Descrizione
Just a stone’s throw from the Battelli Theatre, on Via Antimi, stands the Church of St Michael the Archangel, a monument which, despite its relatively recent 19th-century origins, evokes echoes of a bygone era. Its structure is revealed in its simple, pure geometry, with a single nave rising towards the high altar and opening into a semicircular apse, like a stony embrace that shelters prayers and confessions.
The Great Wooden Crucifix
Within this sacred place lies a crypt, a web of stone and brick that binds itself to the foundations like deep roots. But it is the wooden Crucifix, that treasure of wood and time, that takes one’s breath away: it commands attention with its majestic presence, a silent guardian of suffering and divinity, a work that evokes the spirituality and art of a land where the sacred blends with the human. The cross of Macerata Feltria, majestic in its scale and sublime in its craftsmanship, stands as a bridge between the centuries, foreshadowing the aesthetics of the fifteenth century with a mastery that defies time. Long attributed to Carlo da Camerino in 1396 and later, following a revised historical interpretation, to Olivuccio di Ciccarello, this cross embodies an artistic and spiritual history that has remained hidden for far too long.
Today it speaks to us, a relic of beauty and mystery, an enigma that still awaits full unravelling, a symbol of profound piety and of an art that was a beacon of light in an era of darkness.
This type of painted cross – massive and silent from the 12th to the 14th century – which marked the spiritual rhythm of the Marche region, bears witness to a faith that has endured through the centuries. They still stand today in churches and monasteries, sometimes hidden from the world’s view, revealing the traditions and devotion of communities that found in art a voice for their beliefs.
