“Pope John VII”: The Madonna della Clemenza

This class began with the Life of John VII in the Liber Pontificalis.  John quickly emerges as an intriguing figure:

“He also provided images in various churches; whoever wants to know what he looked like will see his face depicted on them.”

We may rather securely attribute the icon known as the Madonna della Clemenza in a side chapel at Santa Maria in Trastevere to the patronage of John VII, and it exemplifies his seemingly shameless self-promotion.

The icon offers a great “Where’s Pope John VII?” exercise, and the direction of the inscription and its description of the image itself continue the image-text thread.  At this point, a flashback could also be useful, especially the Mount Sinai icon of the Virgin and Child with Angels and Saints Theodore and George.

Carlo Bertelli published a monograph in 1961 – La Madonna di Santa Maria in Trastevere - but you may download a recent MA thesis devoted to the icon.  At the least, it provides a useful review of the literature, as do most theses.  The figures also include some harder-to-find, albeit not of the highest quality, color images.

Thesis on the Madonna della Clemenza

Flickr has two decent photos of the icon (Search “Maria in Trastevere Icon”).