Tag Archives: St. Agnes

St. Agnes in Navona

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The shrine and relic (skull) of St. Agnes in the church of St. Agnes on the Piazza Navona.

The church of St. Agnes “in Agone” is a stunning 17th-century church in Rome, Italy. It faces onto the Piazza Navona, one of the main urban spaces in the historic center of the city and the site where the early Christian Saint Agnes was martyred in AD 304 at the ancient Stadium of Domitian. Construction of the modern church began in 1652 at the instigation of Pope Innocent X whose family palace, the Palazzo Pamphili (currently rented out to serve as the embassy of Brazil) is next door to this church. The church was to be effectively a family chapel annexed to their residence (for example, an opening was formed in the drum of the dome so the family could participate in the religious services from their palace).

The name of this church–St. Agnes in agone— is unrelated to the ‘agony’ of the martyr: “in agone” was the ancient name of Piazza Navona (“piazza in agone”), and meant instead, in Greek, ‘on the site of the competitions’, because Piazza Navona was built on the site of an ancient Roman stadium which was used for footraces. From ‘in agone’, the popular use and pronunciation changed the name into ‘Navona’, but other roads in the area kept the original name.

Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers is situated in front of the church. It is often said that Bernini sculpted the figure of the “Nile” covering his eyes. (The four rivers are those which were thought to flow out of Paradise–the Garden of Eden–to bring fresh water to the rest of the world.)

The other church of St. Agnes in Rome — the Church of St. Agnes outside the Walls (Sant’Agnese fuori le mura)–is built outside the ancient walls of Rome atop the Catacombs of Saint Agnes, where the saint was originally buried, and which may still be visited from the church. Most of her relics are still there; only her head is at the Piazza Navona church. (I was recently given The Geometry of Love, a wonderful book by Margaret Visser about this church “outside the walls.” I highly recommend it!)

A view of the high altar in the church of St. Agnes on the Piazza Navona in Rome.

Good King Wenceslaus — again!

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The shrine-chapel of St. Duke Vaclav (Wenceslaus) in St. Vitus' Cathedral (Prague).

The shrine-chapel of St. Duke Vaclav (Wenceslaus) in St. Vitus’ Cathedral (Prague).

Good King Wenceslas is a popular Christmas carol that tells a story of Good King Wenceslas braving harsh winter weather to give alms to a poor peasant on the Feast of Stephen (the second day of Christmas, December 26). During the journey, his page is about to give up the struggle against the cold weather, but is enabled to continue by following the king’s footprints, step for step, through the deep snow. The legend is based on the life of the historical Saint Wenceslaus I, Duke of Bohemia or Svatý Václav in Czech (907–935).

(I remember the first time I was in Prague and stood on the castle battlements looking out across the city during a light snowfall. The city seemed dusted with powder sugar and looked like a fairyland. It was magical. And then–I realized that I could more or less see the cloister of St. Agnes across the river, the famous “St. Agnes’ fountain” of the popular Christmas carol. I was standing more or less where the good king himself must have been standing when he asked his page about the identity of the poor man they saw struggling with his load of winter fuel! The cloister of St. Agnes now houses the National Museum’s breathtaking collection of medieval art. A day or so later, it was breathtaking to walk through the hallways and rooms of the thirteenth century cloister to view some of the most stunning medieval art I have ever seen — even better than the world-famous collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the Cloisters! When you visit Prague, I cannot urge you too strongly to take the time to visit St. Agnes’ cloister along the bend of the river.)

Don’t recall the details of the story? Listen to it now.

In 1853, English hymnwriter John Mason Neale wrote the “Wenceslas” lyrics, in collaboration with his music editor Thomas Helmore, and the carol first appeared in Carols for Christmas-Tide, 1853. Neale’s lyrics were set to a tune based on a 13th-century spring carol “Tempus adest floridum” (“The time is near for flowering”) first published in the 1582 Finnish song collection Piae Cantiones.

Wenceslas was considered a martyr and a saint immediately after his death in the 10th century, when a cult of Wenceslas grew up in Bohemia and in England. Within a few decades of Wenceslas’s death, four biographies of him were in circulation. These hagiographies had a powerful influence on the High Middle Ages conceptualization of the rex justus, or “righteous king”—that is, a monarch whose power stems mainly from his great piety, as well as from his princely vigor.

Although Wenceslas was, during his lifetime, only a duke, Holy Roman Emperor Otto I posthumously “conferred on [Wenceslas] the regal dignity and title” and that is why, in the legend and song, he is referred to as a “king”. The usual English spelling of Duke Wenceslas’s name, Wenceslaus, is occasionally encountered in later textual variants of the carol, although it was not used by Neale in his version. (Wenceslas is not to be confused with King Wenceslaus I of Bohemia [Wenceslaus I Premyslid], who lived more than three centuries later).

[This post was very popular when I first published it in December 2013. This is a slightly revised version.]