1 | SANTA MARIA

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Santa Maria

Pope Franciscus. (Image from the Vatican Media)

I didn’t come here for a miracle. 

I came because the world outside had grown loud, too fast, too brittle. And here, in this space carved by centuries and steady hands, everything slowed. Here was a faith thick with gold and blood and quiet endurance. A place that remembered what I had almost forgotten: that beauty, when it’s honest, can heal.

From the front yard of Ambasciata d'Argentina in Rome, the view of Santa Maria Maggiore rose as an ancient monument -- enormous, elegant, and quietly. Not flashy, not loud—just there, immense and prominent. Tourists thought it is an archive of aesthetic and cultural history. A spatial entity with an outward inscription carved into the facade in translation: "the famous image of the Mother of God was moved from the middle of the basilica to a more splendid seat." 

History expressed its built during the pontificate of Liberius (352-366) and rebuilt or renovated by Pope Sixtus III (432-440).

Someone said that this is a place to the ways where power, knowledge, and sanctity are mutually constituted—and inscribed, not just upon its wall, but upon the very idea of Rome. 

Mary ascended into heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. The prayer, said. Pope Pius XII, in his encyclical Munificentissimus Deus, proclaimed this doctrine during a time of great upheaval to strengthen the shaken faith.   

"For which reason, after we have poured forth prayers of supplication again and again to God, and have invoked the light of the Spirit of Truth, for the glory of Almighty God who has lavished his special affection upon the Virgin Mary, for the honor of her Son, the immortal King of the Ages and the Victor over sin and death, for the increase of the glory of that same august Mother, and for the joy and exultation of the entire Church; by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory."

It marks a hierarchization of the gaze. The Virgin, once amidst the crowd, is now distanced, enthroned. In turn, it recalibrated the symbolic center of gravity within the basilica. 

Pope Francis in Santa Maria Maggiore. (Photo: Vatican Media)

Some years ago, shortly after his election, Pope Francis made a private visit to Santa Maria Maggiore, where he knelt in prayer before the Salus Populi Romani (Salvation of the Roman People), offering a bouquet of flowers as a sign of his reverence and humility. The Salus Populi Romani is an icon of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child. Its title suggests that Mary, through her maternal intercession, is the protector and savior. He entrusted his travels to her. He turned to her not as an ornament, but as a companion in mission. She was his vision. Pastoral, maternal, merciful. The maternal justice. Pilgrims come here seeking for refuge, healing, hope, and spiritual comfort. A foreign religious authority once said that "by legend, it was painted by Saint Luke."

To speak of Santa Maria Maggiore is not merely to recount its genesis, but to encounter a dispositif—of signs, symbols, and institutional strategies—through which power inscribed itself into the spatial and visual fabric of early Christian Rome. Constructed under Pope Sixtus III in the immediate aftermath of the Council of Ephesus (431 CE), the basilica does not simply "celebrate" Mary as Theotokos; rather, it enunciates and stabilizes a new epistemic regime in which the female body, once suspect in both classical and Hebraic thought, is recoded as the threshold between divinity and incarnation.

The Council’s proclamation of Mary as Mother of God was not merely theological but genealogical—it was a reordering of discursive formations that made possible a new visibility of the sacred feminine within an imperial-Christian regime of truth. The basilica’s mosaics are not illustrations; they are visuals of faith and governance. In them, the life of Mary, the acts of Christ, and Old Testament prefigurations --such as Moses' command over the Red Sea, do not simply coexist. They are arranged in a semiotic economy that aligns typology, dogma, and imperial ideology. From the morose and determined eyes, this is not art as expression. It is a command.

Richard Krautheimer's observation, in his classical study on monuments and arts in Antiquity through the Middle Age, regarding the papacy’s land-based revenues in the 4th and 5th centuries—administered through a centralized accounting system—should not be read as background but as infrastructure. The basilica was not simply funded; it was produced within a matrix of fiscal, spatial, and symbolic control. The building project becomes intelligible not as piety realized, but as an effect of administrative rationalization. The Church, in this reading, emerges as a body politic, capable of mobilizing resources for architectural inscription, and through that inscription, shaping both memory and legitimacy.

It somewhat affirmed professor of medieval and early modern history Miri Rubin's insight—that Mary is a mediating figure between imperial Rome and Christian Rome—points toward a more fundamental appreciation of the Virgin as translatio imperii. In a city no longer ruled by emperors, Mary becomes the figure through which sovereignty is reimagined: maternal, divine, but unmistakably imperial in posture. She is the feminine form through which continuity is performed, and faith is exalted unmasked.

