“Communis Patria”

Introduction

Already in the Early Middle Ages, foreigners in Rome established schole to welcome their fellow countrymen traveling to or settling in Rome. These institutions were almost always entirely devotional and lacked autonomy or a strong national character.¹ The first major event to have contributed to the emergence of the national confraternity typology, which I will be discussing in this paper, was the first “holy year,” or the Jubilee of 1300, called by Pope Boniface VIII. With the expected large numbers of religious pilgrims coming from around Europe, new “national” hospices began to pop up around Rome to serve as points of reference. Though reflecting in many ways the earlier schole, these new institutions had distinctive national characters and began to occupy central districts and nodes throughout Rome. They also began to function as much more than just religious institutions, and instead as proto-welfare organizations. We can take, for example, the latter case of San Girolamo degli Schiavoni, which was granted to the “Slavic” population (Dalmatians, Croatians, and Bosnians) in the mid-15th century, who were arriving as refugees from Ottoman advances in the Balkans.² The “Schiavoni” (Slavonian) confraternity organized a hospice around the Church and functioned as a semi-independent urban enclave tailored to a specific nation, especially being able to provide services for permanent settlement. Such national confraternities could now establish “solid links of socio-religious solidarity.”³

The next big shift occurred with the return of Pope Gregory XI to Rome from Avignon in 1377, when Rome experienced rapid demographic growth. Prior to the fourteenth century, all those not born in Rome were seen as foreigners, whether it be Italians from other regions or those who had come from beyond the alps (alienigenae, forenses and ultramontani). But with the emergence of national confraternities in the fourteenth century, and the return of the Pope and the Curia, awareness of foreign nationalities in Rome developed together with the concept of the natio as they began to establish a stronger presence on the urban fabric of the city as well as its social life. This is where I turn my attention to the focus of my paper, and specifically to the Santa Maria dell’Anima, which was the German national church and confraternity in Rome beginning at the end of the fourteenth century. Believed to have been founded around 1390 for the Jubilee year, it became the central expression of Rome’s largest foreign identity, the Germans. I choose to focus on the Anima because it occupied a particularly interesting institutional and spatial position within Rome’s national institutions. Unlike many other national churches, it was not tied to a royal patronage system nor did it represent a single, unified natio. Instead, it represented the heterogeneous German-speaking world of Northern Europe, which was not united under a single empire, as say France. This made it especially capable of projecting a coherent “German” presence outward into the city. I thus choose to privilege the Anima’s external expressions: its architectural and artistic form and urban presence, rather than how it was internally perceived by the German community itself. Focusing on the outward-facing elements allows for a reading of the Anima as an active urban agent in constant conversation with Roman life rather than a closed enclave. Chronologically, I have chosen to focus primarily on the period after 1443, following the return of Pope Eugenius IV from Florence which began the Anima’s largest development, both architecturally and institutionally. More broadly, I ask how the Anima constructed and articulated a distinctly German collective identity in Rome of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Rather than reflecting a preexisting German identity, Santa Maria dell’Anima actively produced a legible German presence in Renaissance Rome through its coordinated, external architectural, artistic, and urban program. Historical and Theoretical Context:

