Santi Luca e Martina, 228 AD, Rome, Italy

The church was initially dedicated to Saint Martina, martyred in 228 AD during the reign of Emperor Alexander Severus. In 625 Pope Honorius I commissioned construction of the church. Restored first in 1256 during the reign of Pope Alexander IV, it was a simple rectangular structure surrounded on three sides by other constructions until it was rebuilt by the painter and architect, Pietro da Cortona, in the seventeenth century.

The plan of the upper church is almost a Greek cross with nearly equal arms and the center is crowned by the dome. Large Ionic columns, supporting a large entablature, band around the crossing and inhabit the wall spaces of the apsidal transepts, choir and nave. The windows in the apsidal vaults are each surmounted by a split pediment with a head in a scallop shell with octagonal coffering above, motifs which Cortona used in his fresco painting. However, apart from the altarpieces, the interior is white stucco, built for the painting academy in Rome and by a painter who had decorated some of the most opulent church vaults in Rome such as Santa Maria in Vallicella. The interior dome decoration has been attributed to Cortona's pupil and collaborator, Ciro Ferri; ribs and coffering are combined as they are at Santa Maria della Pace but here the forms of the coffering are far more fluid and almost shimmer with movement.

Two stairways from the upper church lead down to the lower church that has a corridor connecting to an octagonal chapel directly below the dome of the upper church and the chapel of Santa Martina below the high altar. A circular opening in the vault of the octagonal chapel allows a view through up to the dome of the upper church. In contrast to the white spatial expansiveness of the upper church, the lower church, and particularly the chapel of Santa Martina, is richly decorated with color, marbles, gilt bronze and has relatively low vaults. In the Chapel of Santa Martina, the Ionic columns in the corners have been placed on the diagonal, giving the chapel some orthogonal tensions in the center of the altar to S. Martina.

The gentle curvature of the façade is contained by a double story of paired pilasters. The columns of the ground story are pressed into the wall rather than projecting as a spatial entity like the entrance portico at Santa Maria della Pace. Other elements such as pediments and moldings allow the columns to create spatial tensions

Source:

Glancey, Jonathan. Architecture. London: DK, 2006. PrintWatkin, David. A History of Western Architecture. Sixth ed. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986. Print.

Watkin, David. A History of Western Architecture. Sixth ed. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986. Print.