AN ARMED CONFRONTATION IN A DEVOTIONAL ALTARPIECE OF SAN GINESIO
By Luigi Maria Armellini
The picture of Saint Andrew, better known as "Battle between ginesians and fermans", (popular denomination given to the painting of the 15th Century from inmemoriables times on the base of a detail of the scene represented there, which remembers a treacherous aggression by night at Saint Andrew’s eve frustrated thanks to a baker), was ordered in the second half of the 15th Century to decorate the left central chapel of the augustinian temple of San Ginesio, of municipal ecclesiastical benefit. There took place the annual celebrations in honor of the Saint, no wonder he’s for the population of San Ginesio one of the protectors of their country, particularly benevolent in two occasions of serious danger to the municipal rights, when he made a double apparition, defined like "Bina" by Salvi, with his imposing, gathered, hieratic look, up on the tower of the church of Saint Augustin, in those years much more higher that nowadays due to the damages of the earthquake in 1799.
In order to show the veneration and gratitude of the community, faithful to the spiritual protection of his saint, there was nothing better, lacking of a church where to practice exclusively the cult, then to build a chapel whose main ornament was an altarpiece having like double objective to express the devotion to Saint Andrew and, at the same time, to remember to its faithfuls one of the episodes of the salvation of the community by ordering a painting that represented the prodigious intervention of the friendly divinity, a fact that remained very latent during a long time in the fantasy and conversations of the population of San Ginesio.
The hyperbolic dimensions, with which the Saint has been carved, evidently denotes the devotional character of the altarpiece, very similar in this aspect to so many representations of the Virgin in which its person shows itself gigantic in relation to the faithfuls who, numerous, congregate under its opened mantle in search of protection mainly against natural catastrophes. It isn’t strange, therefore, that the painting, whose accomplishment was trusted to a passing through artist, was denominated, by the recently alluded reasons, the "Picture of Saint Andrew", title that certainly had to be adopted when it was placed, or in the successive centuries in which the "devotee crowd" of faithfuls ginesians grouped in front of the image of the Saint to ask for celestial favours, being celebrated every year the festivity with the traditional rites in which they also take part the municipal magistrates. In two documents of the Historical File of San Ginesio, belonging to the in/outs series of the City council, the painting is denominated “Picture of Saint Andrew”. The motivation of the second great expense is significant (June 1875), when a worker was called to separate our altarpiece for “obtaining the photography”.
The “Picture of Saint Andrew” is a typical example of which is defined as “painting in Marche”, a distinction due to the fact that our region, as writes Luigi Serra, didn’t have “through the centuries an own, unitary, organic artistic development, with its own centers of creation and elaboration with works concatenated by clear bows of union, characterized by its own accents”. The author of our painting was an artist of sienese origin, registered in Norcia and belonging to an association on which also took part Bartolomeo di Tommaso and Andrea Di Litio, the first from Foligno and the second from Abruzzo, that’s why he couldn’t avoid to show in his work his individual “koine” of the group to which he belonged and of another painter as Paolo da Visso, who was working in the orbit of the most important artist of that society, that’s to say, Bartolomeo di Tommaso. That is why Vitalini Sacconi attributed the altarpiece, whose view was shared by other studious. Nicola di Ulisse from Siena, this is the whole name of the author of the “Painting of Saint Andrew”, fact on which agree a great part of the critics of art of recognized and remarkable fame, certainly was a painter who didn’t scorn works although they’re distant of his habitual residence, since being established his family in Norcia, he often was working in Marche, and if we consider that when younger, perhaps until reaching the majority, lived in Siena where he was born, it’s possible to think that he had certainly an evident spirit of nomadic artist, and therefore he frequently accepted orders of work for example in Amandola and San Ginesio, in churches of Augustin friars, maybe thanks to some personal friendship inside that mendicant order.
In more than one occasion they’ve asked to me which would be the reasons of sociopolitical substrate that pushed the municipal authorities of San Ginesio to order, around the second half of the 15th Century, a painting for a chapel of the municipal ecclesiastical benefit, and to also trust the work of evoking a warlike event of almost one hundred years before. Nevertheless I’ve found a possible answer in the desire to maintain alive the feeling of patriotic love in the members of the population celebrated through a species of “school of the heart”, that with the effectiveness of the images could educate all, even to those to whom wasn’t given the possibility of reading, not being very spread at the time the trust on the writtings: a function, this one, that many centuries later, and at national level, during the Italian Renaissance, would be trusted to the historical novel and the lyric poetry, destined “to make vibrate the cord of the patriotic enthusiasm”.
The author of the “Painting of Saint Andrew”, that nowadays is at the civic picture-gallery of San Ginesio, called Scipione Gentili, was not an excellent master but anyway, his work is of extreme charme and interest because of the cromathical and atmosferical nuances present in this painting that even if inspirated in a real event, transmits inmediately that nuance of kindly reality of the late gothic style. And even if the goal of the author was to provocate hard, dramatic feelings, the result isn’t free of a kind of candour that gives to the composition the fabolous character, present in so many pictorial works of the 15th Century in our region. |
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