Santa Maria di Monserrato in Rome: Shifting Identities of a Multifaceted Community

Susanne Kubersky-Piredda and Sílvia Canalda Llobet

Santa Maria di Monserrato is one of around fifty churches in early modern Rome run by nationally organized confraternities. It was built from 1518 onwards for subjects of the Crown of Aragon along the model of – but also in competition with – the church of San Giacomo degli Spagnoli in Piazza Navona, which had been serving the community of Castilians from as early as 1450. The members of the Confraternity of Santa Maria di Monserrato, founded under Pope Alexander VI Borgia were grouped according to their territories of origin, such as Catalans, Aragonese, Mallorcans, Valencians, and Sardinians. The statutes precisely defined the voice in the assembly for each group. The institution itself had its roots in two older hospices founded by female benefactors from Barcelona and Mallorca in the mid-14th century for Catalan pilgrims. Since the church was financed solely by private donations, construction dragged on for many years. The altar was consecrated in 1594, but the apse with its altarpiece featuring the Virgin of Monserrat, now in Genzano di Roma, was not completed until 1675. In 1807, San Giacomo degli Spagnoli and Santa Maria di Monserrato were merged into a single national Spanish institution. The church in Piazza Navona was abandoned and the majority of its artistic inventory was relocated to the church of the Aragonese community, which was then given the new name Iglesia Nacional Española de Santiago y Montserrat.

This brief historical outline already demonstrates that Santa Maria di Monserrato was a multifaceted institution, whose history over the centuries was characterized by a constant flux of changing identities and varying influences. These changes often reflected political power games and had an impact on art patronage and material culture. Individuals, families, and regional groups with different cultural backgrounds gathered within the confraternity, each seeking to realize their own interests and not infrequently coming into conflict with one another. Although the confraternity presented a unified front to the outside world under its patron saint, Our Lady of Monserrat, and interacted with the other charitable institutions that had settled in the area around Via Giulia and Via dei Pellegrini, internally it was highly heterogeneous. In addition to the patroness of the church, regional cults were promoted in the individual chapels, such as those of Our Lady of Pilar or Saint Raymond of Peñafort, the Immaculate Conception, and – from the 19th century – Saint James the Greater.

This transdisciplinary research project is dedicated to the complex dynamics at play within the community: the changes and ruptures in its history; the changing alliances and rivalries that impacted the development of its history and artistic patronage; material culture and festive display as expressions of manifold collective identities; and 19th-century adjudication upon cultural heritage as necessitated by the merger of the two churches.