Piazza di Tor Sanguigna. Because very often an oil-lamp shed some light on the Madonnelle, they constituted for centuries the only public lighting available in Rome. The Madonnelle were a form of popular devotion. In general the rich did not feel these images would add to the beauty and importance of their palaces and only a limited number of palaces show a sacred image. A miraculous event or just a happy event often led the inhabitants of a street or of a building to commemorate it by placing a little Madonna at the corner of the street. In the XVIIth century the development of stucco techniques made affordable to these people the framing of the image in a little stucco relief. Angels holding the image became a common subject of these reliefs or statues. Angels were a typical Baroque theme, but they were popular among the lower classes well into the XIXth century. A little baldaquin, sometimes made with metal, gave the image some protection against rain. The more sophisticated stucco reliefs were painted in line with the Baroque tendency to mix painting with sculpture (and architecture). A certain number of images were made of rather large paintings, a memory perhaps of the Renaissance habit of painting the façades of the palaces. In these cases the subject of the image was more complex and the painting was most likely the initiative of a brotherhood, if not of the pope. In some cases, like this one, the stucco reliefs are so large and ornate that the sacred images are somewhat suffocated. Besides many painted images are almost unreadable. In general we know very little about who designed and executed these reliefs.