Description
The Chiesa della Santissima Annunziata is the great church of the Servants of Mary in Pistoia, on Piazza dei Servi: a 14th-century hall 47 metres long, clad in 18th-century gilded stucco, with a cloister of twenty-six frescoed lunettes beside it.
Inside, what strikes you is the contrast between the 15th-century trussed ceiling, with its original painted decoration, and the Baroque walls: gilded wooden altars, large stucco crosses and two rows of frescoes. Up high, sixteen saints and blesseds of the order by Niccolò Nannetti; below, the cherubs of Giovanni Domenico Ferretti.
Just to the right of the entrance is the Vergine Annunziata, a 14th-century fresco that gives the church its name. In 1590 Sebastiano Vini added the angel, God the Father and the space around them: up close you can still see the points where the new plaster meets the old.
In the choir, beneath the vault frescoed by Ferretti with the Annunciation, you'll find among other things the Assumption painted by Santi di Tito in 1572. In the cloister, with pietra serena columns and Ionic capitals, the lunettes painted in the 17th century by Bernardino Poccetti and other Florentine and Pistoian painters tell the story of the order's origins.
The liveliest scenes are those of the Blessed Buonaventura Bonaccorsi, a native of Pistoia. In the lunettes you first see him in helmet and breastplate, leader of the Ghibelline faction persecuting its enemies; then, after a sermon by Saint Philip Benizi in 1276, embracing them in public and giving all his wealth to the poor.
Buonaventura died in Orvieto in 1315. His remains rest in a gilded urn under an altar in the left aisle, brought to Pistoia for the sixth centenary of his death.
The church was begun in 1269–1270 on land belonging to the Cancellieri family, then outside the walls, and so it was called Santa Maria del Poggio. Of the original church the bell tower survives, 27 metres high, with four Gothic windows.
Inside, what strikes you is the contrast between the 15th-century trussed ceiling, with its original painted decoration, and the Baroque walls: gilded wooden altars, large stucco crosses and two rows of frescoes. Up high, sixteen saints and blesseds of the order by Niccolò Nannetti; below, the cherubs of Giovanni Domenico Ferretti.
Just to the right of the entrance is the Vergine Annunziata, a 14th-century fresco that gives the church its name. In 1590 Sebastiano Vini added the angel, God the Father and the space around them: up close you can still see the points where the new plaster meets the old.
In the choir, beneath the vault frescoed by Ferretti with the Annunciation, you'll find among other things the Assumption painted by Santi di Tito in 1572. In the cloister, with pietra serena columns and Ionic capitals, the lunettes painted in the 17th century by Bernardino Poccetti and other Florentine and Pistoian painters tell the story of the order's origins.
The liveliest scenes are those of the Blessed Buonaventura Bonaccorsi, a native of Pistoia. In the lunettes you first see him in helmet and breastplate, leader of the Ghibelline faction persecuting its enemies; then, after a sermon by Saint Philip Benizi in 1276, embracing them in public and giving all his wealth to the poor.
Buonaventura died in Orvieto in 1315. His remains rest in a gilded urn under an altar in the left aisle, brought to Pistoia for the sixth centenary of his death.
The church was begun in 1269–1270 on land belonging to the Cancellieri family, then outside the walls, and so it was called Santa Maria del Poggio. Of the original church the bell tower survives, 27 metres high, with four Gothic windows.