Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista

The fifteenth-century Church of San Giovanni Evangelista contains a major cycle of Renaissance painting. At the church, Moretto and Romanino share a Eucharistic programme across Old and New Testament walls, while Zenale's Deposition presides over the high altar.

Why it matters

A foundation tradition traces the church to Bishop San Gaudenzio between 400 and 402 AD; from 1135 the Lateran Canons ran it as an immunity zone outside city jurisdiction. The Eucharistic cycle brings together work by two leading Brescian painters from 1521–1524 onward: Romanino painted New Testament scenes on the left aisle and Moretto Old Testament scenes on the right. The programme drew in part on a published sermon collection.

What to notice

Romanino's left aisle includes the Resurrection of Lazarus, the Feast at the Pharisee's House and the Mass of St Gregory; Moretto's right aisle includes Elijah's sleep, the gathering of manna and the Last Supper. Above the high altar is Zenale's Deposition altarpiece, dated 1504–1509, with Moretto's Coronation of the Virgin lunette added after the 1882 remodelling. The church also preserves Romanino's Sacra Conversazione of 1509 and the Madonna del Tabarrino, a 1486 fresco signed by Paolo da Brescia. The Chapel of the Santissimo Sacramento was added in 1509 and remodelled in Baroque style between 1651 and 1674.

Context and history

The first church, called Concilium Sanctorum for the relics Gaudenzio gathered there, stood outside the walls until the twelfth-century expansion of the city brought it within them. Repeated rebuilding ended in the structure of 1440–1447: three naves on pillars with floral capitals, the essentially medieval body you still enter today. The sixteenth-century fresco and canvas campaign made the church a laboratory of Brescian painting, drawing on Gabriele da Barletta's sermons, first printed at the end of the fifteenth century and reissued in Brescia in 1521. Nineteenth-century taste intervened too: Vantini's 1882 works reframed the paintings in pseudo-Renaissance frames. The church now belongs to the diocesan museo diffuso network, which coordinates the sacred heritage of the historic centre.