Reflections on the historicist consciousness that arose in certain quarters of nineteenth-century architectural culture have been almost entirely bracketed by a discourse on style. The stylistic revivals and eclecticisms of the period were justified by the historicist narratives of writers like Heinrich Hübsch, Léonce Reynaud, or Thomas Hope, who suggested to architects that, by turning back to key junctures on a cultural path, the arc of future formal and stylistic architectural developments might yet be reinflected. The institutionalization of architectural preservation reflected another aspect of the new consciousness: its mounting awareness of the past as separate and ever receding from present experience, and of its artifacts as fragile, irreplaceable testimonies to the development of the contemporary world.

Yet these reflections should be seen against the backdrop of a much broader discourse on historicism, whose main stakes are not stylistic but religious. Indeed, a narrowly culturalist reading dissimulates a historical epistemology that has tied time to religion since the early modern period. In the dominant history of ideas, the wellsprings of nineteenth-century historicism have been located in the struggles over history that characterized the conflict between Protestants and Catholics—or, to be more precise, between the competing political and theoretical projects of Reformed churches and the Tridentine Catholic Church—during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This article argues against the foregoing caricature by analyzing how architects, intellectuals, and church leaders in Rome during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century reimagined the excavation, display, repair, or reconstruction of the architectural heritage of early Christian and medieval Rome. It operates a double act of revision. First, it highlights a neglected side of early historicist consciousness, one formed not in the hermeneutics of textual interpretation among scholars but in the rearrangement of architecture and artifacts in the lived space of the city. Second, it shows that the secularization of architectural time was not only driven by the culturalist debates of the Protestant north but could even occur within the explicitly religious concerns and activities of the Catholic Church.

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