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Santa Maria di Monteluce: Nuns’ Choir


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This choir,which the nuns called “chiesa nostra dentro" (our church within), was enclosed in 1449, when a wall built was built across the last bay of the church.  It is entered by the small door to the left of what then became the back wall of the tribune (as described in the page on the interior of the church). 

The choir escaped the remodelling of 1602-7 and therefore preserves some of its original votive frescoes.

Frescoes (14th century) 


These frescoes on the left wall include:

  1. three votive frescoes with kneeling nuns (illustrated above), which depict:

  2. St Jerome;

  3. St Michael Archangel; and

  4. the baptism of Christ; and

  5. the stigmatisation of St Francis (behind the screen on the far left).





Assumption of the Virgin (14th century)

This damaged fresco is to the right on the wall that separates the choir from the church (presumably on part of the structure that pre-dates the enclosure of the choir in 1449).  Its iconography is similar to that in the fresco by Cimabue on the altar wall of the upper church of San Francesco, Assisi, in which Christ and the Virgin sit side by side in an intimate pose as angels bear them to Heaven.  For more information on this interesting iconography, see this website by Andrea Lonardo.

There is a copy (1983) of the central figures of this fresco in a tabernacle on the exterior of the church.


Santa Maria di Monteluce:  Main page   Church   Nuns’ choir   Art from church.


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