Pair of Roman vedute depicting the Milvian Bridge and the church Santa Mari

A pair of Roman vedute depicting the Milvian Bridge and the church Santa Maria in Domnica.
Oil on canvas.
Rome.
Late 18th century.
h. 17,3 in. ; w. 21,6 in.

Pair of Roman vedute representing the Milvian Bridge and the church of Santa Maria in Domnica, known as the Navicella.

The Milvian Bridge is one of the most famous monuments in the history of the Roman Empire. It is a reconstruction of an older bridge, rebuilt in 109 BC by the censor Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, as maintaining and restoring public buildings was the responsibility of censors under Roman law. However, it was in 312 AD that this bridge truly entered the history books, as the site of Constantine's victory over Maxentius on 28 October 312, despite the numerical inferiority of his troops. The Milvian Bridge, which carries the Via Flaminia on either side of the Tiber, has since been associated with Constantine's mysterious vision in which, according to Eusebius, the emperor saw a Cross in the sky and the words ‘èn toutô nika’, in Latin In hoc signo vinces (by this sign thou shall conquer). Constantine had a dream, the same night, in which Christ appeared to him and said if he made his troops bear the sign, they would win, though outnumbered, against those of Maxentius.

The second veduta depicts the lesser-known church of Santa Maria in Domnica. Stendhal, in his Promenades dans Rome, thought the portico of the church was the work of Raffaello, a long-held belief that Burckhardt cast doubt on in the Cicerone. Modern scholarship refustes it as well and tends to attribute the portico to the architect and sculptor Andrea Sansovino.

The church is known among Roman architecture enthusiasts, not only because of the now disproved attribution to Raffaello, but also for the Navicella, a mysterious marble monument in the shape of a vessel, long mistaken for an antique, and now considered, like the church itself, to be the work of the same Andrea Sansovino. The Navicella bears a dedication to Pope Leo X Medici and his coat of arms, and is dated to around 1518-1519, five years after the church's restoration.

Each painting, both oils on canvas, depicts a monument either from ancient or modern Rome. They come with their 18th century frame. There are some damages on the frames and some very discrete restoration on the paintings.

Sources

Stendhal, Promenades dans Rome, Paris, 1853 ; Charles Daremberg and Edmond Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines, t. IV, I, Paris, 1873 ; Théodore Mommsen, Le Droit public romain, t. III, Paris, 1892; Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. I, London, 1897.