La più antica icone di Maria. Un prodigioso vincolo fra e occidente (review)

I found this little volume interesting and informative, even entertaining, and for those who have some Italian, I would recommend this study of what the author calls the 'oldest icon' representing Mary. Guarducci's language is lively, and she writes with considerable enthusiasm for her subject. Readers of Patristics will recognize her name in connection with her most celebrated (and most controversial) early Christian publication, namely I graffiti sotto la Confessione di San Pietro in Vaticano (Vatican City, 1958) I-III. Other works by Guarducci on early Christian subjects can now be found conveniently gathered between the covers of ÉPROER vol. 98 (1983). By training Guarducci was a Hellenist, an archaeologist and an epigrapher (she was general editor of Inscriptiones Creticae 1935ff.) Her first article appeared in 1925, and it was not until 1942 that she first wrote on a Christian subject. Early Christianity was something of a scholarly avocation for Guarducci, although in her later years it grew to a professional commitment. She made some solid contributions in the early Christian field (e.g., her study of an inscription influenced by Valentinian gnosticism: Römische Mitteilungen 80 [1973] 169ff.), but I suspect her most enduring published work will prove to be her editorship of the Greek inscriptions of Crete. In the present volume, which concerns late Roman and early Medieval art history, she has moved quite a considerable distance from her fields of demonstrated competence.

The essence of this book's theory is as follows. Based on a discovery made in 1950 by Pico Cellini, Guarducci concludes that the underpainting of the Medieval icon of Mary in the ninth-century Santa Francesca Romana (formerly Santa Maria Nova) near the Roman Forum actually consists in a fifth-century (ca. 400-425), east Mediterranean, encaustic image on a linen ground. This image, she believes, reproduces the same iconographic type (Hodigitra) which was formulated (438 or 439) in a Constantinopolitan workshop as the official image of Theotòkos—indeed Guarducci believes the underpainted image in Santa Francesca is a direct and contemporary copy of the original Hodigitra, executed in Constantinople but carried west sometime in the fifth century. She believes that this painting was housed in the sixth-century church of Santa Maria Antiqua al Foro Romano, that the church received its epithet 'Antiqua' thanks to the painting and that the encaustic underpainting is the very icon which Pope Gregory carried in procession in the year 590 to stem the tide of disease which ravaged Rome. She also believes that this so-called fifth-century icon served as the model for the thirteenth-century image of the Virgin in Santa Maria Maggiore, the 'Salus populi Romani' type which was connected in the popular imagination with Luke the Evangelist. The volume concludes with a brief but informative bibliography and a general index. The photos are better than average in quality.

Guarducci's method of argument is ingenious, speculative and somewhat circular. It reminds me of Carcopino's work earlier in this century on the so-called neo-Pythagorean basilica underground at Porta Maggiore. Possibly over time Guarducci's theory will be vindicated. More likely, it will remain a theory.