Santa Maria di Monteluce
Nuns’ Choir
This choir,which the nuns called “chiesa nostra dentro", was enclosed in 1449, when a wall built was built across the last bay of the church. It is entered by the small door to the left of what then became the back wall of the
tribune.
The choir escaped the re-modeling of 1602-7 and therefore preserves some of its original votive frescoes.
Frescoes (14th
century)
These frescoes on the left wall include:
the stigmatisation of St Francis (behind the screen on the far left); and
three votive frescoes with kneeling nuns: St Jerome;
St Michael Archangel; and
the baptism of Christ.
Assumption of the Virgin (14th century)
This damaged fresco is to the right on the wall that separates the choir from the church. Its
iconography is similar to that in the fresco by Cimabue on the altar
wall of the upper church of San Francesco, Assisi, in which Christ and
the Virgin sit side by side in an intimate pose as angels bear them to
Heaven. For more information on this interesting iconography, see this website on the Assumption of the Virgin.