THE valley south of Assisi must always have been of strategic importance and supports a number of towns: Spello, with an imposing Roman gate and the church of Santa Maria Maggiore where Pintoricchio’s frescoes in the Baglioni Chapel do honour to painter and patron alike; Foligno, where the palace of the Trinci still testifies to the ambition of a family whose signoria was brutally suppressed by the papacy in 1439; and, to the west, Bevagna, with its Gothic Palazzo del Consoli and on the same piazza two unusually successful late Romanesque churches, San Silvestro, begun by Master Binello as is recorded in an inscription of 1195, and San Michele, where he was assisted by a collaborator, Rodolfo. On a hill to the south is Montefalco, which was held by the Trinci from 1383 until their fall, and then like Foligno under direct papal rule.
San Fortunato: Benozzo Gozzoli, Madonna and Child, border (detail), fresco, 1452.
Walled in the fourteenth century, Montefalco boasted its own saint, the Augustinian Chiara di Damiano, whose life is recounted in a fresco cycle of 1333 in her eponymous church. The strength of the Augustinian presence is implied by the large Gothic church of Sant’Agostino, but it is for its Franciscan church that the town is most memorable. Built in 1336–8 and now deconsecrated as a museum, San Francesco is an austere monument. On the right in the first bay is the chapel of Saint Jerome, frescoed in 1450–2 by Benozzo Gozzoli, who had previously acted as Fra Angelico’s assistant in Rome; the fictive polyptych is a charming visual conceit, and the conviction of the scheme helps to explain why the artist was retained to decorate the choir with a cycle of scenes from the life of Saint Francis, also of 1452. Benozzo was no artistic protagonist, but his work at Montefalco was to have considerable local repercussions, as is so evident in the plangent mood of the emergent masters of the school of Foligno, Niccolò da Foligno and Pierantonio Mezzastris.
Less than half a kilometre south of the town, still rustic in setting, is the church of San Fortunato, who established Christianity at Montefalco. Benozzo worked here also, painting the beautiful lunette with the Madonna and Saints above the portal, and, within the church on the right, a more solemn fresco of San Fortunato himself enthroned as well as a Madonna of which a section has been lost. Outside is the Cappella di San Francesco (or Cappella delle Rose). This was decorated in 1512 with murals of Franciscan scenes and of saints by Tiberio d’Assisi, who understood something of Perugino’s spatial formulas. This is more than can be said for his uneven Montefalcan contemporary, Francesco Melanzio, whose provincialism has ensured that most of his oeuvre remains in the churches of his native town. Below the town to the south in the sanctuary of the Madonna delle Stelle, begun by the Perugian architect Giovanni Santini in 1862, is a Visitation by the German Friedrich Overbeck that expresses the reverence of the Nazarines for the Peruginesque.