San Macuto

The church of San Macuto, the only one in Italy dedicated to the Breton bishop saint, is located on the square of the same name in Rome, in the Colonna district, next to the Collegio San Roberto Bellarmino of the Society of Jesus, formerly the Palazzo Gabrielli-Borromeo with which it shared its history for a long time.
The church, dedicated to Saint Macuto (in French, San Malo, which gives its name to the well-known locality of Saint-Malo in Brittany), is first mentioned in 1192. It found different owners at different times.
In the second half of the 13th century it depended on San Marcello al Corso, later it belonged to the Dominicans of the nearby Santa Maria sopra Minerva (confirmed by Nicholas III in 1279). In the year 1422 it is mentioned as a parish church. In 1516, Leo X united the parish to the Chapter of St Peter's, which ceded it to the Confraternity of the Bergamasks (1539).Having changed the dedication to that to the Bergamasque saints Bartolomeo and Alessandro, the church was given a new façade (around 1560) to a design by the Ferrara architect Giovanni Alberto de Galvani and was then partially rebuilt (1577-1585) to a design by Francesco Capriani da Volterra. Among the main events of the 16th century is the following suppression of the parish (1588).In the years 1725-1726, according to a decision by Benedict XIII, the Bergamasks left their church to the Jesuits of the nearby palace and moved to St. Mary of Mercy, whose title later changed to that of Saints Bartholomew and Alexander of the Bergamasks (on Piazza Colonna). From that time on, the church granted to the Jesuits resumed the dedication to St Macuto and followed the vicissitudes of history together with the adjacent palace (later named Gabrielli-Borromeo), for the longest time connected with the presence of the Society of Jesus. It thus served as the church of the Roman Seminary, the College of Ecclesiastical Nobles, the German-Hungarian College and the Gregorian University (1873-1930). Since 1942 it has been part of the Bellarmine College, formerly of the Roman Province of the Jesuits, now an international house of the same religious order.St Macutus or Maclovius (lat. Machutus or Maclovius, fr. St Malo, eng. Machlow), from South Wales, was a member of a monastic community founded by St Cadoc at Llancarvan. He then emigrated to Brittany (it is said with St Brendan the Navigator who was his spiritual master), where he settled in Aleth and founded a monastery that became the centre of evangelisation of the neighbouring countries. He was consecrated the first bishop of Aleth, he died, however, in Saintes around 640 (621?). As a saint, he was already venerated in Brittany before the 9th century and when, in the 12th century, a new town sprang up near the Aleth area, he took his name - Saint-Malo. The cult of Saint Macute is also found in England (Winchester) and in Rome, in the case of the church described here. The saint is celebrated on 15 November.The one-nave church building of San Macuto features a harmonious façade dating back to the 16th century. This comes from the design by G. A. de Galvani (the division into two orders of equal size with pairs of pilasters at the sides) and bears elegant retouches by Francesco Capriani da Volterra due to his design around 1575 (the insertion of the serliana with frieze in the second order). Later, the elevation was modified so that a high volute attic that had crowned it was replaced with a modest projecting tympanum decorated with five pinnacles, which still exists.The interior, consisting of a rectangular hall, has a hipped barrel vault built in 1819 by architect Benedetto Piernicoli to replace the original wooden roof.The Bergamasks leaving the church to the Jesuits took all its furnishings to their new home on Piazza Colonna. Therefore the new owners had to devise a new decoration inside the building using, however, the structures of three 16th-century altars that remained there. Of these, the altar on the left wall was made around 1575 by Volterra himself (an elegant aedicule with two fluted side pilasters and a triangular tympanum, made of paonazzetto), the altar on the opposite side is the same, but completely made of stucco, and the high altar is decorated with a pair of columns made of black African marble and crowned with a lunette tympanum.It was the painter Michelangelo Cerruti (1666-1748) to whom the Fathers of the Company entrusted the execution of three paintings to complete the ornamentation of the altars stripped of their original paintings: the Virgin Appearing to San Macuto for the high altar (replaced the altarpiece by Durante Alberti with the titular Bergamasque saints and Saints Francis and Barnabas under the Madonna and Child), the Sacred Heart adored by Saints Giovanni Nepomuceno and Luigi Gonzaga for the left side altar (replacing the Beheading of the Baptist by Girolamo Muziano), the Glory of St. Joseph for the right side altar (replacing Saints Bartholomew and Alexander forced to worship idols by Giuseppe Peruzzini).Cerruti's Baroque paintings date from the period around 1730, considering the depiction of Nepomuceno, canonised in Rome in 1729 and proclaimed patron of the good name of the Society of Jesus in the years 1731-1732. His painting with the Jesuit saint Luigi Gonzaga, protector of teachers and students, is exceptional from an iconographic point of view (the adoration of the Sacred Heart, ten stars around St. John's head instead of the usual five, the depiction of the façade of the Gabrielli-Borromeo palace and the church of San Macuto itself at the bottom of the painting should also be noted). In the painting of Saint Macuto with the Virgin, on the other hand, the detail depicting the city of Saint-Malo is of interest.