L'AQUILA, ARCHDIOCESE of. - Chief town of Abruzzo and provincial capital, with an area of 2,172 sq km and 115,000 inhabitants, all Catholics, of whom 60,000 are in the commune of L'Aquila. It has 145 parishes with 149 diocesan priests and 75 regulars; a seminary (1949). The city is situated at 720 m above sea level on the left bank of the Aterno river, in a locality rich in water, on the edge of a basin enclosed by mountains, among which Gran Sasso rises.
The earliest Christian records of the city are linked to the uncertain and obscure reports of a group of martyrs, St. Maximus, St. Justa and companions, venerated in the region. But the first known bishop of Furconium (Forconium, Furcona, today Civita di Bagno) dates from the 7th century. When the city of L'Aquila was founded, in the 13th century, Alexander IV created it an episcopal see, transferring to it that of Furconium, which from then on ceased to exist and took the name of the new city (20 February 1257). The diocese absorbed the territories of ancient Amiternum, today S. Vittorino, and in the last century (1818), the diocese of Città Ducale. Since 1881 it has been an archbishopric immediately subject to the Holy See.
ABBEYS
In the L'Aquila area there flourished: the illustrious abbey of S. Giovanni di Collimento, founded after the 11th century and suppressed by Pius II in 1461; S. Benedetto, now S. Maria della Riviera, earlier than 1303 and a priory of the Cistercians; S. Lorenzo, an abbey of the Benedictines later united with Collemaggio; S. Maria di Collemaggio, founded de Colle Madio in 1287 by St. Peter Celestine, who would receive his coronation there in 1294 and lies buried there (G. Pansa, Regestum S. Mariae de Collemadio, in Rassegna abruzzese di storia ed arte, 3 [1899], p. 248); S. Maria di Soccorso of the Olivetans (1472); Alexander VI united to it the abbey of S. Maria di Picciano; S. Spirito, given in commendam in 1547, united with the hospital of S. Spirito in Sassia in Rome; Bominaco S. Maria and S. Pellegrino, an abbey of the Benedictines of Farfa, erected in 1001 by Oderisio, count of Valva, suppressed in 1762.
The archives of the Cathedral and of the episcopate have been stripped of their ancient documents.
Bibliography9 works
Serafino Prete
ART
I. Architecture
The earliest documents of L'Aquila architecture date back to the second half of the 13th century, and in them there already appears that well-defined physiognomy which partakes at once of the Romanesque and the Gothic tradition and is enriched by cultural elements that flowed in from the most disparate centers, from the centers of Benedictine artistic culture or from the northern Romanesque, as well as from the forms of Campanian or Apulian architecture. The earliest religious buildings, today unfortunately much altered by the ruins of earthquakes or by later tampering, present the peculiar characteristic of a facade with a horizontal crowning, divided into two horizontal bodies by a slender frieze and often also tripartite vertically by two pilasters that rise from the base up to the crowning. The portal and the rose window are the central decorative elements of the architectural scheme, and in them the Romanesque and Gothic forms merge even more than in the other parts of the building.
The oldest of the churches that are partly preserved is perhaps S. Pietro di Sassa (ca. 1256), today much transformed, followed by S. Giusta (1257), whose facade, however, dates to 1349, and S. Maria di Collemaggio, the most exalted monument of the entire region. It was begun in 1283 and consecrated in 1288, but the building continued for many years still, and the splendid main portal and the rose windows date to the second half of the 14th century. The horizontal facade, framed in a suggestive setting against the background of the Gran Sasso and the Maiella, has an elegant decoration with geometric patterns in blocks of white and pink stone. In this church St. Peter Celestine, having come down from his hermitage at Morrone, was crowned pope in 1294, and there is his tomb, executed in 1517 by Girolamo da Vicenza.
Other churches were built in the following years. S. Antonio, near Porta Romana, bears on the architrave of the surviving portal the date 1308, and to the same year the facade with the notable portal of the church of S. Maria Paganica is traditionally referred. More decidedly Angevin characters, especially in the sculptural decorations, are presented by the churches of S. Domenico (ordered by Charles II in 1309, but still unfinished in 1362), of S. Maria di Rojo, earlier than 1322, of S. Marciano, of S. Marco, of S. Pietro in Coppito. Before 1351 the church of S. Silvestro was begun: its facade recalls, albeit in a simpler decorative layout, S. Maria di Collemaggio. In the interior, on the altar to the left of the high altar, under the patronage of the Branconio family, was the Visitation attributed to Raphael, today in the Prado Museum in Madrid.
Recently there have been discovered in the apse very remarkable frescoes by an unknown painter, who proved to have been active in Abruzzo toward the last years of the century and the first of the 15th century. Of 1422-28 is the facade of S. Maria del Guasto, today leaning against the little church of S. Maria degli Angeli, with a portal that has a lunette and archivolts with paintings in the manner of Delitio. Of 1439 is the front of S. Giovanni di Lucoli, likewise leaning, in 1896, against the church of S. Francesco di Paola, which no longer preserves any trace of the original construction. Slight reminiscences of the ogival construction are visible in the right side of the cathedral, which has a Baroque interior and a Neoclassical facade. Remains of medieval civil architecture are in the building called "Le cancella" and in the house de' Nardis, as well as in the numerous surviving dwellings in the old and characteristic narrow streets of the ancient city.
