Artistic License

The Basilica of San Lorenzo in Lucina is one of Rome’s oldest churches, founded, according to tradition, in the mid-fourth century. Excavations beneath the present floor level have revealed the ruins of an ancient Roman house, presumably that of Lucina, the Roman matron who donated her property to the newly legal Christian cause. A well in the ancient courtyard still produces clear water that reputedly has healing effects for the sick. The water’s effect on buildings is less beneficial; seepage has plagued the church for its entire history.

In the seventeenth century San Lorenzo, strategically located between the great aristocratic palazzi around the Pantheon and the seedy artists’ quarter to the north called Four Corners (demolished by Mussolini), provided a showcase for the artistic giants of Baroque Rome, including Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the “divine” Guido Reni (who painted the high altarpiece), Carlo Saraceni, Simon Vouet, and the architect Giuseppe Sardi. Nicolas Poussin is buried there, among many illustrious others. In 1650 San Lorenzo’s original late antique interior was entirely remodeled in the Baroque style by the brilliant architect Cosimo Fanzago, but his work was destroyed in 1858 by order of Pope Pius IX, who regarded Baroque design as ugly and licentious. (All those sporting cupids!) Only the basilica’s marble pulpit has survived the purge to remind us of what must have been a spectacular space.

Fanzago’s alterations to the ancient basilica included eliminating its side aisles, which were walled off to become a series of private chapels, available for lease and snapped up by some of the city’s most illustrious families. The “renovations” of 1858, carried out by Andrea Busiri Vici, created two more chapels for lease, one on each side of the main altar.

Responsibility for the decor of these family chapels has always involved a complex web of agreements among the lease holders, the parish, and the higher ranks of the Church. Since 1870, changes to historic properties have also involved the Italian state. Today a special Fund for Religious Buildings, a branch of the Ministry of the Interior, operates under the supervision of the Superintendency of Fine Arts, a branch of the Ministry of Culture. The early-twentieth-century superintendent Antonio Muñoz was as enthusiastic an eliminator of Baroque embellishments as Pius IX, but tastes began to change in the late 1960s; in Rome today, any artistic or architectural intervention of historical significance, in any style, is vincolato—“chained” by law to preserve its present form. But these “chains” are a relatively new development in Rome’s millennial history, and the city is so full of monuments that official procedure, in a country plagued by bureaucracy, is not always followed to the letter.

The chapel to the right of the high altar in San Lorenzo, created in the nineteenth century, was never conspicuous enough to merit particular scrutiny except for a wooden crucifix “of Michelangelesque derivation” that dates from 1590. The crucifix is vincolato. The rest of the chapel, up to now, has been too new for the designation. Busiri Vici, like every architect active in nineteenth-century Rome, employed a team of decorative painters to embellish the walls and ceilings of the chapel with floral designs, landscapes, and classical motifs, but they were craftsmen rather than artists, no matter what artistic aspirations they may have held in their hearts.

In 1985, following a suggestion by Vittorio Emanuele IV, the exiled pretender to the throne of Italy, San Lorenzo’s monarchist parish priest, Don Pietro Pintus (who tried, without success, to have Princess Grace of Monaco beatified after her death), approved a thoroughgoing renovation of the chapel housing the wooden crucifix that included transforming its western wall into a monument to Vittorio Emanuele’s father, Umberto II of Savoy, the last king of Italy. The project’s sponsor, the distinguished lawyer Carlo d’Amelio, had spent more than half his life (he was eighty-three) as a loyal citizen of the Kingdom of Italy. Guglielmo Marconi had been one of his first clients, and for both of them the Church and the royal family, along with their own aristocratic social rank, provided a certain amount of insulation from Mussolini. Under the long reign of King Vittorio Emanuele III—Umberto II’s father and Vittorio Emanuele IV’s grandfather—d’Amelio received multiple knighthoods and served Popes Pius XI and XII as Secret Chamberlain of Cape and Sword to His Holiness, one of a group of aristocratic volunteers who assisted the pontiff on ceremonial occasions.

