A legend tells that an image of the Madonna kept in the monastery of Monte Celio spoke to Saint Gregory the Great while he was praying to her. At the end of the 16th century, Cardinal Salviati decided to build a chapel to honor this miraculous image. Leading artists such as Carlo Maderno, Giovanni Battista Ricci and Annibale Carracci will create a marvelous setting while seeking to recreate the storia of the miracle in question. If the chapel has already been the subject of various studies (Pedrocchi 1993, Eichberg 1994, Franceschini 2020), the icon of the Madonna still needs to be questioned. Indeed, this one has a curiosity, namely its curved shape and its oblique position which reverses the traditional iconic face to face.

The first part of the presentation therefore proposes to reflect on the origins of this exceptional obliquity. In a second part - by observing the limits of the categories of the discipline as icon/narrative and image/art - we will analyze the ambiguity and the effects of this singular phenomenon: how does it engage with the display of the chapel? And how does it impact the visual, spatial and devotional relationship between the image and the viewer?