The Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones mosaics in Saint Paul's Within the Walls in Rome.(Critical essay)

In 1881 the British Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Coley Burne-Jones (see Fig. 1f) was commissioned to design mosaic decorations for the new American church in Rome. The Church of Saint Paul's Within the Walls was the first Protestant church to be built in the former capital city of the popes (Fig. 2). (1)

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When Rome was part of the Papal States, from 756 to 1870, only Catholic churches were permitted in the city. (2) There were a few exceptions: Jewish worship had always been permitted in the ghetto, and Protestant services were tolerated if they were conducted at a foreign legation and were incognito, that is, with no conspicuous religious aspect. The American Episcopal congregation, known as Grace Church, was harbored in the American legation until 1867, when the diplomatic mission closed and the parishioners were obliged to meet outside of Rome in a room in an old granary on a filthy street beyond the Porta del Popolo.

Beginning in 1870, when Rome became the capital of the newly formed kingdom of Italy, all religions were welcomed there. The wealthy American Episcopal congregation, led by the church's rector, the Pennsylvania native Robert Jenkins Nevin (see Fig. 1b), (3) determined to build a magnificent new church inside the walls of the city, and in 1871 Grace Church was renamed the Church of Saint Paul's Within the Walls. The decision to stress "within the walls" was made for two reasons. The first was an emotional one--the church's previous banishment to an inferior location outside Rome's walls was deemed an insult to the Protestant religion. The second was to distinguish the new house of worship from another church consecrated to Saint Paul, San Paolo Fuori le Mura (Saint Paul Without the Walls), a heavily restored fourth-century basilica just outside Rome.

The estimated cost to construct the new church was one hundred thousand dollars, and fundraising began immediately. Mrs. Edwin Augustus Stevens (nee Martha Bayard Dodd; 1831-1899) of Hoboken, New Jersey, launched the building fund with a ten thousand dollar donation. (4) American artists then living in Rome, among them David Maitland Armstrong (1836-1918), George Inness (1825-1894), and Elihu Vedder (1836-1923), donated their paintings and sculpture to be sold to benefit the fund. (5) Nevin hastened back to the United States to raise money, and contributions soon began flooding in from individuals such as John Jacob Astor III, Theodore Roosevelt Sr., William C. Rhinelander, Junius Spencer Morgan and his son John Pierpont Morgan, the Honorable Hamilton Fish, and from Episcopal churches in the United States and elsewhere.

The vestry retained George Edmund Street (1824-1881), a leading British architect, to design the new church. Street, who had been a pupil of George Gilbert Scott (1811-1878), was well known for his Gothic revival buildings and designed churches both in England and on the Continent. (6) In 1872 he wrote to his friend the British painter, writer, and critic Frederick George Stephens (1828-1907): "We are going to start for Rome tomorrow night. I am going to look at ... sites for two churches in Rome--one for the English, the other for the Yankee Episcopalians. By very odd coincidence they both came to me without knowing the other's intentions." (7)

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