the foundations, fol. 86r, pontifical of the
Roman Curia, late fourteenth century, Vatican City, Biblioteca
Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. lat. 4748, pt. 2 (photo: by permission
of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, with all rights reserved).
See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.
the landscape; the ground within and beyond the foundations
is rocky, and there are mountains in the distance. Another ap-
proach is found in the so-called Broadley Pontifical of about
1490, thought to have been produced in Venice and now in
Cambridge, Massachusetts (Harvard University, Houghton Li-
brary, MS Typ 217, fol. 133v; Fig. 11).137 This is a manuscript
copy of the 1485 editio princeps of the Pontificale Romanum,
a revision of Durandus’s pontifical by Agostino Patrizi de
Piccolomini and Johannes Burkhard that repeats his blessing
of the first stone almost word for word.138 Here, in a rectangu-
lar miniature, the bishop and clergy stand facing the plan of a
church marked on the ground. Set in a green landscape, the
whole plan, filled in with a brown wash, is that of a basilica
137. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library,
MS Typ 217, fol. 133v. Roger S. Wieck, Late Medieval and Renais-
sance Illuminated Manuscripts, 1350–1525, in the Houghton Library
(Cambridge, MA: Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Har-
vard College Library, 1983), 74, no. 36; and Otto Pächt and J. J. G.
Alexander, Illuminated Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford,
vol. 2, Italian School (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 36–37, no. 368,
for a Neapolitan pontifical with the same arms of the Paruta of Ven-
ice; 57–58, no. 583, for a Venetian Psalter with similar borders.
138. Marc Dykmans, Le pontifical romain révisé au XVe siècle
(Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1985), 108–23, esp. 116,
for the editio princeps; 124–25 for MS Typ 217.
Holy Ground Plans in Late Medieval Italy D 249

Figure 10. Blessing of the foundations, fol. 76v, Durandus pontifical,
1450s, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat.
lat. 1145 (photo: by permission of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,
with all rights reserved). See the electronic edition of Gesta for a
color version of this image.
with an apse and no transept but with some indication of an
entrance at the west, where the clergy stand. The bishop, his
robe held out of the way by the man behind him, grasps a hoe
in both hands, poised to bring it down into the earth.
The representation of the foundations in the form of a
ground plan in these three Italian pontificals suggests an
awareness of contemporary Italian depictions of the miracu-
lous ground plan of Sta. Maria Maggiore. A range of other ap-
proaches was available to the artists, so the fact that the plans
are found in the same geographic area is likely to be more than
coincidental, while the greater number of surviving represen-
tations of the Sta. Maria Maggiore plan, as well as the early
date of the first example in the facade mosaics, implies that
this formed the overall precedent. This type of schematic plan,
represented as drawn on the ground, is found in very few other
contexts, and these too are concentrated in central and north-
ern Italy around the turn of the fifteenth century.139 The pres-
139. One exception is the representation of a church under con-
struction as a simple cruciform plan with apse, transept, and an
opening at the west end, found in two Vaticinia manuscripts from
the late fifteenth century (Rome, Biblioteca Angelica, MS 1146,
fol. 11r; Vatican City, BAV, MS Chigiano A.V.152, fol. 12r). Paola
Guerrini, Propaganda politica e profezie figurate nel tardo medioevo
(Naples: Liguori, 1997), figs. 116–17. Another possible example of
a plan marked on the ground, visible in the late fifteenth- and early
sixteenth-century intarsia work in the sacristy of San Marco in Ven-
ice, has itself been connected to the tradition of miraculous founda-
250 E Gesta v57n2, Fall 2018
ence of the two subjects—the miraculous plan and the bless-
ing of the foundations—in liturgical manuscripts created a
context in which knowledge could circulate, and illuminators
might well have had experience in representing both. There
was considerable variety in both spheres: the plan could be
shown partially or in full, in different orientations, and em-
phasizing the outline or the area covered. Yet all the solutions
in the pontificals find correspondences in representations of
the snowy ground plan, if not necessarily in the same combi-
nation.
