Propositura dei Santi Jacopo e Filippo

scarperia0004

SCARPERIA – Until 1808, the present parish of Saints Jacob and Philip was the Augustinian convent of San Barnaba. Just in that year the Augustinians were removed, following the Napoleonic suppression of religious orders, and the religious building assumed the title and function of a parish church named after the saints Jacob and Philip. The ancient site was then transformed into the Oratory of the Trinity Company.

Thus, the church of Saints Jacob and Philip was founded around 1324 by the Augustinians under the title of San Barnaba, together with the adjoining convent within the village of Castel San Barnaba (then Scarperia); the latter was founded by the Florentines only a few years before (1306), with the intent of obtaining an intermediate stage in the path between Florence and Bologna to the friars who moved between the two cities, locations of important Augustinian convents as well.

Throughout the centuries, the convent and the church of San Barnaba hosted many important members of the Augustinians and received donations by the citizens of Scarperia.

The church was extensively restored over time, especially during the years 1870-71, by the architect Mario Falciani, and later in 1929-1932, when a new façade and a new bell-tower in Purist and Neo-Gothic style were added. Despite the interventions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the interior maintains the original plan, transeptless, ending with a large central choir, characterized by ribbed sail-vaults, in clear Gothic style, alongside two lateral chapels. Outside, it is still visible the profile of an ogival window (perhaps a bifora window), which opened to the Gothic apse of the church. Unfortunately, the great room of the church no longer shows the original pictorial decoration that had to cover its walls internally; according to the principle of “Biblia pauperum”, the decorations with cycles of frescoes with sacred stories were intended to be shown and commented to educate the faithful, often illiterate, with images. Only a small fragment on the right wall of the frescoes that were to illustrate the walls of the church is currently visible.

On the right-hand side of the façade, a short walk leads to the vast cloister of the ancient Augustinian convent, surrounded by an airy loggia, whose side to the church is bolstered by four columns with 14th-century-taste festooned and figurative capitals. The first capital on the right is noteworthy for its corners in shape of monstrous heads with episcopal miter: it could be a controversial depiction of the Augustinians against the Episcopate accused of corruption. The remaining three sides of the cloister have Ionic capitals of exquisite fifteenth-century taste, analogous to those found in similar Florentine buildings such as the cloister of Sant’Antonio in the convent of San Marco.