The Sixth Century (Pelagian) Building of San Lorenzo fuori Mura at Rome

Pope Pelagius II's (579-590) church of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, a gallery basilica, has been viewed as an anomaly in early Christian Rome. Its atypism is ascribed to a presumed introduction of eastern building elements in Rome resulting from the Byzantine occupation in the sixth century. This dissertation challenges that assertion to the extent that San Lorenzo is viewed as topographically and typologically related to other Roman churches partially constructed inside a catacomb. Set against the backdrop of the Gothic wars of the fifth and sixth centuries and their aftermath, San Lorenzo emerges as new and innovative. Its novelty seems to be associated with the importance of the cult of martyrs and the hordes of pilgrims who journeyed to Rome to venerate the sacred shrines. Together, these apparently inspired the monumentalization of martyrs' shrines located ad corpus, and the concomitant development of a new type of martyr's shrine in the sixth century. The history of San Lorenzo is first considered in the scholarship, which has been long and problematic. For over 400 years, scholars have tried to reconstruct the history of the present church from the literary documents alone, or on the basis of issues extrinsic to the church itself. For this reason, it has been judged necessary to separate the written from the archaeological evidence in order to draw from each, its autonomous testimony. Only then are the results derived from both sets of documents conflated, and the combined testimony used to refine the received history of San Lorenzo. The separation of these sources serves to identify immediately the pivotal issue in any attempt to reconstruct the history of San Lorenzo: the original location of the tomb when, in 258, St. Lawrence was buried in a crypt on the Via Tiburtina. Scholars have always assumed that the present tomb of St. Lawrence beneath the High Altar in San Lorenzo, is the original locus as well. It is a major purpose of this study to address explicitly this assumption, which has never been tested. The original location of the tomb is of singular importance, because it was the focal point for all later building activity on the site, beginning with Constantine's foundation of a church in the fourth century also dedicated to St. Lawrence. The pre-Pelagian history of the site is therefore treated as well, because once located, the early place of the tomb goes far to explain the historical development of the shrine ad sanctum Laurentium, and why Pope Pelagius II chose to build this church in this place, in this form, and at this time. The inquiry then concludes with considerations of the cult of the saint, the place of this church in contemporary building practice, and the historical context in which San Lorenzo was built.