Sala dei Battuti

Beside Conegliano's cathedral waits a single great hall that condensed a medieval confraternity's faith into paint. Its walls carry a sixteenth-century cycle running from the Creation to the Last Judgement, its facade shows Old Testament scenes, and after a completed restoration the room has recovered its original colour.

Why it matters

The Sala dei Battuti is the meeting hall that the confraternity of the Battuti — the "beaten" devotees whose congregation was born in Umbria around 1260 and reached Conegliano within a few years — raised above their church in the second half of the fourteenth century. Built perpendicular to the nave so as not to break the porticoed street front, the hall served the brothers who ran the city's hospitals and hospices. The hall is known for its painted interior. Its fresco cycle underwent restoration promoted by the Rotary Club Conegliano with public and private partners.

What to notice

Outside, the hall's facade hides the cathedral's own front behind nine pointed arches, and that wall carries late-sixteenth-century frescoes by Ludovico Toeput, known as il Pozzoserrato, whose scriptural scenes keep a monumental, still Mannerist bearing. Inside, the rectangular room keeps a handsome wooden ceiling and a fresco cycle executed mostly by Francesco da Milano in two campaigns: the outer wall painted in the second decade of the sixteenth century, the inner wall around 1530, the latter modelled on the printed Passion cycles that Albrecht Dürer had issued around 1510 — look for the German printmaker's compositions translated into Venetian colour. When the hall was enlarged, the new walls were decorated by Pozzoserrato and other local painters; the Touring Club also records Girolamo da Treviso the Younger and Andrea Previtali among the contributors. The cycle spans the Creation of the world to the Last Judgement.

The adjacent Sala del Capitolo holds five Flemish tapestries, dated to about 1560, depicting the stories of David and Bathsheba.

Context and history

The confraternity's complex grew fast: by 1354 the Battuti had built their church of Santa Maria Nuova at the centre of a pilgrims' hospice, and the present cathedral of Conegliano is its descendant, begun by the brothers in 1345. The hall above it outlived the order's purposes. After the Napoleonic suppressions it became a prison in 1807, then a soldiers' shelter in 1847, and was then left to decay until restoration began in the 1960s. That biography — hospital administration, prison, barracks, ruin and recovery — helps explain both the survival of the cycle and its damage. A later conservation campaign, valued at about 130,000 euros, was carried out by Sirecon with support from the Diocese of Vittorio Veneto.