At the same time, each pontifical bears a different relation-
ship to the tradition of the miracle of the snow. MS Vat.
lat. 4748, pt. 2 (Fig. 9) is likely to draw most immediately on
a pontifical of the Durandus type, since its own text contains
no reference to the foundations and thus no clear prompt to
engage with the Sta. Maria Maggiore legend. The representa-
tion of the plan in the Barozzi pontifical (Fig. 10) corresponds
to a wider interest evident in this manuscript in sacred space,
with the initial for the consecration of the church depicting the
bishop writing the alphabet cross, while that for the blessing of
a bell shows this taking place outside a church set in a detailed
landscape, perhaps with the intention of evoking the area
reached by the sound of the bell.140 Some of this could be a de-
cision on the part of the artist, but Barozzi, who seems to have
played an active part in the compilation of the pontifical, had
been a subdeacon under Pope Eugene IV (r. 1431–47) and
would have been familiar with the Sta. Maria Maggiore leg-
end.141 Perhaps the closest visual relationship can be posited
for the Houghton Library’s Broadley Pontifical (Fig. 11); the
miniature here is highly reminiscent of depictions of Liberius
marking out the foundations of Sta. Maria Maggiore and may
well reflect direct engagement with such a scene. In addition
to the ground plan, which echoes examples in which the snow
is shown covering the whole area of the church or the founda-
tions are depicted as open, the image of the bishop with hoe
in hand is particularly suggestive. The liturgy does not call
for the bishop to take part in the breaking of the ground, al-
though occasionally illustrations of the ceremony did show ec-
clesiastics involved in the work.142 Just as the Breviary of Mary
of Savoy could be mistaken for a depiction of the blessing of
the first stone were it not for the presence of Mary (Fig. 6), so
the Houghton image could be taken for a depiction of the mir-
tions exemplified by Sta. Maria Maggiore: Deborah Howard, Venice
and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architec-
ture, 1100–1500 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 54.
140. Vatican City, BAV, MS Vat. lat. 1145, fols. 79r, 126v.
141. Morello and Maddalo, Liturgia in figura, 121–26, no. 14.
142. For example, a fourteenth-century Bolognese Durandus
pontifical has a cleric with a pickax and a workman holding a pickax
and the foundation stone. Toledo, Biblioteca de Castilla–La Mancha,
MS 167, fol. 92r.
Figure 11. Opening of the foundations, fol. 133v, Broadley Pontifical, ca. 1490, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library,
MS Typ 217 (photo: by kind permission of the Houghton Library).
acle of the snow, especially because some representations of
Pope Liberius opening the foundations did not show Mary ei-
ther.143 The existence of these ambiguous scenes suggests that
the two subjects were considered to be closely linked; not only
were Liberius’s actions later interpreted in liturgical terms but
a bishop might be cast in a similar role. However, in the case of
the Broadley Pontifical (Fig. 11), it is also possible that the spe-
cific challenge of illustrating a text taken from a printed, un-
illustrated pontifical prompted a sideways glance at this closely
related tradition.
If the manuscript pontificals represented a regional tradi-
tion, they also constituted an important precedent for the rep-
resentation of ground plans and foundations in early printed
examples, which enjoyed a wide circulation throughout Eu-
rope. Closely following the Houghton example in time, and
perhaps also linked through their place of production, is a
set of pontificals printed in Venice in the sixteenth century
143. Jerusalem, Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, MS 7(H),
fol. 48r; Madrid, Biblioteca nacional, MS Vitr. 21 6, fol. 341v; and
Paintings and Works of Art from the Collections of the Late Lord
Clark of Saltwood, no. 91.
by the Giunta Press, which devoted a series of woodcuts to
the blessing of the foundations and foundation stone. Two
versions of the scenes exist: one in the editions of 1520 and
1543, the other in the editions of 1561 and 1572.144 The later
set is closely based on the earlier one.145 In the scene illus-
144. Pontificale S[ecundu]m Ritu[m] Sacrosancte Romane Ecclesie
(Venice: Giunta, 1520), consulted Cambridge, University Library,
A*.3.17(B); Paulo III Pont. Max. Pontificale Romanum (Venice:
Giunta, 1543), as in the catalogue record for New York, Morgan Li-
brary & Museum, E1 03 D; Pio IIII Pont. Max. Pontificale Romanum
ad Omnes Pontificias Ceremonias (Venice: Giunta, 1561), consulted
London, BL, C.108.l.2; Pio V. Pont. Max. Pontificale Romanum (Venice:
Giunta, 1572). Some of the woodcuts of the 1520 and 1572 editions
are reproduced in Athelstan Riley, Pontifical Services, vol. 4, Illus-
trated from Woodcuts of the XVIth Century (London: Longmans,
Green, 1908), 2–9. The 1572 edition has been discussed in Carol
Steyn, “The 1572 Pontifical in the Library Archives of the Univer-
sity of South Africa, Pretoria,” Muziki: Journal of Music Research
in Africa 1, no. 1 (2004): 20–40. Some scenes are mentioned in
Holder, “Medieval Foundation Stones,” 11.