When Gregory the Great, amid a sixth-century plague, redirected liturgical processions to converge on Santa Maria Maggiore rather than the apostolic tomb of Peter, he enacted a spatial revision of intercession. The plague, a bubonic plague, was an aftershock of the Plague of Justinian (541-542) which affected significantly Europe and the Middle East. Pope Pelagius II had died of the plague in February 590, and Gregory, who had previously been a deacon, became Pope. 

That procession was not simply devotional; it was disciplinary. The gesture re-situated the locus of divine mediation—from the founding apostle to the maternal intercessor—and in doing so, it reinscribed the city’s ritual geography in accordance with the shifting architectures of belief and control.

Later, in the wake of the Avignon papacy, the basilica’s temporary conversion into a papal residence should not be understood as a contingency of architecture, but as a symptom of the Church’s spatial negotiation of legitimacy. Displacement and return are never neutral—they recalibrate power across topographies.

Across centuries, successive restorations—from Eugene III to Benedict XIV—function not as mere acts of preservation, but as palimpsests of authority. Each intervention is an act of governance over the visible past, an assertion that the basilica’s historical sediment must remain legible only within the syntax sanctioned by the Church.

Even the archaeological discoveries of 1966—Roman ruins, imperial calendars beneath Christian foundations—reveal the archaeology of memory itself. These remnants do not contest the basilica’s Christian identity; rather, deepen its genealogy. The sacred is not built upon the ruins of the profane but emerges precisely through the regulation and absorption of those ruins.

Inside the hall, the hush was not silence—it was a kind of listening. As if the walls had heard every prayer, every echo of sorrow and gratitude, and still weren’t tired of them. Light filtered through clerestory windows, brushing across centuries of dust and devotion.

How many lost souls stood beneath the coffered ceiling, staring up like a child trying to read the stars? Mosaics shimmered high above—Mary crowned, Christ cradled, prophets like fire caught mid-gesture. Moses struck the sea just above the altar. I wondered if faith always felt like that—like stepping into water, uncertain if it will hold or open.

Though vast in spatial expanse, the construction of Santa Maria Maggiore was no accident of scale; it was a calculated expression of architectural normativity in early 5th-century Rome. Its layout—a tall, axial nave flanked by lateral aisles and terminating in a semicircular apse—follows a typological schema deeply embedded in the urban, liturgical, and symbolic logics of the late antiquated church. This was not merely a functional design, but an articulation of authority and orthodoxy: an architecture of visibility, procession, and control.

Yet what renders the basilica more than a repetition of type—what inaugurates it as a foundational node in the genealogy of ecclesiastical architecture—are the mosaics. Situated on the triumphal arch and extending along the nave, these images are not decorative embellishments but operative signs. They function as a visual discourse, embedding theological dogma into the perception of the faithful. Through gold tesserae and sacred narrative, the mosaic becomes a site where Christological truth is not spoken but shown—where the invisible is rendered legible under ecclesial supervision.

The Athenian marble columns—spolia, drawn either from an earlier Christian structure or a pagan edifice—are themselves artifacts of power’s transmutation. Their reuse is not merely economic but symbolic: a reterritorialization of imperial remnants into Christian order. In the act of shortening them for uniformity, Ferdinando Fuga does not merely restore; he disciplines. The columns are made to conform, their asymmetries erased, their antiquity subordinated to a Baroque logic of sameness and spectacle. The addition of gilt-bronze capitals enacts a final layer of codification—authority sheathed in ornament, history made obedient to aesthetics.

Santa Maria Maggiore, then, is not simply a basilica. It is a diagram. A spatialized discourse in which theology, imperial memory, and aesthetics confluenced to engineer not only a place of worship, but a tabernacle for consecration, remembering, and believing.

Its crypt, chapels, reliquaries, and tombs are not isolated devotional or aesthetic characters, but as sites in a larger discursive and disciplinary formation: the sacralization of space, the visualization of memory, and the coordination of authority through ritual, relic, and representation.

Beneath the formal altar of the church is not an empty void, but a layered signification: the Crypt of the Nativity. More pronounced by reporters as the Holy Crib. It is not merely subterranean in structure but substructural in function—underpinning the basilica’s theological narrative about the nativity with relic, reliquary, and the spatial sanctity. The crystal reliquary, crafted by Valadier, encases fragments of wood said to derive from the manger of Christ. This enclosure does not serve a commemorative function alone; it performs an epistemological labor, transforming historic birth in Bethlehem into memory. Or, better understood as the symbolic Bethlehem in Rome. The relic is not less than an object, rather a condensation of belief, safeguarded, framed by aesthetics, and sanctioned by ecclesial authority.

