Themed thread
Frescoes covered and rediscovered
Centuries of wall painting vanished under lime, and partly brought back to light.
It is the most recurrent story in our entries, and it spans four centuries. In the churches of these valleys frescoes were covered, limewashed or whitewashed an impressive number of times, and the most intense moment is a precise season: the pastoral visits of 1616 and 1617. In those two years orders were given to cover the paintings at Cloz, Cis, Bozzana, Ortisé, Rallo and Arsio, and at Cusiano the auxiliary bishop Pietro Belli ordered all the frescoes and paintings removed from the walls. The same Belli, in the same months, was consecrating new churches not far away.
The lime did not always come on a bishop’s orders, though, and the reasons recorded are the most varied. At Mollaro the seventeenth-century frescoes were limewashed in 1774; at Cusiano the interior was whitewashed in 1854 and the vault of the presbytery decorated with a pattern of silver stars; at Romeno, in the nineteenth century, the paintings of Sant’Antonio abate were damaged not by a religious decision but by a disinfection of the walls after a cholera epidemic; at Scanna the paint that covers almost all of them dates from between 1960 and 1969, and only the apse conch survived. At Faedo, on the other hand, what hid the fresco in the presbytery was not lime but a wooden altarpiece.
The consoling part is that many have come back. At Cloz the frescoes whitewashed in 1617 re-emerged and were restored in 1927; at Baselga di Bresimo the cycle inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s Small Passion, ruined by a nineteenth-century limewash, was recovered around the middle of the twentieth century; at Salobbi it was precisely a repainting in the 1970s that led to the discovery of ancient fragments. Of others nothing more is known: at Rallo, about the frescoes that the 1616 visit ordered to be covered, the sources say nothing else.
17 places where you meet it
- Chiesa dei Santi Filippo e GiacomoVal di NonA visit in 1537 records a church at Terres dedicated to Saints Philip and James, belonging to the pieve of Flavon.
- Chiesa dei Santi Pietro e PaoloVal di NonParish church of Casez, a hamlet of Sanzeno. It was built starting from 1200 and completed within the first half of the century; the first written mentions date from 1264.
- Chiesa dei Santi Pietro e PaoloVal di SoleThe church of Bozzana is first mentioned in a document of 1384, and in the second half of the following century the building was enriched with a cycle of frescoes, which has largely been lost.
- Chiesa dell'Assunzione di MariaVal di NonAlso known as the sanctuary of Santa Maria Assunta or the sanctuary of the Madonna di Bresimo, it appears explicitly in documents from 1324.
- Chiesa della Natività di MariaVal di NonThe first mention of this church dates from 1537 and appears in the records of the pastoral visit of Bernardo Clesio, cardinal and prince-bishop of Trento.
- Chiesa di San BiagioVal di NonThe original construction dates to the second half of the 15th century, but the first written mention comes later, in the records of the 1537 pastoral visit of Bernardo Clesio, which describe it as dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary.
- Chiesa di San CristoforoVal di SoleThe church of Ortisé was built in the fifteenth century and enriched with decorations attributed to Giovanni and Battista Baschenis, or to painters of their school, within the first decade of the sixteenth century.
- Chiesa di San GiorgioVal di NonWhen it was built is not certain. A first indirect mention may date back to 1117, but it is from 1266 that the church appears in the documents, described as built beside a graveyard. What is certain, however, also from recent archaeological investigations, is what stood before on the same site: a pagan temple of the Roman era, between the 1st and the 6th century, and before that human settlements of the Iron Age.
- Chiesa di San LorenzoVal di SoleThe oldest document that mentions this church dates from 1264, but a fragment of Carolingian-era fresco on the presbytery shows that the building already existed in the ninth century.
- Chiesa di San MarcoVal di NonThe first place of worship dedicated to Saint Mark in Mollaro was visited by the envoys of Bernardo Clesio on 23 June 1537, and described as a small church with a single altar, that of its patron saint.
- Chiesa di San TommasoVal di NonSubsidiary church of the hamlet of Dres, above Cles, with a first mention that may date back to a document of 1322.
- Chiesa di San TommasoVal di SoleThe church of Cassana is documented from 1468 onwards.
- Chiesa di Sant'AgataVal di SoleFirst mentioned in 1244, it was partly rebuilt and enlarged in Gothic forms in the second half of the fifteenth century.
- Chiesa di Sant'AntonioVal di NonThe place of worship at Rallo is first mentioned in 1537, and the year the building was constructed is not known; the bell tower was erected in 1573.
- Chiesa di Santa LuciaVal di NonIt stands in the pine wood of the hill of Santa Lucia, north-west of Fondo, and the hill already bore that name in the 13th century: a sign that a place of worship dedicated to the saint existed before the present building, which dates from the 14th century.
- Chiesa di Santa Maria AssuntaVal di NonCloz is made up of two neighbouring centres that form a single settlement, and which are sometimes distinguished by the names of their respective churches, Santo Stefano and Santa Maria.
- Chiesa di Santa Maria MaddalenaVal di SoleThe presence of a place of worship at Cusiano is documented as early as 1368, and from 1470 it is known that Giovanni and Battista, of the important Baschenis workshop originally from the Valle Averara, worked on its decoration.
The links between these places come from our entries, where every fact has been checked against the sources. The entries are written one at a time: this thread will grow with them.