I will begin with a brief history of the Anima prior to the sixteenth century to establish the system that made the Anima legible in Renaissance Rome. Though scholars aren’t certain on the exact founding date, the most widely accepted theory is that it was officially founded in 1390 by Dutchman Giovanni di Pietro of Dordrecht and his wife Caterine, who bought and joined three houses in the Parione district as a welcoming centre for pilgrims from north-central Europe arriving for the Jubilee year. In fact, we still see the original three houses in the morphology of the current Santa Maria dell’Anima church. In 1398, Pope Boniface IX published a bull which granted Anima permission for the sale of indulgences, which became the confraternity’s main source of income in its first fifty years. Another bull was issued just a few years later in 1406 by Pope Innocent VII, which now put the Anima under special protection of the Apostolic See and freed the Anima from interference by Roman parishes.⁴ His bull also gave the German confraternity permission to bury Germans in a private cemetery, which was one of the biggest privileges that a foreign community could have, as it transformed the German community from a transient population into a spatially anchored one that was now materially inscribed into the urban and historical fabric of Rome. Between 1420-1434, we also see early real estate accumulation, which was being rented to almost exclusively fellow Germans. It is important to note that the definition of “German” was broad and fluid, having included those of Flemish, Dutch, Belgian, and other origins, and the Anima at this stage had a mixed social composition of everyone from lay craftsmen to clerics. The only universal factor was spoken German. In fact, the confraternity insisted that their members speak German, including the chaplain: “qui lingua alamannicam bene sciat loqui” and that the members had to speak their native German, whether that be high or low: “naturaliter teutonizzare.”⁵ Though this paper will dedicate most of its attention to the Anima beginning in the mid-fifteenth century and thus the Anima as an institution for wealthy German clerics, I would also like to briefly discuss the “common” Germans of Rome that dominated the Anima in its first few decades, as this history is crucial in understanding the development of the German community. Pope Martin V had made immigration especially inviting to populate Rome, and residents from Germany were especially sought after as they were not a part of the ancient feud between the Orsini and the Colonna. Due to the unfavorable market for artisans up north and increasingly more difficult admission requirements for guilds, many northern Europeans were eager to move to Rome. With their expertise and the lack of certain professions in Rome, Germans came to dominate the bakers, cobblers, weavers, and printers, establishing guilds based on their northern models. Their monopoly in these spheres meant that they were able to establish associations of exclusively Germans, paving the way for organizations like the Anima.

Now back to the Anima. In 1431, the confraternity saw the first major reconstruction of the Anima. They also merged with the Sant’Andrea hospice, the German women’s hospital, just a few blocks away, and the Anima became the primary German hospital in Rome. At that point, they had already acquired four buildings across from the original three, which would now become the hospices, and the three original houses were joined into one church completed in the Roman Quattrocento style.⁶ Little about the Anima was externally depicting German identity, other than the language being spoken and the ethnicities being included in the membership. Up until then, the Church could realize a profit from its houses only when the Pope and Curia were in Rome, as the curialists rented from the Anima. Yet with the exile of Pope Eugenius IV to Florence in 1434, we see the Anima starting to rely solely on donations⁷ and thus we track the beginning of a donor-driven institutional economy and a system where the wealthy members of the Anima become its main driving force. Yet still in the years leading up to 1443, artisans dominated the administration of the Anima and the membership remained relatively open. This decade served as a liminal phase when the Anima is institutionally ambitious but doesn’t yet have the means to resolve its social tensions, which begin to arise between the German laity and the curial elites.

In this context, the return of Eugenius IV to Rome in 1443 proves to be a decisive turning point. As the church was unfinished at his return, to the clergy, it looked like having craftsmen serve as provisors during this period was the reason for this failure. Following 1443, very few non-noble laymen appear in the Liber Confraternitatis, which was the membership registry of the confraternity, and the laity lost their biggest privilege, that of burial (now only those making sizeable donations are buried in the Anima’s cemetery). With this, the Anima becomes a “fashionable institution”⁸, and the laymen move to the Campo Santo Teutinico, the second German institution in Rome, which continues to be more welcoming to a wider diversity of social strata but never gains as powerful a footprint in Rome’s fabric as does the Anima. Thus, the church’s history becomes more closely linked with its curial benefactors and leaders, and the church receives more attention from the German curialists as it is now a representation of them as well.⁹ We see the first major reconstruction (the one started in 1431) being completed in 1449, just in time for the 1450 Jubilee. The Anima’s members become an increasingly homogenous group of clerics, but simultaneously gained prestige as provisors brought the church to the attention of the papal court (three cardinals served as provisors by the sixteenth century). We will see the influence of this system going into the sixteenth century, and with those like Johann Burchard later on. Clifford W. Maas, in his book on the “German Community in Rome” discusses at length the continuous additions of new houses to the developing urban enclave around the Anima beginning in the period of the 1440s. By the reign of Pope Sixtus IV in the 1470s, the Anima owned over twenty five houses, seventeen of which were rented out and brought in revenue.¹⁰ We see thus that already by the last quarter of the fifteenth century, the Anima was wealthy, very well politically connected, ambitious, and very well spatially anchored just a few steps away from the Piazza Navona, Rome’s main mercantile center. In fact, Anima’s role as a German institutional anchor is underscored by Johann Burchard, who records the burial of a cleric closely associated with the papal household in his diary, published between 1483 and 1492. Although the body was clothed “in Roman fashion,” it was escorted by “Germans and officials” and interred at the “Hospital of the Germans,” a pattern repeated in subsequent burials noted in his diary.¹¹ Thus, by this point, the urban enclave had already been widely known to be “German” and to contain welfare institutions. It was in constant competition with other neighboring national churches, especially those of San Luigi dei Francesi (the French national church) and San Giacomo degli Spagnoli (the Spanish church), both of which were located on or next to the Piazza Navona. But what differentiates the Anima is the fact that, despite its several reconstructions, it stood in the center of the German neighborhood, which had existed for centuries prior (even if without a central building), whereas San Giacomo was only built in the 1450s and San Luigi at the start of the sixteenth century. The Anima thus had a spatial and historical advantage and an interesting position as the representative of an otherwise non-existent nation. It is here that I begin the exploration of how Santa Maria dell’Anima externally exerted authority and a distinct identity over Rome, starting with the reforms of Sixtus IV.