Here, Ignatius of Loyola celebrated his first Mass on Christmas Day, 1538. The founder of the Society of Jesus, whose theological praxis and educational institutions would later reshape Catholic modernity, enters ecclesial history through this cryptic intersection of incarnation and institution. This event marked a significant moment in his life and the beginning of his journey in founding the Society of Jesus. He and his companions, including Francis Xavier, made their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience on that same day. 

Pope Francis is also a Jesuit.

Elsewhere, the transposition of Arnolfo di Cambio’s Nativity sculpture into the Sistine Chapel off the right transept—designed by Domenico Fontana for Pope Sixtus V—the sacred scene relocated into a space of papal memorialization. This chapel, often confused with the more famous namesake in the Vatican, is itself a double—echoing, repeating, but distinct. The ciborium, upheld by bronze angels, is a model of the chapel itself: an architectural mise en abyme in which the space represents itself, collapsing interiority and exteriority, both as symbol and structure. It was created by Sebastiano Torregiani and the chapel was commissioned by Pope Sixtus V and designed by Giovanni Battista Ricci. 

The interior decoration of the Sistine Chapel, executed under the Mannerist idiom from 1587 to 1589, reflects the collaborative yet hierarchical character of late 16th-century sacred art. The painter Cesare Nebbia was not only an artist, but as a visual strategist, his sketches forming the preliminary matrix from which the totality of representation was derived. Giovanni Guerra's role—"supervisor" rather than originator—underscores the function of oversight in artistic production, mirroring the ecclesial structure it served. 

Photo: Vatican Media

Across from the Sistine chapel is the Pauline Chapel which houses the Salus Populi Romani -- an image brought to Rome by Saint Helen, the mother of Emperor Constantine. At the axis of Marian devotion, the icon was not merely venerated. It encouraged piety: it is deployed in processions, invoked in times of plague and war, and presented as Rome’s intercessor. As an icon, it does not depict the Virgin—it enacts her. It is not representation, but a living presence. 

The high altar sculpture by Pietro Bracci (c. 1750), the Pauline Chapel frescoes, and the crib sculptures by Arnolfo di Cambio (c. 1290) converge at the threshold between myth and mechanism. The Presepio—Nativity as tableau—is not a static devotional scene but a miniature theology: incarnation staged, God rendered in flesh and wood, yet mediated by artistic design and ritual space.

This church is also the burial site of Jerome, architect of the Vulgate, whose translation of Scripture into Latin was less a linguistic feat than a juridical act: it rendered the Word interpretable within the administrative language of the Western Church. Jerome's tomb here is a symbolic textual authority beneath the physical altar—a semiotic hierarchy rendered literal in stone.

Outside the chapel, the tomb of Gianlorenzo Bernini rests not in solitude but in proximity to this nexus of devotion, representation, and authority. The location is not incidental. Bernini, whose architectural and sculptural interventions reshaped the visual field of Roman Catholicism, is interred not merely in the Church, but within its aesthetical intents.

Thus, beneath these relics and symbolic arts lies a system. Within every reliquary and frescoed wall, a dense interplay of signs and disciplines—religious, political, visual—through which the sacred is not merely believed, but made intelligible, governable, and enduring.

To catalogue the artworks of Santa Maria Maggiore is to traverse a semantic architecture in which visibility is governed and memory curated. Each object—whether sculptural, pictorial, or epigraphic—functions within a discursive field that organizes not only sacred narrative but also ecclesiastical authority, imperial legitimacy, and the temporal accumulation of symbolic capital.

The ancient Roman agricultural calendar was also unearthed beneath the basilica. It anchors the Christian structure atop a pre-Christian schema of time, labor, and ritual. It is not an accident of excavation but a palimpsest, revealing how Christian space overwrites and absorbs the imperial mechanics of timekeeping and cosmic order. Here, the calendar survives not as artifact but as an unconscious substrate of liturgical time—where feast, fast, and harvest now serve the Church rather than the state.

The 5th-century mosaic cycle depict the Old Testament events—Exodus, crossing of the Red Sea, prophetic figures—is not narrative illustration but of doctrines. These mosaics operate as exegetical instruments, reconfiguring Hebrew scripture as prefiguration of Christ and Church. The Old is made to speak for the New, and the visual surface becomes a pedagogical apparatus through which theology is sedimented into the spatial experience of the faithful.

