Church of the Eremitani Historical Timeline

Origins

The Augustinian hermits -- the eremitani -- built the church between about 1276 and 1306, a broad single-nave preaching hall of the kind the mendicant orders favoured.

Turning points

Between 1448 and 1457 the young Andrea Mantegna painted the Ovetari Chapel with scenes from the lives of St James and St Christopher. He was in his late teens and early twenties, and the cycle is where his handling of perspective and foreshortening first becomes fully itself.

Influential people

Guariento di Arpo frescoed the apse in the 14th century, and much of that work survives -- overshadowed by the Mantegna story, but the more complete of the two cycles today.

Cultural evolution

On 11 March 1944 an Allied raid aimed at the nearby railway destroyed the chapel and reduced Mantegna's frescoes to rubble. Two scenes survived only because they had been detached for restoration before the war. The rest came out of the debris as tens of thousands of fragments.

Present-day significance

Recovery has continued for decades. A long project completed in the 2000s used computer analysis to place many thousands of surviving fragments back into position against pre-war photographs -- a painstaking partial resurrection rather than a restoration, and shown honestly as such.