Santa Maria dell’Anima

In 1477, Sixtus IV created Piazza Navona on the site of the ancient Stadium of Domitian, and moved the municipal market from the Capitol to here as part of his renovatio urbis project. In this sense, the Anima got lucky with its location as it had established itself in this new mercantile center before the new neighborhood’s inception. More importantly for the Anima, though, was Sixtus IV’s commission of the Santa Maria della Pace church in 1483. It would neighbor the Anima church, and several Anima properties, specifically those functioning as its hospice, had to be demolished to make way for the Pace church.¹² This was seen as an affront to the Anima not just in its urban position, but also theologically, given that the Santa Maria della Pace would now become a rivaling Marian church to the Anima. Indeed, the German community did feel as though their status quo had been impaired by Sixtus IV, and their reservations proved partially correct. For example, in the pilgrim guides of the 1490s, the Santa Maria della Pace church is discussed in far greater detail than the Anima, which was often simply referred to as the church next to Santa Maria della Pace.¹³ The same seems to have been the case for illustrations of the Anima: in G. Francino’s 1588 guidebook to Rome, the Anima receives minimal attention and is accompanied by an illustration which cuts off its campanile¹⁴ and even in Giuseppe Vasi’s 1756 etchings, Santa Maria dell’Anima is only visible on the side of a plate dedicated to the Santa Maria dell Pace church.¹⁵ Yet on the other hand, it seems that the “embarrassment” for the Germans that the construction of the Pace had caused served as a rationale for beginning to more ostensibly display German identity onto Rome’s streets. In reconstructed plans by Joseph Lohninger from 1906, we can see the large amount of Anima space and properties that had to be given up for Santa Maria della Pace.¹⁶ Though his plan is oversimplified, it can still help us gain an overall understanding of how much was taken for the Pace and the general morphology of the Anima.¹⁷ The case of the Anima emerges as a rare one of uninterrupted, centuries-long expansion, and unlike the other national churches, it did not demolish and rebuild its block, but instead, multiple small acquisitions accreted gradually. This creates a micro-geography of German identity and a visibly layered enclave rather than, say, a monumental or monofunctional church complex. We have one surviving plan from 1586 by Taddeo Ferarzolo, which shows dwellings, hospice rooms, internal courtyards, leased apartments, and even a communal well. Initially, the Anima did not anticipate the later speculative strategies of the sixteenth century and was founded for welfare rather than financial gain. Therefore, expansion was a form of political self-assertion and a preservation of the German language and, in large part,t a response to papal neglect and threat (as with the case of Sixtus IV).¹⁸ The confraternity requested public land to regularize an irregular indentation along the church’s flank where the Santa Maria della Pace now stood, a desire which aligned with the new urban criteria of viae rectae, prioritizing straight streets rather than medieval irregularity.¹⁹ This granted land actually allowed the fourth bay, part of its sixteenth-century expansion, to align cleanly with the rest of the building. The acquisition of almost everything around the church helped protect the German community’s spatial autonomy, and the viae rectae system allowed for more direct visibility of the Anima from different perspectives and approaches from the street. Visibility is thus more generally framed as a tool for the survival of the community and becomes a central topic of interest for the Anima’s provisors and wealthy members who sought to establish their own authority through increasing the authority of their confraternity.

