Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Grazie (la Propositura)

Anghiari's principal church took more than a century to reach its present form, resulting in a late-eighteenth-century interior centred on Andrea della Robbia's glazed terracotta Madonna delle Grazie and Renaissance panels.

Why it matters

The Propositura is the town's chief church, the seat that gives Anghiari its own provost, and its art holds the condensed history of the borgo's faith and patronage. Andrea della Robbia's Madonna delle Grazie, modelled and glazed in the family workshop's tin-glazed terracotta, has been a devotional image for centuries. The building is an unusually late construction: the regional tourism board dates work from 1628 to 1740, while the national heritage catalogue dates the church to 1785 and attributes the design to Giovanni Battista Bellini. The result is a late-Baroque-to-Neoclassical statement in a town otherwise shaped by the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

What to notice

Andrea della Robbia's Madonna delle Grazie relief shows the Virgin and Child in the glazed terracotta associated with the Robbia workshop; the image gives the church its dedication. The church also holds two paintings by Giovanni di Antonio Sogliani, the Florentine Renaissance painter active from 1492 to 1544, and a large Deposition from the Cross by Domenico di Bartolomeo Ubaldini. The heritage catalogue describes the church as an isolated volume on a Latin-cross plan with an apsidal chapel. The parish buildings attach to the left transept, a detail that explains the church's domestic, lived-in edge despite its classical scale.

Context and history

Construction began in 1628, in the full confidence of the Florentine grand duchy's rule over the Valtiberina, and continued in stages until 1740, a timescale that explains why the church absorbs earlier devotional art into a later architectural frame. The final design belongs to the late Settecento: the Catalogo Generale dei Beni Culturali, the national heritage register maintained by the Ministry of Culture, dates the church to 1785 and attributes the project to Giovanni Battista Bellini, with the Soprintendenza of Siena, Grosseto and Arezzo today exercising protection over a building still owned by a Catholic religious body. The Robbia Madonna connects the church to the town and valley's older devotional traditions. The dedication to Santa Maria delle Grazie is worth stating precisely: the Madonna delle Grazie image gave the church its title, not the reverse.