Basilica di San Sebastiano fuori le mura

A church was built here in the fourth century with the title of Saints Peter and Paul, on the spot to which their relics were moved in 258: a Constantinian circiform basilica of three aisles with a large quadrangular atrium, on the same model as Sant'Agnese on the Nomentana and San Lorenzo on the Tiburtina. Sebastian's relics were taken to St Peter's in 826 for fear of a Saracen raid, which came and destroyed the church; Pope Nicholas I, who reigned from 858 to 867, rebuilt it, and Honorius III reconsecrated the martyr's altar at the Cistercians' request. Cardinal Scipione Borghese ordered the seventeenth-century rebuilding in 1608, to a design by Flaminio Ponzio continued by Giovanni Vasanzio with Guido Reni as artistic director; the facade is dated 1612, and Annibale Durante carved the wooden ceiling in the same year to a design traditionally given to Vasanzio. The aisles were rebuilt in 1933 on the ambulatory of the fourth-century church. The parish was erected on 18 April 1714 by bull of Clement XI, and John XXIII created the cardinalatial title San Sebastiano alle Catacombe in 1960. A marble bust of the blessing Christ in the convent adjoining the basilica was identified in 2001, in research for the Clement XI exhibition, as the Salvator Mundi carved by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in 1679. The identification was argued by Francesco Petrucci in the Bollettino d'Arte and rests on the scale and on the Sicilian jasper of the pedestal; versions at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk and at Sees cathedral have also been proposed for the same work.