San Giovanni Evangelista.
By now I have visited the church of San Giovanni Evangelista in Brescia twice. I therefore feel an obligation towards my readers to write a post about it. The church is one of the oldest in Brescia, with a history that reportedly goes back to the days of Saint Gaudentius, bishop of Brescia from the end of the fourth until the beginning of the fifth century. The church of Gaudentius was damaged on multiple occasions, destroyed and rebuilt. A very important rebuilding project took place between 1440 and 1447. Part of the project was the addition of two cloisters to the church, which were used by a chapter of canons regular for ages. Although the outward appearance of the San Giovanni is still that of a late medieval Gothic church, the interior is clearly Baroque. Responsible for this interior was the architect Gerolamo Quadrio (1625-1679), whose family was originally from Lugano in Switzerland.
The façade of the building is rather conspicuous. The church once had a rose window, but that has been replaced with a rectangular window. The portal is sixteenth-century and possibly a work of Filippo Grassi, the architect who was co-responsible for the Palazzo della Loggia, the current city hall of Brescia (see Brescia: City of piazzas). To the left of the portal, we can still see a Gothic pointed arch made of brick, a remnant of a tomb that once belonged to the Maggi family. This is the family of which Berardo Maggi was a member, the bishop of Brescia between 1275 and 1308 (see Brescia: The Duomo Vecchio). Berardo was succeeded by his nephew, Federico Maggi. Above the right entrance we see another Gothic pointed arch. This one is made of stone and is supported by columns. Both the arch and the columns were once part of a funerary monument for a scion of the Paitone family. The family’s coat of arms, with three crescents, is still visible in the tip of the arch.
Quadrio’s interior is a mix of white and pink. In the back there are still a few remains of fifteenth-century frescoes, but most of the artworks in the church date from later centuries. In this respect, the names of two men need to be mentioned: Girolamo Romani (ca. 1484-1566) and Alessandro Bonvicino (ca. 1498-1554), also known as Romanino and Moretto. In 1521 they were commissioned by the canons to jointly decorate the Cappella del Santissimo Sacramento, which had been added to the left side of the church in 1509. Romanino embellished the left side of the chapel while Moretto took care of the right. The two masters painted prophets, evangelists and stories from the Old and New Testament. A famous work is Moretto’s panel painting of the Coronation of the Virgin. The altarpiece featuring the Deposition is a work by Bernardo Zenale (died 1526).
Remains of frescoes, 15th century.
Baptistery. Romanino’s Marriage of the Virgin is on the left.
Romanino and Il Moretto were responsible for more important work in the church of San Giovanni. On the third altar on the right, we for instance find a Massacre of the Innocents by Moretto (ca. 1531) while Romanino’s Marriage of the Virgin in the baptistery also warrants closer inspection (image above). A curiosity is the painting depicting the Ten thousand martyrs of Mount Ararat. It was made by Angiolo Everardi (1647-1678), an Italian painter of Dutch extraction (his father was from the town of Sittard). According to an unreliable tradition the ten thousand martyrs were Roman soldiers who had converted to Christianity and had subsequently been crucified. In Brescia they are venerated because they are said to have successfully intervened during a plague in 1511. This painting is one of the very few attributed to Angiolo Everardi with certainty. The painter died young and was largely forgotten.
Sources: Church of San Giovanni Evangelista | Comune di brescia, Church of San Giovanni Evangelista – Le vie del Romanino and Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista (Brescia) – Wikipedia.