Sunday 28 February 2016

Charlemagne and Rome: Alcuin's epitaph for Pope Hadrian I in St Peter's Old and New (Thursday 24 March)

When the Roman Pope Hadrian I died on Christmas Day 795 Charlemagne, then King of the Franks and King of Italy, commissioned a monumental stone epitaph to adorn the pope's tomb. The epitaph was composed by Alcuin of York, English scholar, ecclesiastic, poet and teacher, a respected member of the Carolingian court. The monument was made in Francia and taken to the fourth-century St Peter's Basilica in Rome.

In 1505 Pope Julius II decided that the ancient basilica should be demolished and replaced with the grandest building in Christendom. The first designs for the new St Peter's were those of Donato Bramante. Progress was very slow. Other architects became involved. In the mid sixteenth century Pope Paul III coerced Michelangelo to become the superintendent of the building programme. The St Peter's we see today is largely his design. Very little survives of the first St Peter's, but on the west wall of the Portico, to the left of the central door, a visitor may see Charlemagne's epitaph for Pope Hadrian.

Our lecture on 24 March will be given by Joanna Story, Professor of Early Medieval History at the University of Leicester. Professor Story's main research interests focus on Anglo-Saxon England, Carolingian Francia and Italy, especially Rome, in the period from roughly AD 600 to 900. Her well-illustrated lecture will tell the story of Charlemagne and Alcuin's epitaph for Pope Hadrian, why it was made and why it survived. It will reveal much about the cultural politics of Renaissance Rome in the grip of Reformation and Counter-Reformation and about the network of connections that had bound Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian Francia to Rome and the Cult of St Peter eight centuries earlier.

Mike Short

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