Immersed in the mugellan countryside, the church of St. Mary in Olmi, an antique memory but going back in its present aspect to the last century, preserves an important group of realizations of the San Lorenzo Furnaces. This church was also greatly damaged by the earthquake in 1919: in the book of memories of the church of Olmi, started by the prior Giuseppe Maria Brocchi in 1717 and continued by his successors, the prior don Luigi Bartoletti in 1928 noted that the church, because of the earthquake, had lost its façade, which had been restored thanks to the financial contribution of the government. In 1935 the same don Bartoletti recalls that in that year the facade was again rebuilt, and how on that occasion its eye, previously semicircular in form, had been remade.
It is very probable that exactly on that occasion the stained-glass window which closes the oeil-de-boeuf of the façade and represents Christ the King, was also realized. Iconographically, the window calls to mind other previous examples of the production of the Furnaces with the lunettes of the churches of Pulicciano and St. Martin in Scopeto, or the great window of the oratory of St. Omobono. However, the sculptural monumental plasticity of the design seems to suggest the name of Tito Chini, though with citations of the methods of Galileo himself, as is evident in the splendid frame with motifs of broken lines.
The other six stained-glass windows of the main nave, in a semi-circular shape, bear a frame with ovolo motifs with a splendid tondo in the centre, bearing coats of arms of renowned families of the area. In don Bartoletti’s recollections, an explicit reference to these windows does not exist; however, their evident stylistic dissimilarity with respect to the eye of the facade and their semi-circular shape, similar to that of the previous window on the facade, may induce a hypothesis of their chronological collocation approximately between 1919 and 1925.
The remarkable quantity of the windows, which, in their decorative simplicity, concentrate all the attention on the central coats of arms, may also make one think of an intervention of Galileo Chini himself. The two circular windows of the head of the small transept consist of a simple dazzling decorative motif with golden rays. On the wall of the left nave, a large commemorative tombstone of the inhabitants of Olmi fallen in the First World War is set into the wall. The marble slab is framed by elements of majolica stylistically referable to the Furnaces. It is the crowning with golden wreathes, having a winged cherub in relief, of the lower part, also gilded and again with spiral motifs, but enriched by a cross inside a tondo, by four gilded corner rosettes, also in ceramic, and by two beautiful lateral vegetable festoons. The artefact, for which it seems that the Furnaces had supplied only some decorative components, bears the date 6th. December 1925.
Itinerario Liberty - Planning and Realization - Stefano Pelosi - www.stefanopelosi.it