I now shift my attention to the architectural typology and form of the Santa Maria dell’Anima church. Despite just being reconstructed in 1443, by the 1490s, the church had seemed architecturally outdated, given that it was then completed in the Gothic style popular during the Quattrocento in Rome. In 1499, the decision was taken to rebuild it once again by the leadership of the Anima.²⁰ The competition with other national churches additionally served as a motivating factor, which is supported in contemporaneous church documents from the “Archivio di S. Maria dell’Anima”(ASMA): “honorem nostrae nationis Germanicae […] construi et aedificari facere novam ecclesiam, opus laudabile Alemannico more compositum.”²¹ At the time, Johann Burchard, who was the most powerful German in Rome and the papal master of ceremonies, was provisor of the Anima and thus took on the responsibility for rebuilding. His close proximity to the papal court and Pope Alexander VI allowed him to gain permission from the Pope to tear down and erect a new church on the condition that the new church could not extend further than the old one.²² The subsequent construction was financed in part by the Roman branch of the Fugger bank, as the Fuggers had long been members of the Anima and even maintained a private chapel in the church, and in part by donations and indulgences that the confraternity had accumulated throughout the fifteenth century. Additionally, Pope Leo X issued a special papal bull in the 1510s, which urged everyone to make donations to the church, having complained that the church hadn’t been completed yet.

The earlier church had three naves of equal height (mimicking the German hallenkirche type), was vaulted and relatively monumental for the mid-1400s.²³ In the 1500 rebuild, the hallenkirche typology was preserved through the equal-height naves. In meeting minutes from 1499 from the Anima’s archive, we read that this was a very intentional decision for the vaults to be “quas omnes volumus pariter in altum elevari et aequalis altitudinis esse.”²⁴ Indeed, it is believed that only three churches in Rome had naves of equal heights the time, and all three were foreign churches: the Spanish church, the church at Campo Santo Teutonico (the second German institution), and the Santa Maria dell’Anima. Rome overwhelmingly used basilican plans in its Renaissance churches and the hallenkirche type appears only when there is an explicit conceptual or symbolic reason,²⁵ thus we can extrapolate to understand this as an explicit example of architecture as institutional self-representation. Yet given the need to still fit into the Roman visual language of the early sixteenth century, the church acquired a more all’antica style during this reconstruction.²⁶ We see this most in the more classical proportional logic, round arches, and the pilasters that were used instead of clustered Gothic supports. Additionally, the façade is restrained and relatively austere, which perhaps served to conceal the plurality and fluidity that defined the German community in Rome by creating a recognisable collective identity (as subjects of the Holy Roman Empire).²⁷ It would have simplified the legibility of the church externally, which once again would have made the representation of the Anima’s identity stronger within Rome’s streets. The interior, on the other hand, is much more decorative which allows for the Church to internally appeal and respond to its diverse population, but for the purposes of the paper, I focus primarily on its external elements.

The Anima is no longer a medieval German transplant but is now a re-articulation of a German spatial type using contemporary Roman language. In this way, the Anima moves away from simply being a foreign community in Rome and now takes up a powerful stance on the Roman urban scene as it chooses to consciously align itself with current architectural language. The way that the Anima regularized the site is also an interesting example of this spatial control, as the irregular urban plot was regulated not just with the aforementioned viae rectae approach but also by adjusting the interior spatial logic. The side chapels were recessed into the thickness of the lateral walls²⁸ instead of being projecting volumes, and the bays were regularized, which asserted a disciplined, coherent, and all’antica approach to the reconstruction.²⁹ Though no architect can be definitely attributed to the Anima church, Vasari claims that Bramante advised on the project.³⁰ It is interesting that, although Burchard intended to use German masons for the construction, its design was ultimately described as being of Italian origin (through Bramante) and through the use of Italian craftsmen when no Germans were found. Thus, the Anima, completed in 1523, clearly earned its spot in Rome’s landscape in the sixteenth century.

