Description

This unique mosaic is positioned over the entrance of San Tommaso in Formis, a small church located on the Caelian Hill, a hotbed of medieval-era ecclesiastical sites. The artwork is a legacy of San Tommaso’s Trinitarian heritage. After a dream of Jesus holding a black slave and a white slave, John of Matha founded the order and dedicated it to freeing and rehabilitating Christians held captive by Muslims – an issue particularly prominent in this era of crusades. Simultaneously, John felt the attraction of a monastic lifestyle and eventually retreated to a cloister adjacent to the order’s hospital at San Tommaso.

John’s ecclesiastical career illustrates a tension, common in twelfth-century Christianity, between a desire to engage with the world and the traditional pursuit of piety in monastic isolation. The mosaic captures this tension. Christ is shown resolving a realistic human problem, one of whose subjects is African--indicative of the order’s trans-regional mission. However, the work is located over the gate in the walls of the monastic complex. The urge to separate the activities of a religious order from the world – even if they were engaged with the world – was still strong.

As for the Cosmati mosaic itself, the scene should not necessarily be understood as an abstract meditation on racial egalitarianism. Among other activities, the Trinitarians purchased Afro-Italian slaves and exchanged them for captive Christians. The mosaic thus brings to mind the founding myth and the public activities of the order. A helpful analogy is a modern-day corporate logo.

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Source

Robert Brentano, Rome Before Avignon: A Social History of Thirteenth Century Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 14

Steven A. Epstein, Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 194-195

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