Chiesa di San Giorgio Martire in Breda Cisoni

On the flat farmland beyond Sabbioneta's walls, the parish church of Breda Cisoni rises with a Central-European elegance that surprises in a hamlet of the Po plain. Designed by the Viadanese architect Pietro Antonio Maggi and built between 1747 and 1764, it keeps gilded stucco, a 1769 organ by Giovanni Cavalletti of Ferrara and the memory of an earlier oratory.

Why it matters

Breda Cisoni is one of the frazioni that belong to the commune of Sabbioneta while lying outside the famous walled city, and this church is its monument. The building replaced an oratory that had stood here since the second half of the fifteenth century, and its construction ran from 1747 to 1764 — roughly contemporary with Antonio Galli Bibiena's great church at Villa Pasquali, and in dialogue with it. The church is a notable work of Central-European taste by Pietro Antonio Maggi; its museum section is dedicated to the baroque of the Casalasco-Viadanese, the borderland between Cremona and Mantua where such idioms met.

Its refined interior also shows how the ideal city's religious reach extended across its rural territory.

What to notice

The facade is divided by a strong projecting cornice into two orders; below, lesene on a high plinth frame a portal crowned by an aedicula resting on columns; above, the narrowed upper order answers with volutes, pyramid-topped pinnacles finish the sides, and a sail-shaped crowning piece closes the composition. The design turns on rotated, almost twisting pilasters — the official text notes the double order of lesene turned on their own axis — a sign of the late baroque's appetite for movement.

Inside, decoration takes over: the parish heritage pages describe an interior resplendent with stucco work shining with gold and ending in shell and spray-shaped finials. In the vault, medallions with the Evangelists look down on the nave. The presbytery is divided from the nave by a balustrade of polychrome marbles, from which the altar was also made. The organ, installed in 1769 by the Ferrara organbuilder Giovanni Cavalletti, remains in working order, with its original balconies.

Context and history

The sequence of dates is documented. Work began in 1747 and reached completion in 1764; in the six years that followed, Davide Terzani carried out the stucco decoration of the vaults and altarpiece frames, while the Como-born sculptor Stefano Salterio supplied the monumental statues in marbled stucco. A Venetian painter made the altarpiece showing the Martyrdom of Saint George, the Evangelist medallions and two side altarpieces.

Two later episodes changed the room. In 1829 parts of the vault stucco fell, and the parish priest of the day removed the remaining stucco ornaments of the vault rather than restore them; an anonymous tempera decoration replaced them in 1883. In 1769 the Cavalletti organ had arrived, enlarged by his grandsons Giovanni and Stefano in 1828, and in 1863 the bell tower rose from a design by the learned archpriest Don Antonio Parazzi. A recent overall restoration of the exterior has given the building back the chromatic vivacity that time had dulled.