Tomb of Nicholas IV

In 1573 Cardinal Felice Peretti (later Pope Sixtus V), a Franciscan, ordered Domenico Fontana to design a new tomb for the remains of Nicholas IV, the first Franciscan pope in the thirteenth century, and commissioned Leonardo Sormani to provide the sculpture of the seated pope and allegorical figures of Religion and Justice.

Fontana designed the structure of the tomb itself, and Sormani completed the marble sculptures that stand within its three rectangular niches. Sormani executed for the central, more prominent niche a seated statue of Pope Nicholas IV, wearing the traditional papal tiara and cope and gesturing with his right hand. The sculpture of the Pope is flanked by the allegorical figures of Religion on the left and Justice on the right. The tomb was originally placed on the left side of the high altar but was moved to the left of the main entrance in 1746, when Pope Benedict XIV refurbished the basilica, under the direction of Ferdinando Fuga, for the Holy Year of 1750.

The effect of the tomb is of a decorously correct, if chilly, classicism - a foretaste of Sormani’s imperial stylistic associations in Sixtus’s later projects.