The last major architectural element that I would like to cover is the campanile, which was also added during the 1499 reconstruction. Perhaps, this was the most obvious, external representation of the Anima’s national identity as it has Gothic pinnacles and is pointed with its spire being covered in polychrome glazed tiles, a distinctly Northern European element. It is attributed to Andrea Sansovino and believed to be completed in 1518. 1518 is the year when the Anima is put directly under the authority of the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, who at the time was Maximilian I.³¹ Thus, at the top of the spire we see the Habsburg eagle, while on the façade we later see the coat of arms of Pope Adrian VI. Most national churches served the dual role of a devotional and national community space, whereas the Anima had a wider multitude of functions as a political, diplomatic, аdministrative, and economic power-center apart from its already inherent role as a national church. The campanile served as an obvious visual marker that could be seen before the Anima ever came into sight, especially from the Piazza Navona. Unlike the Spanish church, which was situated right on the Piazza, a street separated the Anima from it and so it was even more crucial that the Anima could be recognized as a distinct German enclave from far away. Anyone could spot the Habsburg imperial symbol and identify the campanile as the center of the Roman German community. As the Holy Roman Empire was fragmented at the time, the Anima had to step in to serve as its central power in Rome, as no single imperial office could represent “the Germans” in Rome. Potentially, this is also the reason why the Anima was unusually recognized by both the Papacy and the Empire. The campanile could also have been calculated to purposely obscure the view of Santa Maria della Pace, its long-time architectural rival.³² Looking at contemporaneous maps, the Anima is clearly visible by its campanile, which evidently looms over the Parione district. The Duperac map of 1577 and the Tempesta map of 1583 attest to this, and we can thus confidently assume that this was indeed how the Anima was portrayed from the perspective of the street in the sixteenth century. Walking from the sunlit Piazza Navona through the dark, narrow alley and reaching the little courtyard in front of Santa Maria della Pace and the Santa Maria dell’Anima would have proven to be a powerful experiential approach and would have felt like entering a German micro-city. Inscriptions on stone throughout the Anima enclave reminded visitors that the neighboring houses too belonged to the Anima and would have positioned the Anima as a descendant of the “deutsches Viertel” from centuries past.³³ Again, a historically and spatially strong articulation of identity and authority.

Now, it remains to discuss the important artistic elements that added to the Anima’s program. Before its reconstruction in 1499, one of the first large attempts at this was the inclusion of stone reliefs of the Habsburg imperial eagle on all properties belonging to the confraternity. Despite the fact that at this point, the Anima had not yet been put under the protection of the imperial court, they used the symbolism to merely invoke an image of a strong institution.³⁴ They had done this during the sede vacante following Sixtus IV’s reign (after 1484), and thus it was a direct response to his treatment of their enclave earlier in the decade. This is additionally the first substantial example of an artificially created “German” identity. The use of this heraldry became especially strong after 1518 as the imperial eagle ceased to function as a speculative emblem and instead marked the Anima’s recognized position within imperial–papal networks. Though the pontificate of Pope Adrian VI was short (1522-1523), very few foreign communities could boast a pope from their own ranks, and thus inscribing his connection to the church was of special importance. Indeed, his coat of arms was included on the top of the façade.³⁵ Crucially, Adrian VI was buried in the church of the Anima in a tomb designed by Baldassare Peruzzi.

