The Saintly Sewer: Ludovico Carracci, Saint Sebastian, and the Waste of Rome

In 1612, Ludovico Carracci painted Saint Sebastian Thrown in the Cloaca Maxima for the Barberini family chapel in the Church of Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome, but the work was never installed because Cardinal Maffeo Barberini decided to keep it for his private collection. Now owned by the Getty, Ludovico’s painting responded to Counter Reformation decrees of the Council of Trent requiring artists to make biblical narratives and characters more earthly, persuasive, and appealing to the faithful in order to buttress the Catholic Church against Protestantism. Ludovico treated the Saint Sebastian theme in an unusual way by representing his corpse being thrown by Centurion-persecutors into the main Roman sewer (the Cloaca Maxima) instead of the familiar iconography of his living body shot with arrows outdoors. The saint’s pale, beautiful corpse contrasts with the swarthy, contorted soldiers in the dark underground sewer.

This paper considers the possibility that Cardinal Barberini withheld Ludovico’s picture from public display for reasons of propriety pertaining to contemporary environmental conditions in Rome. The painting’s intended location was believed to mark the spot where Christians retrieved Sebastian’s body from the sewer in the year 288. Once a marvel of imperial engineering, the sewer had fallen into disrepair in the early modern metropolis, aggravating sanitation problems that prompted a campaign of infrastructure renewal called the renovatio Romae. Ludovico’s idiosyncratic iconography threatened to conjure scatological sensations of disgust within the sacred church confines, inviting an irruption of the present that could detract from the painting’s moral-historical narrative.