Memorializing Identity: The Foundation and Reform of San Lorenzo in Panisperna

Abstract

In the year 1308, Cardinal Giacomo Colonna (d.1318) was a tremendously busy man. He had returned to Rome only a few years earlier in the aftermath of a devastating papal war waged against his family by Boniface VIII (d.1303). The papal court had been absent from the city for years, leaving an administrative void in Rome as it established itself first in Poitiers, then in Avignon from 1308 under the leadership of the Gascon pope Clement V. In 1306 Giacomo was fully reinstated to the cardinalate, and set about rebuilding his family’s fortunes and reputation, as well as a number of the city’s churches. He commissioned a new mosaic facade for the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, and in 1308 he oversaw repairs following a fire at the Lateran basilica.2 In the same year, he requested and was given charge of a small, ruined Benedictine convent which he built into a new community for Franciscan women. His most unobtrusive activity that year, the founding of the small convent of San Lorenzo in Panisperna, has attracted little attention in comparison with the magnificent mosaics of Santa Maria Maggiore just down the street.3 Yet, when we look more closely at San Lorenzo’s