Chiesa di San Bernardino

On the hillside above Saluzzo's centre, the church and convent of San Bernardino were founded for Franciscan friars in 1471 at the wish of Marquis Ludovico I. Inside the deliberately plain Gothic shell are painted chapels, illusionistic Baroque frescoes and a cloister cycle of Franciscan saints.

Why it matters

The complex captures the piety and the politics of the late Marquisate at once. Ludovico I promoted the complex — the first stone was laid on 20 August 1471 — introducing the Friars Minor to his capital, and the church took its place among the devotional foundations through which the marchional house displayed its rank. The friars remained on the site across the centuries, and the complex records the town's Franciscan history. The convent burned in 1529 and was rebuilt with the help of Margherita di Foix, the widowed marchesa; the layers of Gothic founding, dynastic patronage and Baroque redecoration make the interior a compact history of the town's art across three centuries.

What to notice

The exterior keeps its promise of Franciscan austerity: a central portal and a rose window, with the original Gothic character still legible in the apse. Inside, a single nave is flanked by side chapels with painted altars, and an elliptical dome covers the presbytery. The 1753–55 restoration replaced a deteriorated wooden ceiling with masonry vaults painted by Gian Domenico Rosso da Busca and Pietro Antonio Pozzo with trompe-l'oeil architecture; two large vault frescoes by Pietro Paolo Oberti depict the Glory of San Bernardino and Santa Margherita da Cortona, and among the chapel furnishings a dead Christ attributed to the sculptor Carlo Giuseppe Plura carries the Baroque register into sculpture. In the convent, the refectory keeps lunette frescoes of Gospel scenes, and the cloister holds an octagonal well under a columned pavilion with painted lunettes of Franciscan saints executed after 1630 — which creates the impression of a painted family album of the order rather than court art.

Context and history

The foundation belongs to the Marchese Ludovico I's programme of dynastic display through religious patronage, the same generation that built the Antico Palazzo Comunale (1440–1462). The Friars Minor were introduced to Saluzzo, and their hillside convent became part of the town's religious history. After the dark years that followed the siege of 1487 by Carlo I of Savoy, the convent burned in 1529, in the period of French occupation that came with the marquisate's decline, and was restored through the patronage of Margherita di Foix, widow of Ludovico II and regent of the marquisate, a consistent protector of the Franciscans. In the seventeenth century the convent passed from the order's Genoa province to that of Turin, and after the upheavals of the French revolutionary period it reopened and expanded again, its twentieth-century growth housing the Collegio Serafico. The Franciscan presence and later community work form part of the complex's history.