145. The first set may have been replaced on account of the fire
that destroyed the firm’s equipment and much of its stock in 1557.
Some scenes from the 1520 edition appear to be reused in a pontif-
Holy Ground Plans in Late Medieval Italy D 251
trating the blessing of the holy water, the plan of the church
is marked out on the ground, with a cross on the site of the
altar (Cambridge, University Library, A*.3.17(B), fol. 104v;
Fig. 12). In the next scene the foundations have been dug,
and the foundation stone, marked by a cross, is being passed
to the bishop by the mason (fol. 106r; Fig. 13). Finally, we see
the procession around the site of the church with the bishop
asperging the foundations, now filled in (fol. 106v; Fig. 14).
The scene that shows the blessing of the holy water with the
ground plan of the church is particularly interesting in the
present context (Fig. 12). In both versions the plan is sche-
matic, a cruciform church with a round apse. The outline of
the walls is shown in a manner that differentiates them from
the finished foundations, which are filled in with stones in
both versions of the scene of the asperging of the founda-
tions (Fig. 14). A more subtle contrast can also be drawn with
the foundation trench as depicted in the scene of the laying
of the first stone, where there is a clear suggestion of depth,
through the vertical lines descending from the corners (Fig. 13).
Thus the plans may simply indicate to the viewer that this is
the site of the church, using a sign that functions with refer-
ence to plans on paper. Yet they seem to be more of an inte-
gral part of the landscape than that—there are even tufts of
grass in the center of the plan in the later editions—and can
therefore be understood to represent the “loca ad funda-
menta . . . designata” as a plan literally drawn on the ground.
In the 1595 Pontificale Romanum of Clement VIII, printed
by Giacomo Luna in Rome, the blessing of the water still takes
place against the backdrop of the plan of the church marked
on the ground. Here the most visually characteristic aspects,
the curve of the apse and the projecting transept, are shown
behind the figures.146 Even though the plan is drawn at a larger
scale than in the earlier images and less of it is visible, a sense
of the form of the church remains.
In ascertaining what might have led to the representations
in the printed pontificals, the working method of the printer
is relevant. Luc’Antonio Giunta (1457–1538) specialized in
printing liturgical books and often seems to have commis-
sioned new sets of images for them, collaborating with artists
who practiced both manuscript illumination and woodcut de-
sign.147 Ten years before the 1520 edition, Giunta had printed
ical printed by Hector Penet in Lyons in 1542, but there are some
minor differences: Pontificale Secundum Ritum Sacrosancte Romane
Ecclesie (Lyons: Penet, 1542).
146. Pontificale Romanum Clementis VIII Pont. Max. Iussu Resti-
tutum et Editum (Rome: Iacopo Luna, 1595); Seville, Universidad
de Sevilla, Biblioteca, A Res. 44/1/02, http://fondosdigitales.us.es
/fondos/.
147. On Giunta’s liturgical books, see Lilian Armstrong, “Wood-
cuts for Liturgical Books Published by LucAntonio Giunta in Venice,
1499–1501,” Word & Image 17, nos. 1–2 (2001): 65–93; eadem, “Bene-
252 E Gesta v57n2, Fall 2018
Figure 12. Blessing of the holy water, fol. 104v, Pontificale
S[ecundu]m Ritu[m] Sacrosancte Romane Ecclesie (Venice:
Giunta, 1520), Cambridge, University Library, A*.3.17(B) (photo:
by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library).
See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.
a version of the 1485 editio princeps of the pontifical, which is
not illustrated, and he did so again in 1515, though no copy
of it survives.148 The immediate source of inspiration for the
new images was most likely an illuminated manuscript pon-
tifical with a representation of the foundation along the lines of
the three discussed above (Figs. 9–11), especially those show-
ing the outline of the church. At the same time, it is possible that
the artist was also aware of images of the miraculous Sta. Maria
Maggiore ground plan that depicted the limites of the church.
