Four - Conclusion

Summary

“Remembering St. Peter’s,” Maffeo Vegio’s last important work, is often considered the founding document of Christian archaeology.¹ It has been mined for its factual information about the great Early Christian and medieval basilica ever since that building’s demolition in the century following Vegio’s record of it. Indeed, his is the last eyewitness account of Old St. Peter’s and some of its adjacent structures and artifacts. While much of his information could be found in other written sources – the Liber pontificalis and Petrus Mallius’s Description above all – it is Vegio’s synthetic account that Early Modern scholars like Tiberio Alfarano and Giacomo Grimaldi most frequently turned to for their own, necessarily reconstructive, histories of this church. But “Remembering St. Peter’s” is much more than this. Until now, very little, if any, attention has been given to Vegio’s composition as a literary whole, to its conceptual organization, or to its intellectual content. And yet Vegio brought to this task his early poetic sympathy for an ancient Roman culture as Vergil had imagined it; a commitment – one shared with Leonardo Bruni, Flavio Biondo, and Lorenzo Valla – to the Humanist approach to history as recorded in sources and material evidence; and a canon’s conviction of the pre-eminence of Constantine’s basilica as the final resting place of the Apostle Peter and of his historical successors.