Santuario di Santa Maria della Neve

On the little hill beneath Iseo's Oldofredi castle, where a Roman villa once stood, the townspeople of the seventeenth century raised this sanctuary for a fresco of the Virgin they had rescued from demolition. Built in the 1650s, it keeps that image, baroque stuccoes, marble altars and an organ by the Serassi brothers of 1773 to 1775.

Why it matters

The sanctuary's story begins with an act of civic devotion. In 1653 the community of Iseo resolved to pull down its old church of Santo Stefano, and the builders of the replacement, recorded on the same spot from 1655, deliberately saved the ancient fresco of the Virgin with Saint Anthony Abbot from the rubble and set it above the high altar of the new church, judging it miraculous. That continuity of image and place, on a hillock that had carried a large Roman villa of the second century AD and stands beside the medieval castle, makes the building one of the most layered spots in Iseo. The Diocese of Brescia lists it as a subsidiary sanctuary of the diocese, and its interior, with the Corbarelli-influenced marble commesso work of the Santo Stefano altar, documents how Florentine marbling reached Brescia at the end of the seventeenth century.

What to notice

The facade is deliberately austere so that the baroque portal in stone of Sarnico can carry the composition, its carvings unusually deep in size, type and relief. Flanking the entrance, two stretches of wall form shallow aedicular bays: the square fields hold the Evangelists, the larger rectangular ones Saint Anthony of Padua with the Christ Child and Saint John the Baptist, paintings ascribed to the manner of Bernardino Gandino. A triangular pediment with an iron cross closes the front, and the bell tower on the north side revealed the date 1767 during restoration. Inside, one rectangular vaulted hall lit by two windows runs between fluted Corinthian pilasters. The two side chapels, dedicated to Saint Anthony of Padua and Santo Stefano, wrapped in rich baroque stucco, each with an eighteenth-century fresco in the arch — Jacob's Dream on one side, the Trinity on the other — and the seventeenth-century Venetian-school scenes of Saint Anthony preaching to the fish and the Miracle of the Mule. The high altar preserves the rescued fresco beneath an eighteenth-century lunette of Angels with a cartouche attributed to the Brescian Pompeo Ghitti, and the presbytery's marble altarpiece sets white statues of the Angel of the Annunciation and the Virgin between twisted columns of black marble.

Context and history

The chronology assembled from the lake's official portal and the CEI BeWeb heritage database is unusually complete. A shrine with the image of the Virgin and Saint Anthony Abbot stood here by the early fifteenth century, beside an older church dedicated to Santo Stefano; the community decided in 1653 to replace it, the new sanctuary rose in the following years, and the old fresco was moved to the high altar of the new building in August 1656. Decoration then accumulated: the two late-seventeenth-century canvases of the Annunciation and the Immaculate Conception, still of uncertain authorship; the marble commesso of the Santo Stefano altar in the Florentine technique spread to Brescia by the Corbarelli family after the 1680s; the organ built by the Serassi brothers between 1773 and 1775 on its decorated gallery at the entrance; and the frescoes painted by Piero Brigoli da Corzano in the mid-1950s beside the presbytery. Restorations in 1972, 1980, 2007 and 2009 have kept the building sound, and the parish unit that serves it today unites Iseo with Clusane, Cremignane and Pilzone.