This world was swept away in 1946 when, by popular referendum (for the first time including women voters), the Republic of Italy abolished the monarchy and exiled the male members of the House of Savoy for the family’s part in two world wars, Fascism, the antisemitic racial laws of 1938, and colonial exploitation. (The exile was confirmed by the Italian Constitution of 1948.) Nonetheless, under the new Christian Democratic government, d’Amelio and other Italian monarchists, many of them firmly entrenched in the postwar power structure, continued to carry the torch for the House of Savoy. Because the first king of Italy, King Vittorio Emanuele II, his successor, Umberto I, and Umberto’s popular wife, Queen Margherita, were buried in state in the Pantheon, the monarchists have never entirely given up hope that later generations of the Italian royal family—among them Vittorio Emanuele III, who died in exile in 1947—might attain the same honor.

The rest of Italy has not shared these aspirations: when Umberto II died in 1983, officials at every level of government, from the Socialist president, Sandro Pertini, and the Socialist prime minister, Bettino Craxi, to the Communist mayor of Rome, Ugo Vetere, and the Communist superintendent of antiquities, Adriano La Regina, saw keeping the House of Savoy out of the Pantheon as a matter of national integrity. Amid rumors that the late king’s body would be smuggled into the monument by monarchists in collusion with the Honor Guard of the Royal Tombs of the Pantheon, it was abruptly closed to visitors, ostensibly because a piece of the cornice had fallen on a German tourist’s head. By strange coincidence, however, the Pantheon reopened as soon as Umberto II had been laid to rest in France.

There was no question that the installation of a marble bust of Umberto II in San Lorenzo in Lucina and an attendant requiem Mass for the former king’s soul, two years after his death and a few blocks north of the Pantheon, were meant to provide a kind of consolation for disappointed monarchists. The inscribed marble plaque beneath the bust is positively florid:

In memory of Umberto II of Savoy, King of Italy, who, in Christian submission to the Divine will preferred exile to civil war, devoting himself to this [condition] for the love of his Fatherland, to which, up to his death, he ever directed his encouragement of concord and his filial thoughts, confirming the ideals and traditions of his house. Racconigi, 15 September 1904–Geneva, 18 March 1983. His son, Vittorio Emanuele, placed this [monument] in the hope that the exile would cease after his death in the translation of his venerated corpse to the Pantheon.

The black marble molding that frames the niche with Umberto’s bust may simply signify mourning, but black was also the color of the shirts worn by Mussolini’s Fascist militia, as everyone involved in the project was well aware.

In 2002, six years after Carlo d’Amelio’s death at the age of ninety-four, Italy, under Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, revoked the exile of the male line of the House of Savoy. Vittorio Emanuele IV and his wife, Marina Doria, moved to Rome.^* For the occasion, Carlo d’Amelio’s son Antonio and his wife, Daniela Memmo, decided to spruce up the chapel at San Lorenzo in Lucina with the help of a lay volunteer at the church, Bruno Valentinetti, a self-taught painter in Rome’s long-standing decorative tradition; he had already provided painted decoration for one of Berlusconi’s many villas. Valentinetti enclosed the entire rectangular chapel in a fictive architectural scheme embellished with colorful bouquets and human figures in sepia tones, one of whom bore the features of Elettra Marconi, the effervescent daughter of Guglielmo (still effervescing today at ninety-six).

Above the bust of Umberto II, Valentinetti added a pair of winged figures hovering in the empyrean beneath a floating Savoy coat of arms. Whether they are pagan winged victories, Judeo-Christian angels, or a combination of the two, they are modestly clad in Grecian pepla. The figure on the left holds a painted crown just above the former monarch’s sculpted head and looks out at the viewer. The other, painted in profile, unscrolls a map of Italy. Initially the right-hand figure exhibited a standard classical profile: a sharply pointed nose, full, parted lips, and a prominent chin. The meaning of the assemblage was easy to discern: Umberto, King of Italy in saecula saeculorum. A plaque declares that Daniela and Antonio “restored” the assemblage in 2003.

By 2023 San Lorenzo’s eternal seepage had compromised the murals (painted a secco—on a dry wall—rather than more durable fresco, a much more difficult technique that involves painting on wet plaster), so Daniela and Antonio commissioned a new round of waterproofing and restoration. Valentinetti, today still active at eighty-three, set about repairing his own work. It was completed by 2025.

