Il coro delle monache. Cori e corali

The volume is dedicated to the large space created during the Renaissance for use in monastic liturgy and located between the churches of San Salvatore and Santa Giulia in Brescia. Frescoed in its entirety, it is a place of great charm and constitutes a significant expression and testimony of an architectural renewal dictated by the requirements of not just religion but also taste, in keeping with other developments in the city during the second half of the 15th century. The Coro delle Monache, or Nun's Choir, one of the most unusual of these structures in its typology and its wealth of architectural and pictorial testimonies, is the product of several successive interventions and a response to the need for a place of worship that would be sufficiently large and sequestered to permit the enclosed nuns of the Benedictine order, to which the monastery had been entrusted ever since its foundation in the Longobard era, to attend religious services.
Reserved for nuns observing strict rules of enclosure and accessible only from inside the convent, it is still one of the most secluded parts of the monastery. Along with the early medieval church of San Salvatore, the Romanesque one of Santa Maria in Solario and the late Renaissance one of Santa Giulia, the Renaissance Choir constitutes one of the crucial nodes of the monastic complex and has now been revealed by the recent studies to be a further piece in the architectural evolution of the cenoby. The volume documents the incredible fascination of this setting, completely lined with frescoes painted between the third decade and sometime shortly after the middle of the 16th century by Floriano Ferramola, Paolo da Caylina the Younger and other fine artists.
The volume which carries out an exhaustive investigation of the religious and architectural model of this type of place of worship, even documenting the ornaments and vestments that may have been used constitutes a reflection on the history of the choir of Santa Giulia and other choirs present in Brescian churches, illustrated through the reproduction of precious materials, such as illuminated codices, a large wooden lectern and some paintings from the civic collections.