Agency and Iconography of the Madonna with Souls at Santa Maria dell’Anima

Susanne Kubersky-Piredda

Alongside linguistic and territorial criteria, the creation of identification figures was one of the characteristics of early modern nation-building. For the foreign communities based in Rome, these were above all the respective national patron saints. The church of Santa Maria dell’Anima, run by a lay confraternity whose members originated from all over the Holy Roman Empire, is located in the vicinity of today’s Piazza Navona. Since the Empire did not have a unique national patron saint, the church and the adjoining hospice were dedicated to the Virgin Mary as a protector of the souls. By the late 15th century, a peculiar iconography had established itself for this dedication: an enthroned Madonna and Child flanked by two nude figures representing souls. Within the larger framework of the Roma communis patria project, this study focuses on the representational strategies of the German community residing in early modern Rome. Among other materials, two previously unrecognized visual sources are presented and analyzed for the first time; both are single-leaf woodcuts related to the pontificate of Sixtus IV (1471–1484) and his renovatio urbis project. These rare prints provide telling evidence of the permeation and mutual fertilization of imported artistic phenomena and local practices that were typical of the art commissioned by Rome’s foreign communities. They also testify to the agency of cult images in defining the competitive relationships among Roman lay confraternities around 1500. The results of this project have been published in volume 3 of the Hertziana book series Roma communis patria.