Carlos Fontana – Roger Pearse

We’ve been looking at old pictures of Old St Peter’s in Rome, and thinking about the Circus of Nero nearby, and other structures from ancient Rome.

Last week Brent Nongbri very kindly sent me an extract from one of those tourist books, which the Italians do so well, about the pagan tombs under the Vatican, which contains some interesting diagrams.^[1] In it, my eye was drawn to some splendid old pictures, which the author had reproduced from Carlo Fontana, Il Tempio Vaticano e la sua origine, Roma, 1694.^[2]

The book is mainly about New St Peter’s. It has details of how the Vatican obelisk was moved (with pictures!). But it also contains plans and reconstructions of the older basilica, and the area around it. I thought that these would be known to few, and deserved to be better known.

Here are some of them. Click on the image to get the full-size picture. (They’re all small) I apologise for the cut-off to the right; the blog software doesn’t handle this very well.

fontana_2_plan — Plan of Nero’s circus and its relation to the basilica.

fontana_3_circus_of_nero_w_petronilla — Reconstruction of Circus of Nero with dome of “temple of Apollo”, later Mausoleum of Honorius, later still chapel of St. Petronilla.

fontana_4_plan_of_old_basilica — Plan of old St Peter’s, with New St Peter’s and the Circus of Nero all on the same plan.

fontana_5_section_of_old_basilica — Section lengthways through Old St Peter’s.

fontana_6_half_built_w_andrea — St Peter’s halfway rebuilt, from the south; the new circular church, the Vatican rotunda, and behind it most of the old church.

fontana_7_grottos_of_vatican — Plan of the cellars under the Vatican.

fontana_8_section_and_end_of_old_basilica — Section through Old St Peters side-ways, with picture of the old frontage.

^[1]Pietro Zander, The Necropolis under St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, Elio de Rosa editore, 2009.↩
^[2]Online at Archive.org here, from the original, rather strange, Microsoft digitisation; a better version at Heidelberg here.↩

Roger Pearse

Tag: Carlos Fontana

Plans and illustrations of the Vatican from 1694

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