One of the most fascinating examples is the attempt to fabricate a collective patron image for a community that lacked a stable or unified national identity but which nonetheless wanted to depict it. The Holy Roman Empire and the “Germans” did not have a single, traditional patron saint that could easily function as a national emblem in Rome, as compared to, say, the French who had San Luigi or San Girolamo for the Croats (Slavs). Additionally, they felt pressured by the fact that by the start of the sixteenth century, the church of San Giacomo degli Spagnoli already had on display three statues of their national saint, Saint James the Elder.³⁶ This prompted the confraternity to develop a new iconographic model that could symbolically stand in for the German community as a whole. The North of Europe already had the subject of the Anna Selbdritt, which was not a familiar one in Italy but would have read as distinctly German to anyone coming from the North. In the 1510s, a sculpted, wooden polychrome Anna Selbdritt was installed in the Anima, which functioned as a “devotional image and reliquary.”³⁷ But it was a more regional image and the subject of primarily private devotion, and thus was not sufficient to serve institutional and larger representation. Instead, in the 1520s, the Anima turns to the Italian stonemason (crucially not a sculptor) Bartolomeo Lante for a commission of a three-part marble sculpture of the Madonna of the Souls.³⁸ This reflects the patron saint of the institution (the Anima Madonna – Madonna of Souls) but also the Anima’s foundational mission for the care of pilgrims, sick, and the dead.³⁹ The sculptural group initially stood above the main portal and was intended to operate not devotionally but rather visually and programmatically, so that any traveler could recognize the neighborhood as a German enclave through this iconography. Yet the very need to “invent” such an image reveals the artificiality of the enterprise in the Anima’s process of identity construction. Additionally, the church later wanted to install a monumental Anima Madonna at the altar but struggled to find a satisfactory sculptor and eventually turned to installing a copy of Michelangelo’s pietá (in German: Vesperbild). The confraternity’s attempt to create a common patron saint for the nonexistent “German” natio can considered a failure. The Madonna of Souls “did not find the same acceptance among members of the community as did the long-established cults of the numerous regional saints of the Empire,”⁴⁰ which would have been reflected in the side chapels. The Madonna of the Souls, though successful as a legible, external marker of institutional presence in Rome, thus ultimately exposes the limits of the Anima’s representational strategy.

Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Venice

A useful point of comparison for understanding the distinctiveness of Santa Maria dell’Anima is the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice, the main hostel, warehouse, and exchange for German merchants in the city. Established by the Venetian state and continuously regulated from the thirteenth century onward, the Fondaco functioned as a tightly controlled institution for German commercial activity.⁴¹ It was far from being an autonomous enclave like the Anima or the other national churches of Rome, and was designed explicitly to make foreign merchants legible and governable by Venice’s oligarchic regime of mercantile activity. Institutional representation is thus inverted: in the Anima, it is the German community representing itself to the Romans, whereas in the Fondaco, the Germans had little say in how they were seen or treated by the Venetians. German merchants arriving in Venice were required to lodge exclusively within the Fondaco and conduct all sales through state-appointed intermediaries, which can be read from a document of regulation on customs duties from 1475.⁴² The community was also constantly subject to inspection and surveillance (this is even seen in the panopticon-esque architectural structure of the Fondaco on an engraving from 1616).⁴³ “House rules” were very strict and rigid, with a document from 1508 writing out everything from how much storage each merchant could have to how they should behave.⁴⁴ German identity in Venice was defined almost exclusively in economic terms, and the Fondaco was not intended to foster communal or cultural life but rather to isolate mercantile activity, serve as temporary lodging, and contain a population which was viewed with anxiety and danger by the local citizens.⁴⁵ Indeed, in the description of his pilgrimage, the famous German traveller and writer Arnold von Harff discusses the “German house in Venice” purely as a mercantile enterprise. He describes their daily life as centered on business, with no mention of any cultural aspect: “here the merchants assemble daily about nine or ten o’clock for their business, so that each one can be found without delay.”⁴⁶ This thus shows just how special the Anima model was. Rather than concentrating Germans within a single state-controlled compound, it operated as a diverse institution that was in constant interaction with local Romans and other foreign communities. Its function extended well beyond commerce to include everything from burial and liturgy to artistic patronage. In contrast to the Fondaco’s enforced enclosure, the Anima’s spatial practices produced a porous and semi-autonomous micro-geography that was embedded in Rome and allowed for a much more fluid German identity.

Conclusion

Throughout this paper, Santa Maria dell’Anima emerges not simply as a national church, but as an intentionally constructed institution and spatial system through which a heterogeneous German-speaking population could make itself legible in Renaissance Rome. In the absence of a unified political authority and a stable national identity, the Anima mediated German presence. Rather than functioning as merely a hospice for passing foreigners, it operated instead as an active urban and social institution that could negotiate its position within Rome’s fabric. By examining the Anima’s urban development together with its architectural and artistic elements, this paper has shown that German identity in Rome was not inherited but rather artificially constructed. The preservation of the Hallenkirche typology during the 1499 rebuild, while using the all’antica style for its architectural language, reflects how carefully external markers and elements were balanced to both assert a distinct German identity while conforming to Roman trends. The Anima Madonna of the Souls and the use of heraldry of the Holy Roman Empire helped fashion a collective image for an otherwise fragmented community, which was united by nothing but a common tongue. The paper further showed how these programs revealed both the successes and limits of these representational efforts.

