This lavish production, long anticipated, is to be prized for its deep research, clear writing, and spectacular illustrations. The large format 500-page volume includes 238 figures in outstanding color (with many photos by Barbara Wisch herself) of church exteriors and interiors, altarpieces, frescoes, and sculptures. Also reproduced are etchings, engravings, archive pages, printed plays and poems, and architectural drawings, as well as period maps marked to indicate procession and pilgrimage routes. More than a study of one confraternity for fraternity specialists, we receive a crucial work for all interested in medieval and early modern Rome and its religious and social history in the arts, religious theater, music, and material culture. Barbara Wisch’s concern with the Gonfalone confraternity dates from her 1980s PhD dissertation on the mid-sixteenth-century Gonfalone Oratory and its frescoes. Proceeding to study the confraternity’s production of plays in the Colosseum, she then linked up with theater historian Nerida Newbigin, an expert on earlier Umbrian and Florentine sacre rappresentazioni. They now cover many other dimensions of the confraternity’s devotional, liturgical, and philanthropic contributions to Rome — providing dowries, rescuing slaves, feeding the poor, and running small hospitals and refuges (ospedali) for men and women.

The confraternity called the Gonfalone in the sixteenth century was an amalgam of seven fraternities of flagellants and raccomandati (confratelli and consorelle commending themselves to the Virgin Mary’s protection), becoming one of the largest sodalities for women as well as men, and the most pervasive through Roman society. Elevated to an Archconfraternity in 1579, it set rules for confraternities throughout Italy (nearly 350 by 1615). Its justified claim to be the oldest fraternity in Rome came from its origins in the 1260s as a society of raccomandati in Santa Maria Maggiore, using an icon, the Madonna della Misericordia (“Regina Coeli,” or “Salus Populi Romani”) as its processional banner (gonfalone). It became noted for protecting miracle-working icons such as this and the Avvocata, or Weeping Madonna, in Santa Maria in Aracoeli. With the crucial amalgamation of five fraternities in 1486, Santa Lucia Nuova became its main public church. Under the 1495 statutes, plays at Easter in the Colosseum (where the Gonfalone possessed houses, storerooms, and a small chapel/church), took priority over the ospedali. The main plays, with Giuliano Dati (a very influential confraternity official) as a key writer, were “The Passion of Christ” (or “The Despair of Judas”), performed on Good Friday, “Raising of Lazarus” (or “Stoning of Christ”), and the “Resurrection.” The texts often changed, however. Productions involved dramatic scenes taking advantage of the ruins, machinery for flying angels, and music. Choruses also fostered anti-Jewish emotions. At the 1539 Good Friday production, the crowd, enraged by the acting out of Jews’ treatment of Christ, rioted. The pope banned further Colosseum productions, but the Gonfalone intermittently performed these or other plays elsewhere. Prominent now was the awarding of marriage dowries to twenty or twenty-five zitelle annually, after rigorous vetting (which involved consorelle), to be presented in a major maritaggio ceremony. The Gonfalone was also notable for ceremonies and processions. Their small church with a pilgrim’s hostel at Santa Maria Annunziata, or Annunziatella, outside the walls, became one of nine churches on the pilgrimage route, and especially attractive to women. Food, drink, and foot care were provided, and sometimes banquets after special processions. Many nocturnal processions occurred, often with flagellating confratelli — notably from 1587 the Maundy Thursday procession to the Vatican and into private papal areas.

The focus of confraternity activity was on Santa Lucia Nuova, the public church for women and men, and the private, male-only Oratory on the Santa Maria Vecchia site by the Tiber. The frescoes by artists such as Jacopo Bertoia (possibly the main programmer, 1568–69), Livio Agresti, Federico Zuccari, Marco Pino, and Cesare Nebbia, tell the story in twelve scenes of the Passsion, from Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem to the resurrection. The final chapters excellently describe and analyze overall scenes (and symbols in the wooden ceiling), connecting details and emphases (for example, on flagellation) to the activities and devotions of the confratelli. Such scenes could provide a legible narrative encouraging meditation in the manner of the Spiritual Exercises: a judgment confirmed on my private revisit after decades a few weeks ago, witnessing the impressive 2000–01 restorations, while the 1750 organ was delightfully played.