The parish church of St. Martin in Scopeto, of antique origin but remarkably restructured in the XVIII century, had to undergo further interventions following the earthquake of 29th. June 1919. The entire facade of the building on which, inside an acute arched lunette, a decoration in painted majolic tiles is to be found, portraying St. Martin of Tours, titular of the parish church, must go back to this last phase. The Saint is shown in episcopal clothes and flanked by two coats of arms: the one on the left refers to the Tesi Family, to which the parish priest don Pietro Tesi, who donated the work to the church in 1926, belonged.
The second, portraying St. Martin in the act of giving his cloak to a poor man, probably belongs to the people of Scopeto. Both the coats of arms, in relief, are hanging from two lion-like busts, according to the scheme used in the following, in order of time, lunette of St. Mary in Pulicciano. On the edges, the following inscription with characters in Gothic style “Plebanus Petrus Tesi fecit A.D. MCMXXVI” is legible. Whilst the date 1926 allows us to certainly place the execution of this lunette exactly one year before that of Pulicciano, to which it links again for taste and for certain iconographic characters, despite a greater compositional simplification, from a stylistic point of view, the greater heraldic solemnity of the figure of the Saint, characterized by a more solid, constructive and plastic design with respect to the lunette of Pulicciano, makes one think that the work of St. Martin in Scopeto, regrettably in preservation conditions less fortunate and more worrying, may be attributed to Tito Chini.
One notices, for example, the resemblance between the poor man, portrayed on the inside of the right coat of arms, and that painted on a vase attributed precisely to Tito. The persistence of decorative elements derived from the repertoire of Galileo should also be underlined, like the decorative band with broken lines and the polychromatic geometrical motifs visible in the lower part of the artefact.
Itinerario Liberty - Planning and Realization - Stefano Pelosi - www.stefanopelosi.it