The Anima’s gradual accumulation of property and visibility within the Roman urban fabric transformed a diverse population into a recognizable and semi-autonomous urban micro-geography. Its porous spatial practices, allowing for interaction with the city and its inhabitants while preserving its own enclave, stand in contrast to other examples of German communities, namely that of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice. Ultimately, Santa Maria dell’Anima is an example of how architectural, urban, and institutional practices could compensate for a fragmented and largely non-existent natio and shows how national identity in Renaissance Rome was less a fixed category and more an ongoing project of negotiation.

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Footnotes

1. Esposito, “National Confraternities in Rome and Italy in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period,” 240. ↩

2. Ibid., 242Alps,. ↩

3. “Ibid., 242. ↩

4. Maas, “The German Community in Renaissance Rome, 1378-1523,” 72. ↩

5. Lee, “Foreigners in Quattrocento Rome,” 143. ↩

6. “The German Community,” 81. ↩

7. Ibid., 85. ↩

8. Ibid., 86. ↩

9. Ibid., 33. ↩

10. Ibid., 96. ↩

11. Buchard, “The Diary of John Burchard,” 267. ↩

12. Kubersky-Piredda,“The Madonna with Souls: Agency and Iconography of the AnimaGermansembarrassment, Emblem between Sixtus IV and Gregory XIII,” 130. ↩

13. Ibid., 132. ↩

14. https://www.romeartlover.it/SistoV4.html ↩

15. https://www.romeartlover.it/Vasi121.htm ↩

16. Puteo, “Le Domus Nell’isola Di S. Maria Dell’anima: Politica Dell’espansione Immobiliare Teutonica a Roma,” 355. ↩

17. Ibid., 329. ↩

18. Ibid. ↩

19. Samperi, “La Fabbrica Di Santa Maria Dell’anima e La Sua Facciata.” ↩

20. Hanke, “S. Maria Dell’Anima Als Hallenkirche: Architekturwahrnehmung Um 1500 Und Heute,” 112. ↩

21. “it is our desire to construct and build a new church in honour of our German nation, […] a praiseworthy work composed in [the] Alemannic manner” in Kubersky-Piredda, “Notions of Nationhood and Artistic Identity in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Rome,” 42. ↩

22. “The German Community,” 101. ↩

23. “La Fabbrica,.” ↩

24. “We wish all of them to be raised to the same height and to be of equal elevation” in “Hallenkirche,” 118. ↩

25. “Hallenkirche,” 114. ↩

26. “Notions of Nationhood,” 46. ↩

27. Ibid., 42. ↩

28. “La Fabbrica,.” ↩

29. “Hallenkirche,” 112-113 ↩

30. Ibid., 112. ↩

31. “Notions of Nationhood,” 48have been. ↩

32. “The Madonna with Souls,” 136. ↩

33. “The German Community,” 13. ↩

34. “The Madonna with Souls,” 129. ↩

35. “Notions of Nationhood,” 47had ↩

36. “The Madonna with Souls,” 137. ↩

37. “Notions of Nationhood,” 52. ↩

38. “The Madonna with Souls,” 136. ↩

39. “Notions of Nationhood,” 5be 0 ↩

40. Ibid., 51. ↩

41. Hoffmann,“The Fondaco Dei Tedeschi: The Medium of Venetian-German Trade,” 245. ↩

42. Chambers, “Venice: A Documentary History ; 1450-1630,” 328. ↩

43. https://www.archdaily.com/789024/omas-fondaco-dei-tedeschi-department-store-is-revealed-in-venice/5756f4fee58ece5019000003-omas-fondaco-dei-tedeschi-department-store-is-revealed-in-venice-image ↩

44. “Venice: A Documentary History ; 1450-1630,” 329. ↩

45. “The Fondaco Dei Tedeschi,” 246. ↩

46. Von Harff, “The Pilgrimage of Arnold Von Harff,” 51. ↩