The Renaissance contributions reached L'Aquila late: a first attempt at a fusion of Gothic forms with the new currents came with the little church of S. Maria del Soccorso, begun in 1469, whose facade recalls in its structure examples of Sangallo, while it repeats in the white-and-pink dichromy of the decorative bands reminiscences of the local prototype. Among all the monuments of this period the church of S. Bernardino stands foremost, linked to the memory of the last years spent by the Saint in the city. The facade, a composite work by Cola dell'Amatrice, is of 1540; the majestic interior was reworked several times and preserves a gilded 18th-century ceiling by Ferdinando Mosca da Pescocostanzo, with canvases by the Cennatiempo. Also to be remembered are the Palazzo Benedetti and the Palazzo Dragonetti, for their elegant courtyards with loggias, and the later Palazzo Franchi.
In 1534 the imposing mass of the castle was begun, an unfinished work by the architect Pietro Scriba of Valencia, commissioned by the Spanish government for the defense of the viceroy. Reworked several times, it has been restored recently and is the seat of the National Museum of Abruzzo.
From the Baroque period good testimonies are preserved in the Palazzi Pica-Alfieri, Antonelli, Centi, Cipolloni, Rivera, mostly modeled on Roman examples, in the oratory of S. Antonio de' Nardis, traditionally attributed to Ercole Ferrata (1647), and in the churches of S. Agostino, in part attributed to Fuga, and of S. Maria del Suffragio, which has a graceful dome on a design by Valadier.
2. Sculpture
The testimonies of medieval sculpture at L'Aquila are scanty and such as to exclude a true flourishing of works. Pisan influences, mediated from Naples through the workshops of the followers of Tino di Camaino, are detectable in the statuettes that decorate the main portal of S. Maria di Collemaggio and in the group of the Madonna and Child in the lunette of the facade of S. Maria Paganica. From the same cultural milieu derive some wooden sculptures in the Museum, among them the Madonna regina and the S. Balbina. International Gothic influences, on the other hand, are evident in the monument of Ludovico Camponeschi in S. Giuseppe, executed by Gualtiero d'Alemagna in 1432, and in the fragmentary baptismal font, formerly in the Cathedral, by the Milanese Giovanni de' Rettori.
Of L'Aquila sculpture of the Renaissance a first valid document is the tabernacle in S. Maria del Soccorso, by Andrea dell'A., a pupil of Donatello, active in Naples at the arch of Alfonso of Aragon, between 1455 and 1458. Of Silvestro dell'A., the greatest artist of the L'Aquila Renaissance, documented between 1471 and 1504, the city preserves a group of works that testify to his Tuscan derivation, from Rossellino and from Desiderio, mingled with Roman elements, of Bregno in particular. They are: the tomb of Card. Agnifili, in the Cathedral, damaged by the earthquake of 1703, is of 1476, the wooden St. Sebastian of the Museum, of 1478, the monument for Maria and Beatrice Pereyra Camponeschi, of 1496, and the Madonna and Child in terracotta, of 1499-50, in S. Bernardino. Only the design and the partial execution of the first tier are to be attributed to him in the Arca del Santo, of 1500-1505, completed afterward by his pupils, in the same church.
Furthermore, in S. Bernardino, a Robbian altarpiece is to be remembered. In the Tesoro del Capitolo, together with good examples of L'Aquila sacred goldsmithing, which had a valid school between the 15th and 18th centuries, is the silver processional Cross by Nicola di Guardiagrele of 1434; in the Museum, on the other hand, is the processional Cross by G. Rosecci.
3. Painting
The most important cycle of paintings in the city is that of the frescoes mentioned in the church of St. Silvester. A triptych (ca. 1416-20) and a panel with the Tree of the Cross in the Museum should be attributed to the same artist. For the earlier pictorial culture and for that which followed up to the sixteenth century, the Museum, recently arranged in the halls of the castle, allows a precise and concise overview. In addition to the works mentioned, mention should be made of some notable thirteenth-century icons, a polyptych by Iacobello del Fiore, a Nativity and a small diptych with the Crucifixion and a Madonna and Child by Andrea Delitio (ca. 1450), two fragments by Giovanni da Sulmona, a series of polyptychs recently removed from the catalogue of Cola dell'Amatrice in favor of a "master of the Crivellesque polyptychs" (ca. 1480), and finally some works by Saturnino de' Gatti, painter and sculptor, active at the end of the 15th century, in the orbit of Umbrian-Antoniazzesque influences.
Works of the Neapolitan seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are in the Cappelli, Dragonetti and Rivera collections: works by Preti, Cavallino, Solimena, and de Mura, of whom a Christ and Saints in the church of St. Basil is notable.
Works by Teofilo Patini of Castel di Sangro (1840-1906) are in the Cathedral, the Government Palace and the Provincial Library, which also preserves important fifteenth-century miniatures. - See plate LV.
BIBLI: V. Bindi, Monumenti storici ed artistici dell'Abruzzo, Napoli 1889, v. indice; L. Serra, A. monumentale, L'Aquila 1912; M. Chini, Pittori aquilani del '400, in Rassegna d'arte dell'Abruzzo e Molise, 1 (1912), pp. 7-15, 49-60, 75-82, 116-23; 2 (1913), pp. 9-13, 34-47, 63-71; 4 (1915), pp. 75-97; I. C. Gavini, Storia dell'architettura in Abruzzo, Milano 1926, v. indice; e infine, per una completa e aggiornata bibl., v. U. Chierici, s. v. in Saggio di bibliografia per la storia delle arti figurative in Abruzzo, Roma 1947, pp. 174-79; e inoltre: F. Bologna, La ricostruzione di un polittico e il « Maestro dei polittici crivelleschi », in Bollettino d'arte, 33 (1948), pp. 367-70; U. Chierici, Gli affreschi della chiesa di
St. Silvestro at A., ibid., 34 (1949), pp. 111-28; A. Chiappini, Intorno alla fondazione della città dell'Aquila, Aquila 1949; F. Bologna, Andrea Delitto, in Paragone, 1 (1950, III), pp. 44-50.