Sant'Andrea al Quirinale site features

From Via del Quirinale the church pushes out at you. The front is a flat brick-and-stone panel framed like a giant doorcase, and set into the middle of it is a semicircular porch on two Ionic columns that steps forward onto the pavement under a curved hood — a small stone stage, about wide enough for three people, with steps curving down from it. Above, the wall rises to a triangular pediment, and behind that a low grey dome.

Inside, the room is wider than it is deep, and that is the surprise. You come through the door and the high altar is immediately opposite, perhaps fifteen paces away; the church spreads to your left and right instead of running ahead. It is an oval, ringed by tall pink-and-grey marble pilasters with gilded capitals, and between them open a handful of side chapels, each a shallow curved recess.

The altar is lit from a source you cannot see. Above the altarpiece — a dark canvas of Saint Andrew crucified on a slanting cross — a white stucco figure of the saint sits on a cloud over the broken pediment, arms spread, looking up and apparently about to rise through the frame. Light falls on him from a hidden window.

Then you look up, and the whole building turns out to have been pointing there. The dome is gold: deep hexagonal coffering, shrinking as it climbs along ribs that run to a small bright lantern at the top. Between the ribs, white stucco boys and fishermen clamber over the gilding — figures half out of the surface, climbing toward the light. Oval windows set low in the dome throw daylight across them. It is a small church, and it is doing one very large thing.

The gilded oval dome

Hexagonal coffering narrowing along the ribs to a lantern, with white stucco figures climbing between them. The reason to come, and the reason to look up before anything else.

Raggi's Saint Andrew

White stucco, above the altar's broken pediment: the saint on a cloud, ascending toward the dome. Sculpture used to aim the room.

The altarpiece

Martyrdom of Saint Andrew, 1668, by the French painter Guillaume Courtois — Andrew on the diagonal cross that carries his name.

The oval plan

Entered on the short axis, so the altar faces the door and the church widens to either side.

The semicircular porch

Two Ionic columns and a curved hood stepping out over the pavement, inside an aedicular pedimented frame.

The shrine of Stanislaus Kostka

The Jesuit novice who died in this house. His urn is bronze and lapis lazuli, made in 1716.