Representations of the miracle seem to have circulated widely
in Italian antiphonaries, including in Florence, where Giunta
had printed a four-volume antiphonary in 1503–4.149 The man-
detto Bordon, Aldus Manutius, LucAntonio Giunta: Old Links and
New,” in Studies of Renaissance Miniaturists in Venice (London: Pindar
Press, 2003), 2:644–82; eadem, “Venetian and Florentine Renaissance
Woodcuts for Bibles, Liturgical Books, and Devotional Books,” in A
Heavenly Craft: The Woodcut in Early Printed Books; Illustrated
Books Purchased by Lessing J. Rosenwald at the Sale of the Library of
C. W. Dyson Perrins, ed. Daniel De Simone (New York: George Braziller
in association with the Library of Congress, 2004), 24–45; and Steyn,
“1572 Pontifical in the Library Archives,” 24–25.
148. Pontificale Noviter Impressum per Pulchrisque Characteribus
Diligentissime Annotatum (Venice: Giunta, 1510); for the 1515 edi-
tion, see James Borders, “Chants for Four Masses in the Editio prin-
ceps of the Pontificale Romanum (1485),” in Music in Medieval Eu-
rope: Studies in Honour of Bryan Gillingham, ed. Terence Bailey and
Alma Santosuosso (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 181–99, at 184.
149. London, BL, C.18.e.9, formerly IC.24247, is vol. 3; other sur-
viving copies are listed in Armstrong, “Benedetto Bordon,” 663; and
Figure 13. Laying of the first stone, fol. 106r, Pontificale S[ecundu]m
Ritu[m] Sacrosancte Romane Ecclesie (Venice: Giunta, 1520), Cam-
bridge, University Library, A*.3.17(B) (photo: by kind permission of
the Syndics of Cambridge University Library). See the electronic
edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.
ner in which the Giunta woodcut shows the plan differs from
that in the Houghton Library manuscript of a few decades
earlier (Fig. 11), and their debts to the miracle of the snow are
arguably different. Here too, however, illustrating a text taken
from a printed, unillustrated pontifical may have been a catalyst
for engaging with the Marian plans. In any case, regardless of
how direct or indirect the connection, the representations of
church foundations in the Giunta printed pontificals are likely
to be informed ultimately by depictions of the miracle of the
snow. In this way, if one catalyst for the representation of a
miraculous, ephemeral plan in the Sta. Maria Maggiore mo-
saics was increased attention to the site of a church in the li-
turgical sphere, that representation also had a long-lived and
widespread impact on the way in which the liturgy itself was
depicted. In part this stems from the fundamental similarity
between the two events; after all, the point of both plans was
to indicate the sanctity of the site of the church, whether by
divine intervention or by ecclesiastical ceremony.
Epilogue
This article has traced an interest in plans marked on the
ground in two spheres—the miraculous indication of sites in
Marzia Schiavotti Morena, “L’esemplare completo di un antifonario
giuntino (Venezia 1504) alla Nazionale di Firenze,” La bibliofilía 87,
no. 3 (1985): 281–86.
Figure 14. Blessing of the foundations, fol. 106v, Pontificale
S[ecundu]m Ritu[m] Sacrosancte Romane Ecclesie (Venice:
Giunta, 1520), Cambridge, University Library, A*.3.17(B) (photo:
by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library).
See the electronic edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.
foundation legends and the blessing of the site of a church
in liturgical rites—and has suggested that these traditions un-
derwent cross-fertilization over a prolonged period. A number
of building miracles not only featured visions that revealed the
location and dimensions of the church-to-be but also included
the supernatural provision of the form of the church traced on
the ground. This may reflect practices of preparing building
sites for the digging of the foundations, but it can also be seen
to echo and replace the need for such a site to be approved,
marked, and blessed by a bishop. The innovative representa-
tion of such a ground plan at Sta. Maria Maggiore (Figs. 1a–
b), while reflecting a Roman interest in the foundation of
key basilicas and the miraculous creation of images, also cor-
responded with increasing ecclesiastical intervention in build-
ing sites, including the blessing of the foundations or the place
marked out for them. In turn, the illustration of founda-
tion rituals in pontificals arguably drew on images of the mir-
acle of the snow when indicating the site of the church. In this
shared repertoire of images there is no little variety but also
a certain coherence: these depictions of plans drawn on the
ground are simple, schematic, and often cruciform. I would
like to suggest that we think of this form of ground plan as
particularly redolent of miraculous and sacred foundations,
different both in form and associations from other small-scale
plans.
