I mosaici di Santa Cecilia in Trastevere: una trama da ricomporre. Note a partire dall’arco absidale

The article focuses on a still scarcely explored part of Pope Paschal I’s patronage in the early 9th century Rome, that is the mosaic of the arch of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. Hidden and mostly destroyed during the renovation of the church undertaken by Cardinal Sfondrati in the early decades of the eighteenth century, the mosaic is known – in addition to two fragments in a poor state of preservation – from two 17th-century ‘copies’: a watercolor attributed to Antonio Eclissi and a print published in Ciampini’s Vetera Monimenta. This article points out for the first time that in the earliest and most faithful of the two reproductions, the watercolor by Eclissi, the ten female saints depicted on either side of the enthroned Virgin and Child, surrounded by angels at the top of the arch, hold in their hands an object from which flames emanate. The article therefore considers the possibility of seeing in this iconography a reference to the parable of the wise (and foolish) virgins (Matthew 25, 1-13) and the impact this reference would have had on the vision of the Kingdom of Heaven proposed, between the apse and the arch, in the presbytery of the Trastevere church.