Santa Maria sopra Minerva
Santa Maria sopra Minerva 1280
Some of my guidebooks tend to derail this church because it is not architecturally interesting and that may be so but the more I look at it the more I like it. I particularly like how it is a testament to history, especially those flood markers on the front right. They mark the flood heights of different Tiber floods that I was talking about in a previous post. I mentioned how the flood of Christmas day 1598 was enough to send a Tiber barge down to the Piazza di Spagna, well that flood marker is here shown as the highest marker. The earliest recorded marker is from 1422.
The exterior is perhaps lackluster but part of that is the stained glass rose windows are inset so that in later years pigeons made a home there. Now there is plate glass over the round surfaces therefore you can’t really make out the stained glass work from the outside.
The interior is kind of a problem right now because it is in the middle of a heavy duty restoration so only a portion of the inside is open to the public, which was a drag for me because there was one painting in particular I was keen to see. A painting by Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta which shows Saints Lucy and Agatha both who suffered torturous deaths, Saint Lucy holds a plate with her eyeballs on it and Saint Agatha holds one with her breasts. A very macabre painting but Catholicism specialized in macabre. The reason I am interested is because last year I really became addicted to a particular pastry in Sicily that is made to honor Saint Agatha, and those pastries are meant to look like her breasts. I like that the Sicilians make these to show solidarity for a young girl who stood up for herself, in a way these are defiant pastries. I did manage to get a picture of the painting from a distance, the painting is in bad shape and Saint Lucy’s hand looks very strange.
The inside ceilings are quite remarkable, the deep cobalt blue is beautiful.
Also, as I’ve said elsewhere, this was the site where Galileo’s trial was held.