This is not to imply that these representations were com-
posed and adapted in isolation from the wider representation
Holy Ground Plans in Late Medieval Italy D 253
of ground plans in other contexts. The authors of the founda-
tion legends could have seen ground plans in manuscripts, not
least those describing key structures in Jerusalem, both existing
and projected, although none takes this specific form.150 In
particular, plans of the Temple in Ezekiel’s vision could be seen
as representing a plan measured out on the ground, more than
that of a building per se, even though they are often accom-
panied by elevations that indicate the measurements of the
walls.151 Moreover, the representation of the plan in the Sta.
Maria Maggiore mosaics dates to a period when an increas-
ing number of architects’ plans for proposed buildings sur-
vive.152 At the time Giunta’s 1520 pontifical was printed, ground
plans were increasingly being provided in books on architec-
ture. Indeed, the early sixteenth century saw the illustration of
Vitruvius’s ichnographia for the first time with the ground plan
of Milan Cathedral by Cesare Cesariano.153 However, all these
plans relate to three-dimensional structures, and Cesariano’s
plan even indicates vaulting. The images of plans traced on the
ground do so only indirectly and are fundamentally concerned
with the designation of a site on a horizontal plane.
The distinction is illustrated by a final comparison between
two later representations of a ground plan in a landscape set-
ting. One, a seventeenth-century engraving showing the con-
version of St. Eustace, makes use of a ground plan to indicate
the church that would subsequently be built on the site, at
Sta. Maria della Mentorella in the region of Lazio (Cambridge,
University Library, Z.1.30[OS], p. 186; Fig. 15). Used as the fron-
tispiece to Athanasius Kircher’s Historia Eustachio-Mariana Figure 15. Conversion of St. Eustace, p. 186, in Athanasius
in 1665, it was later included in his Latium of 1671.154 The Kircher, Latium (Amsterdam: Johannes Jansson, 1671), Cambridge,
University Library, Z.1.30(OS) (photo: by kind permission of the
saint is shown looking up at the stag with a cross between its
Syndics of Cambridge University Library). See the electronic edition
antlers that prompted his conversion to Christianity. He stands of Gesta for a color version of this image.

at, or rather on, the entrance to the plan of a church, a com-

150. E.g., the studies in Donkin and Vorholt, Imagining Jerusalem.
151. E.g., Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodl. 494, fol. 158v, and
MS Laud Misc. 156, fols. 13v–14r. On the plans of the Temple in Rich-
ard of Saint-Victor’s commentary on Ezekiel, see Walter Cahn, “Ar-
chitecture and Exegesis: Richard of St.-Victor’s Ezekiel Commentary
and Its Illustrations,” Art Bulletin 76, no. 1 (1994): 53–68; Delano-
Smith, “Exegetical Jerusalem”; eadem, “Maps and Plans in Medieval
Exegesis: Richard of St. Victor’s In visionem Ezechielis,” in From
Knowledge to Beatitude: St. Victor, Twelfth-Century Scholars, and Be-
yond; Essays in Honor of Grover A. Zinn, Jr., ed. E. Ann Matter and
Lesley Smith (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
2013), 1–45; and Karl Kinsella, “Richard of St Victor’s Solutions to
Problems of Architectural Representation in the Twelfth Century,”
Architectural History 59 (2016): 3–24.
152. Borgherini, Disegno e progetto nel cantiere medievale.
153. Cesariano, Di Lucio Vitruvio Pollione de Architettura Libri
Decem, fol. 14r.
154. Athanasius Kircher, Historia Eustachio-Mariana . . . (Rome:
Varesi, 1665); and idem, Latium (Amsterdam: Johannes Jansson, 1671),
186. The engraving is reproduced but not discussed in Emmons,
“Drawing Sites,” 121.
plex design with side chapels and a suggestion of vaulting that
seems like a paper plan introduced into the landscape. De-
spite appearances, this is not an example of a foundation leg-
end in which the form of the church is indicated by visionary
or miraculous means. Eustace himself received no command
to build a church, which was supposed by Kircher to have
been founded by Constantine and restored by St. Benedict.
