The handing over of the sacred girdles

The painting represents the story of a recurring relationship between the monks in Polverigi and the four Saints venerated in the church, and it testifies also the cultural vitality and the wealth of the monastery that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could afford to commission works to valued and of undoubted professionalism painters. The canvas has a small golden frame finely crowned in the center, probably designed for Our Lady of Good Counsel, whose reproduction in the painting is the focal point of the composition and the junction between the upper and lower part of the scene. At the top a group of angels surrounds the frame and offer girdles to the four characters: Monica, Augustin, Nicholas from Tolentino, Nicholas from Bari, who are in the lower part. The work is signed by Domenico Simonetti known as Magatta, a good but very controversial painter from Ancona, born in 1685 and raised in Rome at the Venetian Francesco Trevisani' school.