The Story of Siena and San GimignanoGardner, Edmund G.
History
The Story of Siena and San Gimignano
Gardner, Edmund G.
Art -- Italy -- Siena; San Gimignano (Italy) -- History; Siena (Italy) -- History
The large prison that rises up at the walls, to the left of us, occupies
the site of the Rocca that defended the town until the Florentine
occupation in 1353. After that, a Dominican convent was built upon the
spot--the convent in which Savonarola stayed while preaching the Lent in
the Pieve. It was suppressed in the eighteenth century by the Austrian
Grand Duke of Tuscany. Opposite to it, in the Via del Castello, is the
little church of San Lorenzo in Ponte, with a few unimportant frescoes
of the Trecento.
Passing under the Arco de' Talei into the Via San Giovanni, we see a
large piece of the first circuit of walls on the right, adjoining the
Portone, blackened apparently by fire, and the tall Torre Talei.
Opposite the tower is a shrine, with a ruined fresco by Mainardi. In the
refectory of a former convent of Benedictine nuns (now the Palazzo
Pratellesi) is a very Peruginesque fresco by Vincenzo Tamagni,
representing the mystical marriage of St Catherine of Alexandria; it is
dated 1528. On the left is the dismantled façade of San Giovanni, a
building of the eleventh century. Over the inside of the gate is a
chapel built in 1601 to cover a venerated picture, but the outside of
the Porta San Giovanni is still unspoiled thirteenth century
architecture.
A short way beyond the Porta San Giovanni is the former monastery of
Monte Oliveto, founded in 1340 by Giovanni di Gualtiero Salvucci. In the
lunette over the door of the church is a fresco of the Madonna between
two white-robed monks, possibly by Tamagni. There is a Madonna of 1502
in the church by Mainardi, and two Sienese pictures of the school of
Lippo Memmi are in the sacristy. In the cloister is a frescoed
Crucifixion by Benozzo Gozzoli, with St Jerome beating his breast and
saying the Rosary at the foot of the Cross. Beyond Monte Oliveto, a road
of olives and barley fields leads to the small hamlet of Santa Lucia. In
its church are a fresco of the Crucifixion, with a little Dominican
kneeling at the foot, by Pier Francesco, and a picture by Fra
Paolino--one of those compositions of Madonnas and Saints that he
inherited from Fra Bartolommeo.
Outside the Porta San Matteo is the convent of the Cappuccini. In its
church is a Deposition from the Cross of 1591, ascribed to Jacopo
Ligozzi of Verona. About two miles further on, with a splendid view over
the valley, is Cellole, a Romanesque church of the first years of the
thirteenth century. Attached to it was the Leper Hospital, where San
Bartolo devoted his life to the stricken and where at last, himself
overtaken by the fell disease, he became one with the rest and died.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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