THE ISOLATED hill crowned by the Castello of Udine was granted by the Emperor Otto II to the Patriarch of Aquileia in 983, and in the thirteenth century this became the main residence of several of his successors as they sought to enforce their temporal rule. In time the Venetians emerged as the patriarchate’s main adversaries in the Friuli and Udine fell to them in 1420, her subsequent fate depending upon that of Venice itself. The central Piazza Libertà is the paradigm of a Venetian public space, with the mid-fifteenth-century loggia’d Palazzo del Comune and opposite the elegant arcade of San Giovanni of 1533, with the associated clock tower designed by Raphael’s versatile associate, Giovanni da Udine, in 1527. At the north end of the arcade a gate designed by Palladio leads to the late Gothic covered way that climbs up towards the church of Santa Maria del Castello. This seems modest enough beside the mass of the Castello, an outsize Renaissance palace begun in 1517 and finished in 1595. Now the museum, it houses a substantial collection of pictures including Carpaccio’s serene Blood of the Redeemer.
From the south end of the piazza, the Via Aquileia leads to the much-restored Duomo. Two of the altarpieces on the right, the Trinity and Saints Ermagorus and Fortunatus of 1738 and 1737 respectively, are by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, as are the earlier frescoes (1726) of the Chapel of the Sacrament. The east end of the Duomo was transformed with a riot of stucco, sculpture and murals in the eighteenth century at the expense of the richest family of the area, the Manin, builders of the outsize villa at Passariano. Monuments to the Manin are placed above carved choir stalls of astonishing virtuosity. Facing the south wall of the Duomo is the small Oratorio della Purità of 1757. The relatively modest height of the ceiling means that one can relish the ostensibly effortless touch of the mature Tiepolo’s fresco of the Assumption of the Virgin. The frescoed Immaculate Conception above the altar is also by him, while the Old Testament scenes on the lateral walls are by his son, Domenico.
Not far to the east is the Palazzo Arcivescovile, begun in the sixteenth century. The Venetian patriarchs of Aquileia may have lost the temporal powers of their medieval predecessors, but nonetheless had considerable resources at their disposal. The palace is princely in scale. Patriarch Dionisio Delfino was a discriminating connoisseur, calling in the young Tiepolo in 1726 to decorate the ceiling of the staircase with a fresco of the Fall of the Rebel Angels framed by stucchi and grisaille compartments. In the two summers that followed, Tiepolo decorated the first floor Galleria degli Ospiti with scenes from the Old Testament. The artist was just thirty, but there is nothing immature about his wonderfully inventive compositions. The nearly toothless Sara kneels at the door of a wooden shack by which the Angel has alighted; Abraham bows in prayer; Isaac is open-eyed in surprise as the Angel stays his father’s sword. Tiepolo’s narrative intelligence is marched by his chromatic range. This is emphasized by the contrast between the three richly coloured mural compartments and the grisaille scenes framing the central Jacob and Laban and the fictive niches with statues of female prophets at either side and between the windows on the opposite wall. We are close enough to see Tiepolo’s incised underdrawing and thus experience something of his creative process. He was to paint more ambitious schemes later in the career that took him to Wurzburg and to Spain; but there is a freshness about the frescoes in the Galleria that Tiepolo would never surpass, and indeed did not altogether match in the ceiling of 1728 in the nearby Sala del Tribunale.
Oratorio della Purità: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Assumption of the Virgin (detail).
