From City to Church: Processional Architecture in Space and Memory in the City of Rome during the Imperial Period and into Late Antiquity (20 min)

Presenters

Kearstin A. Jacobson, University of Texas at Austin

Abstract

Processional movement was ubiquitous in social, political, and religious rituals throughout the Roman Empire. Framing its urban performance was an architectural armature including honorific arches and columns, colonnades, altars, temples, and uniting pavements. These forms had agency, directing participants where and how to go. Given the physical engagement it demanded, this architecture established mental links between movement and form; it created associative—and ultimately, neural—memories. And because architecture is a shared experience, these associations created memories among those who had experienced the Roman urban vocabulary; thus, by repeating these forms, Romans maintained a consistent visual vocabulary of procession familiar to all sharing in the collective, cultural memory of their urban narrative. As Christianity developed a public character, these armature forms remained functional in urban processional rituals. Moreover, early church architecture integrated them. This paper evaluates the interrelationship of architecture framing Roman procession and that used both structurally and decoratively within early churches to reassess the latter’s architectural legacy. Drawing on examples from the city of Rome, namely imperial period itineraries for the triumphal and adventus processions, alongside the late antique basilica churches of Old St. Peter’s, St. Paul Outside the Walls, St. Sabina, and St. Maria Maggiore, it questions earlier scholarly suppositions privileging experiential knowledge exclusive to elite audiences when locating churches on the continuum of palace architecture, where “Christ” replaces “emperor” in reception halls. By examining the agency of urban experience as an embodied confrontation with a sequence of architectural forms excerpted from the processional armature, it proposes the adaption of urban processional architecture within early churches established pathways resonating with the city as a whole, representing it while also triggering memories of urban forms to create a textured spatial narrative: these meaningful, sequential links made the church a microcosm of urban processional space knowable to all Romans.