Collegiata di San Medardo

Arcevia's collegiate church of San Medardo is known for its combination of architecture and art. Under a dome by Andrea Vici, an architect formed in Vanvitelli's school, hang panels by Signorelli, the turbulent Last Judgment of Ercole Ramazzani and an altar in glazed terracotta from the workshop of Giovanni Della Robbia.

Why it matters

Small Marche towns frequently have one memorable church; Arcevia has one that functions as an art gallery with a roof. San Medardo contains works by Luca Signorelli, one of the great painters of the Italian Renaissance, whose presence this far down the Apennine flank of the Marche is remarkable in itself; the Last Judgment by Ercole Ramazzani, the district's own Mannerist, whose writhing version of the subject gives the church its most turbulent image; and a major altar of glazed terracotta produced by the workshop of Giovanni Della Robbia, the Florentine dynasty whose luminous sculpture reached even this valley. The dome overhead closes the circle: it is the work of Andrea Vici, the Senigallia architect and hydraulic engineer trained in Vanvitelli's orbit.

What to notice

Three major works define the collection. The Signorelli panels demonstrate the artist's work in the church's original setting. Ercole Ramazzani's Giudizio Universale depicts naked bodies tumbling through cloud, a provincial painter absorbing the Roman-Mannerist current and making it shout. The Della Robbia workshop altar works differently — white glaze on tin-lustred terracotta, a Florentine technique transplanted whole, and a reminder that this hillside commune sat confidently inside the main lines of Italian art patronage. Above these works, the dome by Vici, the architect remembered on the portal's notable-figures page as a collaborator on the Reggia di Caserta and designer of the canal feeding the Cascata delle Marmore, gives the interior its classical calm above the Baroque and Renaissance noise.

Context and history

Arcevia grew as Roccacontrada, the fortified commune that commanded nine castles in the hills of the upper Misa valley; scholarly studies of the Franciscan settlement in this territory document its religious institutions operating between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the collegiate church stands in the line of that tradition as the town's principal church. The artistic harvest now visible inside belongs chiefly to the Renaissance and Mannerist era, when the commune could draw on Signorelli, on the Della Robbia workshop network and on Ramazzani, whose family name survives in the address of the church itself, Via Ercole Ramazzani. Vici's dome arrived later, the eighteenth-century note in an older fabric. The church's paintings and terracotta altar form a concentrated display of local and regional art.