Episcopio - Salone Riario

Behind the cathedral of Ostia Antica stands a cardinal's great hall wrapped in monochrome frescoes of Trajan's Dacian wars, painted around 1512, later whitewashed when the palace served as a lazaretto, and brought back to light only in 1977.

Why it matters

The bishops of Ostia ranked among the most powerful prelates in Christendom, and their residence beside the cathedral shows it. Between 1511 and 1513 Cardinal Raffaele Riario, bishop of Ostia, raised a new wing that knotted together the existing episcopio, the church of Sant'Aurea and the borgo's wall circuit. Its vast central hall — more than nineteen by nine metres — received a painted frieze copying reliefs from Trajan's Column in Rome, a programme that read clearly to contemporaries: the emperor's victories over the Dacians flattered Julius II's own war against Louis XII of France. The parish history records that Pope Julius II stayed at Ostia in 1512, almost certainly seeing the work in progress. Giorgio Vasari praised these paintings in his 1568 Lives, though he misplaced them inside the castle keep across the square — evidence of how quickly even famous frescoes could lose their address.

What to notice

The cycle runs in monochrome, a deliberate choice that made painted walls argue they were carved reliefs. The panels form a campaign narrative: Roman soldiers storming an enemy camp, the siege and breach of Sarmizegetusa, legionaries throwing up a fortified camp, the army embarking at the port of Ancona, a battle on the Danube, the emperor rewarding his troops, a barbarian warrior's suicide after Decebalus's treasure was found, defeated peoples moved to assigned lands, Trajan receiving submission — and, closing the sequence, the funeral of Trajan, the one panel attributed by the parish history to Domenico Beccafumi rather than the workshop around Baldassarre Peruzzi, which included Cesare da Sesto. The palace is also notable for windows and doorways framed in stone, carved with the Riario arms and an inscription reciting the cardinal's titles — Ostiensis episcopus, cardinal of San Giorgio, camerlengo of the Holy Roman Church. Of the hall's four walls, three carry the recovered frieze; the fourth holds two windows.

Context and history

The episcopal residence grew from the medieval borgo that Pope Gregory IV fortified as Gregoriopoli. Cardinal Guglielmo d'Estouteville restored the walls in 1471, and his successor Riario — one of the richest cardinals of his generation, whose Rome palace now houses the Curia's offices — added the wing that gave the complex its Renaissance face. After the borgo declined, the palace's rooms were turned into a lazaretto in the seventeenth century, and the walls went under limewash, sealing the frescoes away for roughly three centuries. In 1977 the parish priest, Father Geremia Sangiorgi, brought the paintings back to attention, and restorers working for the Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici di Roma began the slow job of lifting the whitewash; the parish describes that campaign as continuing in stages, with three walls of the hall freed.