Confraternities, immigrants and artistic production of the "Illyrians" in the Marche (XV-XVI cent.). Master Piero di Giorgio da Sebenico in Fermo (1462)

The paper initially reassumes two years of research on the artistic production related to the Schiavoni confraternities in the Marche region. Unlike Albanian communities, identifiable for their choice of Saint Venus as their patron saint, the Schiavoni confraternities are more difficult to identify due to a greater variety of patron saints, non exclusively “national”. Their group “national” identity, recognizable through the images, seems to have resisted in the 15th century, but not much later. In addition, the research interconnects the notion of the “art of confraternities” with the “Schiavoni artists”, a much more substantial and documented category in the Marche of the 15th and 16th century, re-descovering another forgotten Dalmatian sculptor active in Marche in the second half of the 15th century: Piero di Giorgio da Sebenico. In 1462, he was commissioned to design the new portal for the Church of Santa Maria della Carità in Fermo, and the previously unpublished contract for the portal allows us to advance a hypothesis for the identification of some of its elements, now reused in the portal of the Mount of Piety in Fermo.