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Clusone |
Built in the fifteenth century on the ruins of an ancient castle, the long porticoed front of the palazzo, embellished with important frescoes from the firteenth to the eighteenth centuries, looks out over the piazza. Next to it stands the Torre dell’Orologio (clock tower), whose façade bears an extraordinary mechanism developed in 1583 by a local man called Pietro Fanzago. In the heart of the town’s residential area stands the Basilica di Santa Maria Assunta, a 1688 work by Giovan Battista Quadrio; the internal decor includes works by Antonio Cifrondi, Giambettino Cignaroli, and others.
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Video Gallery: art and culture in Bergamo and local area |
But the church’s real treasure is housed in the presbytery, where the precious high altar, sculpted by Andrea Fantoni, and the altarpiece depicting the Assumption of Mary, a masterpiece by the celebrated Venetian painter Sebastiano Ricci, are to be seen. Opposite the church we find one of Clusone’s best known monuments: the fifteenth-century Oratory of the Disciplines, on whose façade a highly expressive fresco cycle unfolds illustrating the theme of death after the typical fashion of the medieval imagination.
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The cycle is a grand late fifteenth-century painting – unanimously attributed by critics to Giacomo Borlone – that unites on a single wall three emblematic death themes: the Triumph of Death, the Dance of Death, and the Encounter of the Living with the Dead. Inside the chapel, at the widest part of the nave, the artist gives a finshing touch to his work with forty-two remarkable panels illustrating the life of Christ. After leaving the basilica let’s walk toward Palazzo Fogaccia, an imposing and elegant late seventeenth-century villa whose sober exterior stands in contrast to the sumptuous interior rooms, adorned with eighteenth-century frescoes. Before leaving Clusone, visitors should also see the little church of San Defendente (1471), refined with votive frescoes.
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