10th April 2007
You know how guide books often refer to a church and say that to get in you have to ask the man in the local bar for the key and someone will come down to open it up for you?
And you know how it seems rather unlikely, or at least you wouldn’t think of actually bothering to do it?
Well, we did it the other day, and it worked!
Our most famous local artist is Perugino, and any Art courses that I run in the future will have lots of History of Art as part of the course. So we began looking into his life, and I’m getting a little bit hooked. He’s not the most famous, not the best, and is certainly the least glamorous of all the artists of the Renaissance period, but his life story is full of grit, determination and hard work, resulting in him being recognised in these parts as the greatest painter of his generation. We went to the church because he died there, painting a fresco at the ripe old age of 80, during the Winter, on top of a scaffold. He died alone, in view of the Lake, a victim of the plague, having just painted a portrait on the left side of the chapel dedicated to San Rocco, patron saint of plague victims. His body was unceremoniously dumped into a ditch at the side of the road and was only later discovered and reburied with suitable pomp.
None of those chocolate-boxey, rather obvious landscapes of Provence here. This was a painter who grafted all his life and ended up teaching Raphael, (who soon outshone his master and went to Rome to work for the Pope).
Perugino stayed loyal to his landscape throughout his life, and in the background of many of his paintings you can see “a rarified ring of low hills that hovers around a misty lake that is and isn’t Lake Trasimeno.” – Brent Gregson, Drive around Tuscany and Umbria, 2005
Anyway, four of the five frescoes were taken in the middle of the 19th Century - the largest to the National Gallery in London – and all that remains is a solitary Madonna and Child. But the chapel is more than about the painting, it’s about Perugino, and it’s fabulous. 
The chapel at Fontignano.
NB. You have to go to the local bar to get the number of the guy who will bring down the key and show you round.
The stupidest thing I did today;
I went to ask how long it would be to get rid of the water tank.
Comments