From ruins to reconstruction: past and present

Abstract

Among the rare surprises I had during my long permanence at Perugia, in the first place I put the discovery of the fascinating frescoes of the local Quattrocento painter Benedetto Bonfigli (on this painter, see Mancini 1992). Twenty years ago, my colleague of Art History invited me to give a look at the restorations of the frescoes painted by Bonfigli in the years 1449-1456 in the Cappella dei Priori, the Chapel of the local magistrates inside the City Hall, the Palazzo dei Priori. News on his life are really scanty, but it is certain that Bonfigli was included into the group of painters headed by Beato Angelico, to whom Pope Nicholas V, following his decision to move the papal see from the Lateran, commissioned the decoration of the “Appartementi Nicoliniani”, i.e. his apartments in the Vatican, unfortunately destroyed in the course of centuries. The stories painted by Bonfigli on the walls of the Perugian Chapel can be considered among the masterpieces of the Italian early Renaissance, a cycle of frescoes lamentably unknown not only to the great public, but sometimes also to specialists in art history. The frescoes represent various episodes of the life of two of the three saints, chosen to be protectors of the city of Perugia, the local bishop Herculaneus, accused of intelligence with the Byzantines and sentenced to death by the king Totila during the Gothic war, and Saint Louis from Toulouse, saint of the royal house of France, chosen by Perugia to protect the commercial interests of the town, mainly connected with clothes, the “panni”, a deal that already three centuries before suggested to a merchant from Assisi to give his son the name Francesco. Bonfigli places here and there in his frescoes memories of the classical past to follow in his own way the brand new fashion to copy Roman monuments 1, a must for men of both letters and arts, but also to obey by instinct to his culture of the late Middle Ages, heir of the great Trecento realism. This is why he sets the funerals of Saint Louis in a church of an unmistakable