From painted embellishments on altars and temples, marble flooring, dyed sacrificial ribbons and even the colouration of ritual animals, colour was an inescapable aspect of religious experience. Polychromy was not only decorative, it created a visual medium with which those navigating sacred spaces could interact, together with the written word and the language of shape and form. Colour could communicate to the ancient viewer associations of its source; the significance of both where its pigment or dyestuff was harvested and the journey it undertook, both in terms of manufacture and simple geography, in order to arrive before the observer. The very conception of ancient sight, with rays reaching from the eyes in a particularly haptic process of sensory feedback, meant that looking at colours was for the ancient viewer an experience in itself. How would visitors to the sacred spaces of the ancient world have ‘read’ the visual cues surrounding them, and how could the design of colours in ritual spaces influence the reactions and emotions of those witnessing sacred activity? This paper seeks to investigate and unpick some of the chromatic language found in religious spaces to better inform an understanding of ritual activity in Greco-Roman society.

“Prelude to a Revolution” explores the consequences of Gregory XVI’s change of heart following the 1840 consecration of San Paolo, when he abruptly revoked permission for several key features and commanded his architect instead to rebuild the remainder of the church as inexpensively as possible.

Processions were among the earliest ‘moving pictures’ in which the brain could develop the cognitive process of ‘reading’ a landscape and embedding a memory through sensory experiences. Salutaris’ foundation, a text inscribed outside the theatre at Ephesus which records the organization of a ritual procession for Artemis, tends to be treated as a factual guide by scholars, rather than as aspirational script for an event: repeated legal clauses, claims of control and permanency, and the white marble on which it was carved, underwrite the vivid sensual experience and transiency of a ritual event. This paper endeavors to contextualize Salutaris’ foundation by incorporating directives of the text together with an analysis of the procession as a practical event and an emotional experience. As a sensorial experience, one can explore aspects of the performance that could not be controlled: the weather, the attitude of the audience, and the behaviour of the performers. Did aspirational directives of ritual behavior come to fruition in a ritual event? How did the experience of an event shape its role and meaning? This cognitive approach provides insights to both the ritual event and the ways that processions could be read by the viewer.

How do we experience ritual? What role does this experience play in the perception and codification memory? This chapter begins by considering the relationship between senses, cognition, and memory in ritual experiences, in particular, the complex interplay between ritual performance, emotions, and material objects, together with the limitations of script-based approaches to surviving accounts. Situating the volume within current debates on religious ritual in the ancient world from the perspectives of cognitive science of religion and sensory studies, this chapter explores how variability in ritual experiences can be assessed through cognitive approaches to rituals as lived experiences. Having outlined why this volume is timely, necessary, and how it contributes to challenging established views and furthering debate surrounding ritual experiences in the Roman world, the introduction also addresses the challenges of cognitive assessments and how these challenges are met across the volume, through a variety of different contexts and approaches. Lastly, the introduction briefly presents each of the five case studies, drawing on common themes and issues explored in each case study, and considering the global relevance and transdisciplinary applications of scholarship in this volume.

“Paul and Peter” describes a series of changes that Pope Gregory XVI and his advisors made in the iconographic and liturgical/spatial aspects of the basilica, arguing that they aimed to recast the relationship of Peter and Paul in the basilica’s historic iconography to highlight their joint protection of Rome and to foreground Paul as the new guide for the Church in its confrontation with secular modernity.

“Disenchanting Histories” describes how the status of Vitruvian classicism and Early Christian architecture changed in Roman intellectual and clerical culture over the several decades prior to c. 1820 in conjunction with a series of increasingly traumatic political events.

“Eighteen Forty-Eight” uses previously unstudied archival sources to describe in vivid detail how the 1848–1849 revolts in Rome played out at the San Paolo construction site and with what consequences.

“Future Visions” sets out the main positions that emerged in the debate that unfolded over what to do about the burned San Paolo after the fire of 1823.

“Catholic Romanticism” places Pope Leo XII’s decision of spring 1825 in the larger cultural context of the often overlooked Catholic Romanticism that enjoyed favor at the Papal court in these years.

Paul of Tarsus – St. Paul the Apostle, the Apostle to the Gentiles, God’s Chosen Vessel – was martyred in Rome sometime between 65 and 67 CE. He was laid to rest along the via Ostiense, south of Rome, in a sepulchral area owned by a Christian woman named Lucina, where his tomb soon attracted great veneration. Not long after Emperor Constantine accepted Christianity in 313, a modest basilica was erected to shelter the tomb, sponsored, probably, by Constantine himself. Within a few decades, local devotion had outgrown this first basilica, so in 384 (or 386) the co-emperors Theodosius I, Valentinian II, and Arcadius launched the construction of a far bigger one. This prodigious new monument was consecrated under Honorius early in the fifth century and came to be known as San Paolo fuori le mura for its location beyond the old Aurelian city walls. It was to endure for more than fourteen centuries as one of the most important churches in Christendom and, with St. Peter’s, one of Rome’s two most important pilgrimage centers2 (Figure 1).

Egeria, a late fourth century Christian pilgrim to Jerusalem, describes a dramatic ritual on the morning of Good Friday. This text is remarkable on several counts: it is written by a female, it has an early date (soon after Constantine’s initiatives in establishing Christian pilgrimage) and it provides a wonderfully detailed description of the areas visited in Jerusalem during Holy Week. She and the other pilgrims venerate the wood of the cross, the inscription over Jesus’s head, the horn used to anoint the kings of Israel, and the ring of Solomon. Throughout her account, Egeria stresses the importance of pilgrims being assured of the truth of their faith by encountering physical landscapes and tangible objects. Theatrical studies in dramaturgy and stagecraft affirm the role which props play in helping actors activate memory and achieve a rich performance. This chapter examines the network of symbols in these artifacts using ritual studies, theatre analysis and space and place theory, demonstrating how these objects were used as props in a complex ritual drama, which offered material, sensory and embodied experiences for religious pilgrims.