Santa Maria sopra Minerva

Church · Pigna (Piazza della Minerva)Rome,Italy

The one great Gothic interior in Rome, star-painted vaults over Dominican piers, with Michelangelo's Risen Christ and Bernini's elephant outside.

Santa Maria sopra Minerva is the one great church in Rome with pointed arches and ribbed vaults. The interior stands on rows of clustered piers under a blue vault painted with gold stars, and every other big church in this city has a flat or a coffered ceiling. That paint is not medieval: the whole ceiling was repainted in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the fashion was for making Gothic buildings look more Gothic than they had ever been. The Dominicans began the church in the 1280s, and they still hold it. Inside, Michelangelo's Risen Christ stands beside the high altar. He carved the figure naked, and later hands added a bronze cloth that has never been taken off. Catherine of Siena lies beneath the altar itself, without her head, which stayed in Siena. Outside on the square, a small marble elephant designed by Bernini carries an ancient obelisk that was dug up in the convent garden.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Plan this for the afternoon — the midday closure is long, Sunday mornings are given over to Mass, and the chapels are easier to see once the tour groups have moved to the Pantheon.
Feed the coin box in the right transept chapel — the fifteenth-century frescoes there are almost invisible unlit, and they are the best painting in the building.
Look at the bronze cloth on the Risen Christ — it was added long after the marble was finished, and where it meets the body you can see it does not belong to the carving underneath.

Things to do

1
Look up before you look at anything else
Stand just inside the main door and stop. The vault stretches away from you in blue bays scattered with gold stars, carried on ribs that meet at painted bosses. Every other big church in this city has a flat or a coffered ceiling. Give it a minute before you walk on, because this ceiling is the one thing here you will not find in the rest of Rome.
2
Walk round the Risen Christ
The marble figure stands to the left of the high altar on a low base, holding a cross. Circle it. From behind you can see that the body was carved complete and the metal drapery hung on afterwards, and that the right foot has a bronze shoe, put on because pilgrims wore the marble away kissing it.
3
Find the elephant and read the base
On the square outside, a small elephant in marble carries a slim Egyptian obelisk on its back. Walk right round it. The inscription on the base says that it takes a strong mind to carry solid wisdom, and the elephant's expression has been argued over in Rome for three and a half centuries.