Chiesa di Sant'Agostino

On the square that carries its name, the church of Sant'Agostino gathers an improbable amount of seventeenth-century quality into one room: frescoes by Taricco and Aliberti, a painted "Massacre of the Innocents" by a pupil of Guercino, carved wooden Christs by a Lugano sculptor, and a richly decorated high altar.

Why it matters

Built in 1672 to a design by Giovenale Boetto — the same Fossano master who drew the Arco del Belvedere — Sant'Agostino condenses the artistic ambitions of Cherasco's post-plague generation. It documents the networks that linked this small Langhe town to major centres: a painter trained in Guercino's circle, sculptors from the Lombard lakes, and local dynasties of artists like the Taricco family. The church stands beside Palazzo Brizio della Veglia and Palazzo Fracassi, extending the square's architectural history beyond the religious buildings.

What to notice

The "Strage degli innocenti": painted in 1661 by Bartolomeo Garavoglia of Livorno Vercellese, a pupil of Guercino, it is a large composition above the altar. The wooden "Cristo alla colonna" by the sculptor Plura of Lugano and the "Cristo Risorto" by Clementi of Turin represent two carving traditions. The organ case, with its caryatids, and the richly carved seventeenth-century main door repay attention, as does the high altar. Outside, the adjacent Palazzo Brizio della Veglia is a fifteenth-century Gothic building with arched openings and terracotta ornament, while across the square Palazzo Fracassi keeps the historical relics of the Shroud's presence in Cherasco and of Napoleon's passage, once housed in Palazzo Salmatoris.

Context and history

The church belongs to the burst of baroque patronage that followed the plague of 1630–1631 and the Treaty of Cherasco of 1631, when the town's elite rebuilt and embellished on a scale its size hardly predicts. The arch and this church were raised within a single generation — the votive arch begun in 1647, the church completed in 1672 — by the same Fossano master, giving the southern edge of the centre a unified Boetto signature. Boetto's 1672 church acquired a modern interior, progressively filled with frescoes by Sebastiano Taricco and Giovanni Carlo Aliberti, two leading painters of Cherasco's religious art of the period.