Just after Christmas, as 2025 slipped into 2026, the left-leaning Italian newspaper La Repubblica published a photograph of the restored winged map bearer’s face alongside a photograph of Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni. The resemblance was beyond denial, from the shape of the figure’s profile to the distinctive shading under the eyes. As the first Italian prime minister since 1946 to come from a neofascist background, Meloni has been a controversial figure throughout her career. Valentinetti turned out to have his own right-wing credentials: in addition to working for Berlusconi, he had also run for city office in Rome in 2008 on the ticket of a coalition of two particularly hardcore neofascist parties, La Destra—Fiamma Tricolore, at the moment when one of Meloni’s longtime fellow travelers in the neofascist Italian Social Movement, Gianni Alemanno, had been elected mayor of Rome. It was easy enough to conclude that Valentinetti’s intervention lent the overtly royalist decorative scheme of the chapel a further layer of political significance, whether he acted on his own initiative, the parish priest’s, the patrons’, or a conjunction of all three.

The patrons, Count Antonio and Countess Daniela, denied any involvement in the figure’s transformation, insisting that they had only ordered waterproofing and restorations. Valentinetti and the parish priest, Monsignor Daniele Micheletti, also evaded giving any direct answers to the reporters who began to appear in droves. Besides, the priest volunteered, there was an immemorial tradition of inserting contemporary portraits into ecclesiastical paintings; had not Caravaggio used a prostitute as a model for the Virgin Mary?

At this point the Vatican intervened:

The Cardinal Vicar of His Holiness, Baldo Reina, distances himself from the declarations of Monsignor Micheletti and expresses his own displeasure at what has happened. He will set into motion the necessary investigations to verify the potential responsibilities of the various subjects involved. In renewing the commitment of the Diocese of Rome to the preservation of its artistic and spiritual heritage, let it be firmly emphasized that the images of sacred art and the Christian tradition cannot become objects of improper use or exploitation, being destined exclusively to support liturgical life, and personal and community prayer.

Cardinal Reina’s statement deliberately refers back to the Twenty-Fifth Decree, issued in 1563 by the Council of Trent, whose pronouncements between 1547 and 1563 distilled the official Roman Catholic response to the challenge of the Protestant Reformation. In the face of radical Protestants’ condemnation of images, the Twenty-Fifth Decree holds that “great profit is derived from all sacred images,” but they should not “[suggest] false doctrine,” or “[furnish] occasion of dangerous error to the uneducated,” or “be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust.” The text says nothing about inserting contemporary portraits into religious art because the practice was too ubiquitous—indeed, the faces of secular patrons have appeared in works of religious art since ancient times. In classical Athens (at least according to Plutarch), the sculptor Phidias carved his own portrait and that of his friend Pericles into the shield of Athena Parthenos, the cult statue of the Parthenon. Saintly Fra Angelico portrayed his much less saintly benefactor Cosimo de’ Medici as the haloed Saint Cosmas in his San Marco altarpiece of 1439–1441.

Not every intervention of this sort has been flattering. A later resident of Fra Angelico’s convent, the firebrand friar Girolamo Savonarola, appears in one of Luca Signorelli’s frescoes for Orvieto Cathedral as the Antichrist. (Signorelli suffered no consequences; by that time, 1504, Savonarola had been burned at the stake as a heretic.) Michelangelo’s Last Judgment places the papal master of ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, at the mouth of hell. Edward Burne-Jones’s mosaics in the apse of the neo-Romanesque church of Saint Paul’s Within the Walls, commissioned by Episcopalians, show the church fathers with the faces of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Junius Morgan (father of J.P.), but in Florence Carlo Dolci had already portrayed Vittoria della Rovere, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, as the Virgin Mary and the future Grand Duke Cosimo III as the child Jesus Christ.

Monsignor Micheletti was on firm ground when he declared that Caravaggio used prostitutes as models for the Virgin Mary: the painter’s stately Madonna of Loreto in the Roman church of Sant’Agostino was said to be modeled on the courtesan Maddalena “Lena” Antognetti (as well as a statue of the Roman goddess Juno), and his Death of the Virgin was rejected by the friars who commissioned it on the grounds that his model had been a drowned prostitute fished out of the Tiber. Caravaggio’s paintings show how fiercely his Christian faith convinced him of the value of every human being, even the most abject; and hence behind Monsignor Micheletti’s apparently frivolous comment lies, at least potentially, a profound matter of theology. There are those in Rome who believe that praying for Prime Minister Meloni to foster the reburial in the Pantheon of the exiled kings of the House of Savoy (together with the late pretender) also constitutes a good cause. They are, however, an exiguous minority of Romans, more a curiosity than a threat.

The one principle that has never been invoked in the whole affair is that asserted by the painter Paolo Veronese in 1573 when he came before the Venetian Inquisition, as it investigated complaints about his Last Supper. The Council of Trent’s decree had been in effect for only ten years; consequently artists and inquisitors were busily testing the boundaries of their jurisdictions. Aristocrats, rich merchants, doctors, and lawyers, then as now, could rely on the protective power of status and money. Veronese, on the other hand, took a boldly original (and extremely modern) tack, extending Plato’s idea of divine inspiration to his own profession: “We painters take the same license that poets and madmen do.” Artistic license is the conspicuous absentee in all the discussions of the portrait in San Lorenzo in Lucina.

Bruno Valentinetti is invariably described as a “restorer,” but the work he edited in the course of restoration was his own; does he not have some right as an artist to alter his own creation? Monsignor Micheletti observed that the restorer “was certainly not just a plasterer,” but neither is he exactly Paolo Veronese. In short, when does a wall painting become significant enough to be vincolato? When does decoration make the sublime step from craft to art? In Italy, with its endless layers of meaning, it all depends. It always depends.

For the story of the Chapel of the Crucifix in San Lorenzo in Lucina is also very much a story about the Roman aristocracy, whose titles were banned in 1946 along with the monarchy but whose internal rules operate unchanged among the adept, even if the Italian state no longer subsidizes the publication of their Golden Book of Italian Nobility: the baronial families of medieval pedigree like the Massimo (who trace their lineage back to ancient Rome), Colonna, Orsini, Farnese, and Theodoli; and the “black” nobility that includes the old barons but also families like the Chigi, Borghese, Odescalchi, and Pamphilj, who owe their status to post-medieval popes (many of whom, in their own day, had been promoted on the basis of ability rather than aristocratic birth). Called “black” because they affected a sober Spanish style of dress at court, the scions of the black nobility bask in the superior light of their divine chrism. The “white” nobility consists of aristocrats created by mere secular powers (the Torlonia, elevated by Napoleon, are the prime example in Roman society). Principessa Elettra Marconi inherits black nobility through her mother’s line; the d’Amelia owe their earldom to the House of Savoy and hence are white nobility, but barely.

Giorgia Meloni, on the other hand, is a Romanaccia from the working-class suburb of Garbatella and has only the nobility of the high office conferred on her by the Italian state, which is no mean distinction; Bruno Valentinetti has asserted the nobility of the workingman within the Italian state by running, however unsuccessfully, for civic office. Within the Church, Baldo Reina is a cardinal, Monsignor Micheletti is a parish priest. Blame for inconvenient events, it seems, tends to trickle downward much more reliably than money.

A swipe of gray plaster has now obliterated the offending features of the map-wielding figure in San Lorenzo in Lucina. Monsignor Micheletti said he ordered its destruction because he was tired of the parade of tourists coming into the church to snap selfies rather than to pray, and this is perhaps the most straightforward, sensible observation to emerge from the whole business. The face of Elettra Marconi remains intact. The flap about the restoration has never involved her because Valentinetti touched her up to look as she always had. Her portrait never rankled because, as a principessa, a faithful Catholic, a friend of the family, a neighbor, and a generous benefactress, she fits comfortably into the immemorial Roman scheme of things.

Selfie snappers in search of hidden portraits are advised to visit the Centrale Montemartini in Via Ostiense, a museum that whimsically juxtaposes an old power station with a marvelous collection of ancient Roman art. There they will find a portrait bust of Silvio Berlusconi, disguised as a Roman patrician of the first century BCE. The resemblance, absolutely coincidental, is no less striking than that of the erstwhile Giorgia Meloni of San Lorenzo in Lucina to the prime minister herself. You read it here first.