The afterlife of an early medieval chapel: Giovanni Battista Ricci and perceptions of the Christian past in post‐Tridentine Rome

This paper treats the afterlife of an early medieval chapel, the Oratory of Pope John VII (705–707) in Old St Peter's, in a painting by Giovanni Battista Ricci (1537/45–1625) remarkable for its inaccuracy. The oratory's original appearance can be reconstructed with some certainty based on the surviving fragments and other documentation, both written and visual. Ricci's painting, by contrast, clearly rearranges the chapel's furnishings and alters the arrangement, style, and iconography of its pictorial decoration. It is evident that the artist's aim was something other than simple documentation. When viewed in conjunction with Giacomo Grimaldi's writings on the oratory and contemporary debates about religious images, it becomes clear that Ricci's painting is a recreation that pictorially rewrites the oratory's biography in order that it might serve as a defence of images, most particularly of the Sudarium of Veronica, the miraculous holy image the chapel once housed. (pp. 686–698)