Kircher was responsible for the rebuilding of the Lazio shrine,
and the plan corresponds to that of the structure in his time.
In the Historia Eustachio-Mariana he gives the dimensions
of the building and states that “coeteras partes apposita Ichno-
graphia docebit.”155 The engraving therefore elides two mo-
155. “The nearby plan will indicate the other parts.” Kircher, His-
toria Eustachio-Mariana, 119. On the site, see Nicoletta de Gregori,
“Santa Maria della Mentorella: un santuario medievale del Lazio e
alcuni esempi del suo arredo,” Arte documento 12 (1998): 56–61;
and John Edward Fletcher, A Study of the Life and Works of Athana-

254 E Gesta v57n2, Fall 2018

ments in time, anchoring the rebuilding in the original ratio-
nale for the church, and the plan fulfills a function different
from those examined here. It does not represent lines marked
on the ground, and while it is forward-looking in the sense that
it links Eustace’s conversion with a church built more recently,
it is the plan of a structure already in existence.
In contrast, a ground plan corresponding to the type rep-
resented in the context of miracles and foundation ritual
can be found in an early seventeenth-century emblem book
of the Regia Via Crucis by Benedict van Haeften (Cambridge,
University Library, E.13.2[1], p. 334; Fig. 16).156 Here, figures
personifying the human soul and divine love, aided by an
angel, use the cross to reconstruct a ruined church, respec-
tively cutting stones, measuring an image of the church on
the wall, and marking out on the ground a schematic cruci-
form plan with apse and transept.157 In form and location,
including a purely anticipatory relationship with any super-
structure, this is reminiscent both of the images of the miracu-
lous plan of Sta. Maria Maggiore that emphasize the outlines
of the church (Figs. 4–5) and of the plans of the foundations
in the Giunta pontificals (Figs. 12–14). A connection with
the demarcation of sacred space is reinforced in the accom-
panying texts. The biblical quotation from 1 Corinthians 3:16
above the scene says, “Know ye not that ye are the temple of
God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you,” while the
text beneath urges the reader to “build up such a temple in
your heart, as my cross marks out in the yielding ground.”
This type of comparison between the human soul and the
church building is widely found in commentaries on the con-
secration rite, and a particular interest in imprinting both
heart and ground is displayed in discussions of the inscrip-
tion of the alphabet cross.158 Here, however, the impression
of the cross in the ground has more in common with the Figure 16. Measurement of the cross, p. 334, in Benedict van
excavated foundations of an earlier stage of liturgical engage- Haeften, Regia Via Crucis (Antwerp: Balthasar Moretus, 1635),
ment with the church building and with the miraculously Cambridge, University Library, E.13.2(1) (photo: by kind permission
of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library). See the electronic
impressed ground plans of foundation legends. By seeing the edition of Gesta for a color version of this image.
marking of the ground as the fundamental act of image mak-
ing, which might then find verbal and visual representation,
it is possible to chart a long tradition of holy ground plans that
sius Kircher, “Germanus incredibilis”: With a Selection of His Unpub-
lished Correspondence and an Annotated Translation of His Autobiog-
transcends particular legends or liturgies. Depictions of such
raphy, ed. Elizabeth Fletcher (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 54. plans are deceptive in their simplicity. While they might seem
156. Benedict van Haeften, Regia Via Crucis (Antwerp: Balthasar a self-evident way to render complex architecture in sche-
Moretus, 1635), 334; an overview of the work is given in K. L. Bowen matic form, in late medieval Italy, in which they were forged,
et al., The Illustration of Books Published by the Moretuses (Antwerp: they possessed a homogenous and distinctive set of associa-
Plantin-Moretus Museum, 1997), 118–19.
tions with the designation of sacred space. In first represent-
157. Rose Marie San Juan, Vertiginous Mirrors: The Animation of
the Visual Image and Early Modern Travel (Manchester: Manches- ing the miraculous Marian ground plan on the Esquiline,
ter University Press, 2011), 213–15. Sta. Maria Maggiore played a significant role in the forma-
158. Donkin, “Making an Impression.” tion of this wider visual motif.

Holy Ground Plans in Late Medieval Italy D 255