Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza site features

Look up from the street and you will find it before you find the door. Above the roofline on Corso del Rinascimento sits a stepped drum, and out of the top of it rises the thing: a pale stone spiral, a ramp that coils three or four turns in on itself as it narrows, like a corkscrew or a shell stood on end, finished with a small iron cross and, below that, a sphere and a bird with a sprig in its beak. It is a silhouette rather than a building, and there is nothing else like it against the Roman skyline.

The church itself is not on a street at all. It stands at the shut end of a long arcaded courtyard belonging to the old university, two storeys of plain arches running away down both sides; the church closes the far end with a facade that curves inward, bending back like a shallow bowl so that the court seems to gather towards it. From the courtyard floor you see the facade and the dome above it in one view.

Inside, the room is white, tall and oddly shaped. There is no nave and no aisles — it is a single centralised space whose wall alternates, going round, between a bulging semicircular bay and a sharply pinched corner, six of each, so that the plan is a six-pointed star and you can read the whole of it standing in the middle. Tall flat pilasters run up the wall between the bays without a break and carry straight on into the dome, which repeats the same alternation overhead.

Looking straight up is the point. The vault is plain white stucco, divided into the same alternating bays and scattered with raised stars and winged cherub heads in low relief, each bay narrowing as it rises until all of them meet at a small bright oculus at the top. No paint, no gold, no figures: the whole effect is made out of shadow on white. Underfoot the floor answers it in black and white marble inlay, and over the altar at the far point of the star hangs a single large painting.

The spiral lantern

The cuspidate lantern that corkscrews upward, surmounted by a cross and carrying a sphere and a dove with an olive branch in its beak, in wrought iron. Visible from the surrounding streets whether or not the church is open. Urban VIII's flying Barberini bee sits in its roof.

The star plan

A mistilinear six-pointed plan resembling a star of David — recognised at the time, the reference work says, as a Star of Solomon, symbol of wisdom — assembled from curves and clipped triangle tips.

The polylobed dome

Carries the plan's alternating points and lobes upward, so the geometry reads from the floor. The pilasters' upward thrust gathers the eye into it.

The marble floor

Designed by Borromini: an articulated pattern of black and white marble intarsia.

The altarpiece

Sant'Ivo, patron of jurists, over the altar. Started by Pietro da Cortona in 1661 and completed by his pupil Giovanni Ventura Borghesi after Cortona's death — Turismo Roma dates the completion to 1683.

The heraldry

Barberini bees, Boncompagni dragons, Borghese eagles, and Chigi stars and mounts — the arms of successive papal families, in the decoration of the complex.