There is also the funerary monuments—Clement IX by Rainaldi and Guidi, Nicholas IV by Fontana, Pius IX by Jacometti—are not memorials but understood as sculptural inscriptions of papal sovereignty. Each tomb is a locus of posthumous governance, where the dead pope continues to exert discursive force through posture, gesture, and marble permanence. The papal busts, cast in bronze or sculpted in stone, are not likenesses but juridical tokens of ecclesial continuity.

Bernini’s statue of King Philip IV of Spain and the now-absent catafalque designed by Rainaldi for the king’s temporary obsequies, are also hosted in this site. It articulates the interweaving of sacred and secular dominion. Spain, as a Catholic monarchy, gains sacramental visibility within the Roman altar-space. The statue is not a gift but a node of geopolitical proximity; it is the spatialization of alliance through sanctified representation.

Moreover, that busts such as that of Costanzo Patrizi by Algardi and chapel tombs by della Porta enact the personalization of ecclesial memory, translating individuals into typologies—of piety, virtue, benefaction. In them, the individual body becomes symbolic matter, disciplined into legibility within the architecture of salvation.

Other significant arts here in Santa Maria Maggiori are the Fresco cycles—by Passignano, Puglia, Reni, Lanfranco—which are less expressions of stylistic innovation than components of a representational program regulated by the logic of the counter-reformation. These surfaces are not inert; they are didactic screens for the visual pedagogy of orthodoxy, where doctrinal clarity and emotional affect are balanced within tightly controlled aesthetic boundaries.

Thus, Santa Maria Maggiore is neither museum nor mausoleum. It is an operative field, where art is inseparable from authority, and beauty functions not as ornament, but as a regulated form of truth. Every statue, every fresco, every tomb is a statement—not of aesthetics, but of discipline, doctrine, and the gaze of the Church made material.

There are about 80 archpriests who have served here since 1127. 

There are also seven popes, four clergy and religious leaders, two nobilities, and two artists that were buried here. Among the popes who laid their final rest to eternity here were Pope Clement VIII, Pope Clement IX, Pope Honoriius III, Pope Nicholas IV, Pope Paul V, Pope St. Pius V, and Pope Sixtus V.

Their interment within this basilica must be read as a deliberate positioning—one that maps their bodies into the spatial dispositif of Roman Catholic authority. The basilica, therefore, is not a passive repository for the dead, but an active site of posthumous governance.

Burial, in this context, is not the end of power, but its redistribution. A pope interred beneath a Marian altar, within a chapel of imperial marble and mosaic dogma, does not relinquish agency. Rather, he is recoded as monument, as continuity, as flesh made stone. The dead pope becomes a semiotic anchor—a node in the dense network of visibility, ritual, and historical narration through which the papacy sustains itself across time.

That so many chose Santa Maria Maggiore—and not, for instance, the Lateran or St. Peter’s—reveals a significant topology of meaning. The basilica is not merely one of Rome’s four patriarchal churches; it is the Marian axis of papal power. Mary, named Theotokos in the wake of the Council of Ephesus, becomes here not only intercessor but ideological fulcrum. A pope buried at Maria Maggiore binds himself not to the throne of Peter, but to the womb of the Virgin—a gesture both theologically potent and politically astute.

In this light, the burial of Sixtus V, for example, becomes legible not simply as devotion but as spatial assertion. Sixtus, the urban renovator of Rome, who restructured the city along new axes of pilgrimage and power, lays his body beneath the very stones he commanded into place. His tomb is a point of convergence—where architecture, Marian theology, and papal memory collapse into a single, enduring structure.

Clement VIII, Clement IX, and Paul V further inscribe themselves into this sacred geography, aligning their posthumous presence with the Marian believers that undergirded much of the counter-reformation’s visual and doctrinal language. In choosing Santa Maria Maggiore, they position their deaths within a program of Marian authority—aligning the juridical power of the papacy with the affective power of the Mother of God.

Nicholas IV, the first Franciscan pope, buried here in the 13th century, represents an earlier iteration of this alignment—marking the moment when papal humility, friar poverty, and Marian elevation were no longer oppositional, but made to coexist within the same sacred envelope. His burial becomes an early expression of what would become, by the Baroque era, a fully integrated visual-political program.

Even Honorius III, though his tomb no longer survives, once participated in this logic. That his body was once here—and is now lost—underscores the fragility of presence, the instability of historical materiality. But the gesture of burial remains inscribed in the collective body of the Church, in the very narrative of papal succession and sacred space.

(Photo: Vatican Media)

Thus, these papal burials do not belong to death; they belong to the governance of memory. To be buried here is not simply to rest, but to continue—to speak silently through stone, to command through visibility, to remain within the spatial syntax of divine and ecclesiastical order. It is to become, quite literally, part of the religious structure.

