Oratory of San Rocco in Peschiera Maraglio

In Peschiera Maraglio, in the Oratory of San Rocco adjacent to the parish church, there is a cycle of wall paintings of the highest quality and of great interest. The cycle extends to full height on three of the walls of a fairly large room (4.30 x 3.20 m) on which the depiction of some male figures is repeated immersed in landscape backdrops delimited by fake marble pillars and an upper entablature with grotesque friezes. The south-east wall, the best preserved, shows, against a spectacular lake background, San Sebastiano, San Rocco and a saint, perhaps Pantaleone, framed by the fake architectures. On the south-west wall, very damaged and partly compromised by the opening of a window, we see a standing male figure positioned on the threshold of a building, his left hand extended forward, his right holding a blue hat. On the north-east wall, San Rocco is visible, probably in a kneeling pose, on the edge of a wood. On the facade of the parish church, however, a seventeenth-century epigraph is walled up which recalls among the votive feasts those of Saints Sebastiano, Pantaleone and Rocco from which we derive the possible identification of the third saint to whom the cycle with Pantaleone is allegedly dedicated.

According to Vincenzo Gheroldi, the paintings, almost unknown to date, mainly due to the difficult accessibility to the site, can be attributed to Girolamo Romanino. The scholar subsequently included the works in the still little-known panorama of Brescia’s painting between the end of the first and the beginning of the second decade of the sixteenth century. The proposal, based on a cross-section of technical evaluations and stylistic comparisons, awaits further and necessary verifications. If today’s considerations will be able to find confirmation thanks to targeted studies, the pictorial testimony of Peschiera Maraglio would constitute, together with the paintings of San Pietro in Tavernola Bergamasca, a fundamental document of mural painting of the early sixteenth century.