The Church of Saint Blaise in Ancona. Artistic Patronage of a Confraternity founded by Schiavoni

On the high altar of the church of Saint Blaise in Ancona, the painting conceived by Domenico Simonetti, called Magatta, between 1748 and 1752, features two relevant figures: Saint Blaise, dressed as a bishop and identifiable by a nearby carding comb, and a young man, wearing the habit of a confraternity, pouring water from a vase onto the souls in Purgatory. In the eighteenth century, this saint and this young man were merely distant reminders of the long history of events recountend in this book. In 1444, a group of migrant Schiavoni, or Sclavi, Slavi (Slavs), went to Ancona from Sclavonia (mainly from the Dalmatian coast of current Croatia), where they founded a long-lived confraternity dedicated to Saint Blaise. Its members held processions to the church on specific occasions, assisted and supported the infirm, made decent funeral arrangements for the indigent and so on. Although establishing a confraternity was an effective integration strategy used by the Schiavoni to achieve acceptance and inclusion within their new social context, the "foreigners" never forgot their origins and, through their artistic patronage, promoted the cults of Saint Blaise, the patron saint of Dubrovnik, and Saint Jerome, the national saint of Illyrian peoples. Drawing extensively on archival material, this book analyses the artistic patronage of the confraternity of Saint Blaise of Ancona between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.