Pope Franciscus likes to be laid here in final rest, too, in a wooden casket. 

Pope Francis' repeated visits to Salus Populi Romani, the ancient icon housed in Santa Maria Maggiore, are more than devotions—they are ritualized affirmations of a theology. The Virgin, in this context, becomes not just a figure of intercession, but a counterweight to Petrine power, a locus of humility, mercy, and the Church’s maternal face. Choosing to be buried near her, and not under the monumental dome of Peter’s Basilica, is to align his posthumous image not with imperial continuity, but with maternal care and popular piety. It is to shift the axis of memory.

Pope Francis, who has often distanced himself from traditional papal grandeur—from rejecting the Apostolic Palace to riding in a simple fiat—has cultivated a performative humility. If burial at St. Peter’s signifies elevation into the pantheon of papal sovereignty, burial at Santa Maria Maggiore enacts a counter-monumentality: authority made proximate, intimate, modest. The basilica becomes a space of intentional asymmetry—a refusal of centrality in favor of diffusion. This would mark a genealogical turn—not a break from tradition, but a reactivation of an alternative one. Many popes, as we have seen, were buried here: Sixtus V, Paul V, Pius V. Yet they aligned with the Marian and imperial fusion of the counter-reformation. Pope Francis' gesture would re-inscribe the space through a different regime: one that privileges the periphery over the center, the people over the palace, the bishop of Rome over the monarch of Vatican City.

In this Church, space is never neutral. A pope does not merely rest somewhere—he speaks there, eternally. Pope Francis choosing Santa Maria Maggiore would thus enact a theology of geographic dissent: affirming Rome’s ecclesial center, but from its Marian, not Petrine, pole. It would suggest a Church less rooted in dominion and more in discipleship—still deeply traditional, but quietly radical. And perhaps, most powerfully, it would be a soft non serviam to the ideals of canonization and veneration that tends to follow modern popes. Burial at Santa Maria Maggiore could become a quiet disruption in the otherwise seamless continuum of papal glorification.

Its his possible recalibration of its symbols. 

It would be his final parable. 

It is a diagrammatic shift in the entire structure of ecclesial power.

Santa Maria Maggiore is a peripheral center—older in some ways, but never imperial in the same fashion. It is a basilica of the Mother, not the Rock. It carries the maternal, the iconographic, the emotional, the intercessory. It is here that Pope Francis has repeatedly knelt before the icon of the Salus Populi Romani, invoking not dogma but devotion; not power, but presence. This is a rupture in the episteme of papal memorialization. It is the emergence of a new discursive possibility: that holiness may dwell not in monumental centrality, but in Marian proximity; that legacy might not be codified through lineage, but through location.

A pope who lies with Mary invokes a different genealogy—a sacred affect, maternal and vulnerable, that stands in soft resistance to ecclesial heirarchical architecture.

This, too, is power. But a different kind—not hierarchical, but horizontal; not juridical, but gestural. In death, as in life, he will continue to speak—but not from the throne. From the margins. From the crypt. From beside the Mother.

And in doing so, he will leave not just a body, but a question. What does it mean, now, to be a Pope?

Maybe, it means to embody a paradox.

To govern through absence.

To speak, yes, into chaos with a voice that still carries moral weight. But this weight is now tethered to credibility, not infallibility. To listen as a credible witness to the Gospel, not an administrator of decrees.

To carry a broken, beautiful Church on one's shoulders—not as a throne, but as a cross.

To witness Christ in the periphery. To witness suffering in silence. To witness hope where institution has failed. The Pope is not just a man in white; he is a walking question mark, wrapped in tradition, struggling with relevance. Perhaps, it is also to live with the tensions and contradictions. To defend ancient truths while calling for ecological conversion; to maintain a church that is both timeless and urgently in need of transformation. The Pope is no longer merely Peter's heir—he is a hinge between eras, between doctrinal continuity and pastoral change.

In a time of fractured authority—political, spiritual, epistemological—the Pope may be the last figure on Earth whose voice still reaches both the powerful and the powerless. Presidents will kneel. Prisoners will listen. This is not charisma; it is the residue of centuries, repurposed for new economies of attention. The papacy, in this sense, is one of the last global soft powers—an office not of domination, but of conscience.

The modern papacy has begun to unmake its own absolutism. To be a Pope now is increasingly to refuse the very spectacle of papal grandeur. Francis sleeps in a guesthouse, rides in an economy car, washes the feet of migrants and female prisoners. The tiara has become symbolic clutter. The power of the Pope now lies not in what he declares, but in what he chooses not to wield.♰