The Museum of San Francesco

The Museum of San Francesco, founded in 1926, is housed in the former Franciscan convent, which moved within the walls of Mercatello in the mid-thirteenth century. The church retains forms of transition between Romanesque and Gothic, partly softened by additions from the early fifteenth century, as can be seen in the fresco on the lunette of the portal with the Madonna and Child with Saints Francis and Catherine, an example of a flourishing school of local fresco painters well documented in the museum.

The interior has a single nave with a trussed roof and vaulted apse, with frescoes on the sails of the transept of the Four Evangelists attributed to Girolamo Genga. The stained glass windows (Francesco Mossmeyer, 1912) are inspired by the only remaining original, now in a museum, which features the oldest representation of Saint Francis on glass.

In the counter-façade, note the Gothic monument by Bartolomeo Brancaleoni, consisting of a sarcophagus decorated with figures and surmounted by a canopy, moved here from the apse where it originally interacted with the contemporary triumphal arch (c. 1425) dominated by the family crest flanked by the marble statues of Saint Francis and Saint Bonaventura.

At the centre of the arch, on the beam, is a Crucifix on wood by Giovanni da Rimini, the first documented work of the Giotto school of Rimini, signed and dated 1309. The polyptych by Giovanni Baronzio (c. 1345) placed above the altar belongs to the last period of the same pictorial movement. In the nave, fragments of the late fourteenth-century pictorial cycle that entirely covered the walls and frescoes from the fifteenth century can be seen. Other fifteenth-century mural paintings removed from another church are arranged along the walls.