Early Book Collections | Art and Architecture

Jubilee! A Virtual Roman Pilgrimage

This exceptionally rare suite of ten folio souvenir broadsheets, each printed and distributed separately but collected here in one complete set, escorts the viewer through text and image on a virtual pilgrimage through the ten Roman procession churches designated for extraordinary indulgence during the Jubilee year of 1625. Designed by the esteemed artist and engraver Giovanni Maggi, each features a large central woodcut of the external façade and grounds of each individual church. These central architectural scenes are in turn surrounded by smaller vignettes illustrating the most significant relics, shrines, chapels, and works of art within each of these ecclesiastical edifices. The short engraved texts below generally detail the history and fabrics of the church, associated indulgences, and in some cases even the hours of operation specifically for pilgrims. Together, this suite of ten immensely detailed and informative engravings offer unique snapshots in time of how these sacred spaces were adorned and carefully documented for the purposes of imaginative religious devotion.

Of course, not everyone could afford the costs, and travel risks, associated with these pilgrimage years; and those who could often desired visual keepsakes to remind them of the places they had visited at such great personal expense so that their sins might be forgiven. Pilgrimages to Rome during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were intimately tied to a traditional religious culture of extraordinary indulgences that began to fall regularly between intervals of 25 years. Pilgrims flocked to the holy city determined to earn these indulgences by faithfully attending and worshipping at the principal stations of worship and veneration within each of the major basilicas. Growing out of St. Philip Neri’s 1553 repopularization of a prescribed itinerary for pilgrims to Rome’s seven major basilicas—St. Peter’s, St. Paul Outside-the-Walls, St. Sebastian’s, St. John Lateran, Holy Cross-in-Jerusalem, St. Lawrence-Outside-the Walls, and finally St. Mary Major—the present sequence of ten sites adds the Basilica of the Annunciation, St. Paul at the Three Fountains, and St. Maria del Popolo.

The explosion of Jubilee pilgrimages in the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth-centuries coincided, and helped fund, the miraculous transformation of the urban Roman landscape: erecting fallen ancient Egyptian obelisks, broadening boulevards, restoring the ancient basilicas, and in the case of St. Peter’s, its wholesale demolition and replacement on an unprecedented scale.

The prints were designed and drawn by Maggi, likely printed and engraved by Matthaeus Greuter and published under a partnership led by Paul Maupin that included Greuter himself; the latter is suggested by the presentation of Greuter’s privileges to print his designs, and a further dedication by Maupin to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, both appearing in the St. John Lateran sheet. This also suggests that the Lateran—the actual ecclesiastical seat of the pope in his role as Bishop of Rome—was intended as the first print in priority within the series.

Though Maggi died in 1618, Maupin and Greuter did not actually publish the print series until 1625, specifically to coincide with the Jubilee Year. Notably, in that same year Maupin published another work by Maggi: a more general urban atlas of Rome in a massive sequence of some forty-eight plates. Though both constituted major cartographic explorations of the holy city, Maggi’s larger-scale maps could not be more different in format and style than the more diminutive, but exceedingly detailed pilgrimage prints. The latter were not only guides, but rich and attractive sites of mental prayer and devotion that could be performed anywhere, from inside the vast and crowded basilicas that they depict, to the privacy of the pilgrim’s home after their return from Rome. Another potential market for this pilgrimage sequence was for cloistered monks and nuns, most of whose vows required that they never leave the walls of their monasteries and convents. In some instances regular clergy set up, and even painted, these Roman basilica pilgrimage sequences as evenly spaced stations within the sanctuary of their convent churches, manifesting a kind of miniature virtual version of what secular Catholics were able to do within three dimensions.

—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens