Death on the scene

by Maria Lucia Violo
Prints for the Octavaries of the Dead of the Arciconfraternita dell’Orazione e Morte of Rome
That of the sacred representations for the Octave of the Dead, the eight-day period of sermons and other religious services that began on 1 November, was a practice established in Rome from the 1760s onwards, at the initiative of the Archconfraternity of Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte. Soon, imitated by other sodalities, it became one of the most heartfelt and celebrated annual appointments in popular Roman devotion. The Companies would set up, in their cemeteries, a veritable ‘little theatre’ composed of wax figures, which could represent, from time to time, a biblical, hagiographic, allegorical or ecclesiastical episode, in any case always with a didactic and edifying purpose. This display remained on display for the entire duration of the Octave, not infrequently even longer, for almost the entire duration of the month of November, and was visited by the large crowds of devotees who filled the churches and cemeteries on the occasion of the services. Upon payment of an alms, one received a print depicting the same subject as the ‘little theatre’, together with an explanation sheet explaining its contents.

Sacred representations continued with regularity from 1763, the year in which we have news of the first performance by the Orazione e Morte, until 1870, when political events led to a secularisation of the city and a general weakening of religious sentiment and practices: in particular, for what we are interested in, to the decline of sacred representations and the demolition of cemeteries. These representations (which involved a staging characterised by great spectacularity and suggestion, which was not infrequently taken by writers from beyond the Alps as proof of the inclination to the pathetic and the tearful to easy effect typical of the Italian, and in particular the Roman, spirit) generally took place in the innermost room of the underground cemeteries, known as the ‘Holy Land’, which in itself was frequently decorated with real ossuaries and other lugubrious symbolism. In it, a veritable stage was erected, with a proscenium decorated with black curtains and cypress branches, on which wax statues were placed, life-size, dressed with every care and often in considerable numbers, up to ten. The invention and execution of the scene was entrusted to architects, painters and sculptors, and the production of the prints to engravers who, although today appear to us to be of eminently local fame, must also have enjoyed a certain esteem at the time.The reputation of the performances was amplified by the mention of them in the Ordinary Diary of Chracas from at least 1800; and from the same date, further confirmation of their popularity is provided by the numerous reports of visits by popes and sovereigns.

The collection of these engravings held by the Casanatense is unfortunately incomplete, as it includes 82 pieces (compared to the 103 attested by the sources for the Orazione e Morte) covering a total of 55 years; in addition, there are the modest number of 24 illustrated sheets. The engravings form, seamlessly mixed with other prints of the same nature pertaining to other Roman confraternities, a unitary collection that occupies three containers corresponding to the shelf marks 20.B.II.128, 20.B.III.33 and 20.B.II.34 and labelled ‘Octavary of the Dead’. Within them, the succession and numbering of the prints do not seem to follow any particular criteria: only for the composition of binder 20.B.III.34 is it possible to establish an authorial criterion, as it contains exclusively works by Bartolomeo and Achille Pinelli, executed, in fact, for various Confraternities.

An almost complete collection regarding all the Compagnie is in the possession of the Biblioteca Universitaria Alessandrina, the so-called Pieri Collection, in six volumes, five dedicated to the Roman sodalities and one to those of the neighbouring towns. Another collection relating to prints of the Orazione e Morte alone was put together over the years in the archives of the Confraternity and is still preserved there as the De Rossi Collection. Yet another one, similar to that of the Casanatense, equally lacunose, is held by the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Rome. All these collections were assembled in the late 19th century by Roman antiquarian booksellers who then sold them to the aforementioned libraries. It seems that already in these early days these engravings, probably due to their essential nature as second-hand prints, constituted a considerable bibliographic rarity.

The Arciconfraternita di Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte.

The occasion of the Octavary justified and required in general the funerary theme, which is most frequently represented in our Sodality since, by statute, the Orazione e Morte was entrusted with the task of collecting (‘associating’) and burying the poor or abandoned corpses found inside and outside the city of Rome since 1538. This was an extremely useful work of charity from a social point of view at a time when, as is well known, there was no funeral service organised by the public or private sector, but the care, with related expenses, of transporting the coffin and burial was left to individual families, and therefore those who were poor were automatically excluded.

The Company was formed spontaneously for this purpose in 1538 under the name Confraternity of Death and obtained official recognition from Pope Julius III in 1552; in 1560, Pius IV raised it to Archconfraternity and approved its Statutes, first published in 1590. In 1573, the church with the adjoining oratory was built. Its action in the field of associations must have been massive, as the archive documents testify: between 1552 and 1896, the year in which it ceased its task due to the new regulations issued in the meantime regarding burials, it appears that the congregation buried around 8,600 corpses, with an average of more than 25 per year. In order to be more efficient in its task, every year on All Saints’ Day, the Archconfraternity posted an edict, surmounted by its coat of arms, at all the city gates and in the busiest quarters of the city, reminding the institution of its purpose and urging citizens to inform it of the existence of the poor dead, both in the city and outside.

Memories of the ‘associations’ were scrupulously recorded year after year in the series of Books of the Dead Buried by the Venerable Archiconfraternity of Death (three manuscript volumes located at Ms. 4978-80). These registers, some of which date back to the 18th century, have a frontispiece adorned with a monochrome or coloured watercolour alluding to the idea of death and the associations of corpses. In them, for each deceased person, the personal details were recorded, an indication of the place where he or she had been found and a brief account of the episodes that occurred during the ‘association’ (some of them, apparently, miraculous). When the particulars of a corpse were not known, the practice was to take it to the most frequented squares and display it for reconnaissance.

The corpses were buried in the churches closest to the place where they were found, but the cemetery that received the most dead was that of the Archconfraternity itself, which in the old church building was located under the sacristy and then, with the architect Ferdinando Fuga’s renovation in 1737, came to be located under the oratory. The dead who were ‘associated’ during the Octave of the Dead were exposed between two candles in the cemetery and were given the customary funeral rites. However, following the new sanitary regulations issued at the beginning of the 19th century, which led among other things to the construction of the Verano cemetery (consecrated in 1835 and used for burials from 1 July 1836), the Vicariate of Rome decreed that ‘the burial of country corpses and drowned persons should henceforth be performed in the cemeteries of suburban parishes in the open air [. ..] or in the public cemetery, diligently avoiding transit through the city with said corpses’. The Archconfraternity therefore provided a special burial place for the country dead in the Verano cemetery.

The text of the editorial is a brief extract from Maria Lucia Violo’s thesis entitled: Le stampe per gli Ottavari dei morti dell’Arciconfraternita dell’Orazione e Morte di Roma: la collezione della Biblioteca Casanatense (1782-1885). [Diploma for librarians from the Special School for Archivists and Librarians a.y. 2010-2011. Rapporteur Prof. Tiziana Pesenti, co-rapporteur Prof. Francesca Manzari]