lastly, in 1487-90 it was finished with polychrome windows, a rarity in the region. Between 1497 and 1522 the Antonine confraternity often requested Martino da Udine, better known as Pellegrino da San Daniele, to fresco the church walls. At the end of the fifteenth century he painted the Christ benedicens with evangelists, prophets and angels in the choir’s lesser vaulting cells and the half-length portraits of ten female Saints under the arch between the choir and the presbytery; after 1513 he decorated, in several stages, the apse with the magnificent Crucifixion (the part on the left is the work of assistants) and the presbytery vaulting cells and walls with Doctors of the Church, prophets and scenes from the lives of Christ, St Anthony Abbot and St Anthony of Padua, the triumphal arch and the walls of the nave with numerous figures of Saints, other episodes from the life of Christ and St Anthony Abbot blessing the members of the confraternity. In these paintings Pellegrino first shows signs of a modest provincial artistic culture and, later, demonstrates his ability to open up to new pictorial techniques of his time within a uniform icon ography of fine scenic effect which makes these wall-paintings “the finest cycle of Renaissance frescoes in the region”. 
    Another church in San Daniele was built, indirectly, because of Pellegrino: the Church of the Madonna di Strada was built in 1636-37 to house a Virgin and Child that was frescoed by the Udine painter in 1506 on the boundary wall of a farm, and was the subject of popular devotion as early as 1617. This Church is one of the most interesting examples of Friuli Baroque and was later enriched with the 1901 façade designed by Raimondo D’Aronco. Next to the church the restored rooms of the former Dominican monastery now house the Civic Museum established in 1981 for works of art from churches in the town and its surrounding area that were damaged by the 1976 earthquake.

 

 At present this atmospheric venue houses archaeological remains ­ from digs or occasional discoveries in the area around San Daniele or other locations in Friuli ­ and very interesting work of art including two early-Christian sarcophagus fronts (third-fourth centuries) with inscriptions and two Carolingian pluteus with an intertwining wickerwork decoration from the Church of San Daniele in Castello; the bas-relief of the Adoration of the Magi which was once set into the outside wall of the apse of the Romanesque castle church; a Vivarini-style wooden polyptych on two levels from the first half of the fifteenth century attributed to Venetian artists Paolo di Amedeo and Michele Giambono; a fragment offresco dated 1475 depicting Christ among the Doctors in the Temple, rescued from the Church of Sant’Antonio abate; the wooden altar with a full-relief Mourning Over the Dead Christ and five tempera figures of Saints carved and painted in 1488 by the Bavarian artist Leonard Thanner for the Church of Santa Maria della Fratta; the sixteenth-century carved and gilded wooden polyptych attributed to Donato de’ Bagatinis and the lovely Virgin and Child by Francesco da Milano dated around 1520, which were both originally in the cathedral; a seventeenth-century painting of Abraham Meeting the Three Strangers attributed to Bernardo Strozzi, part of the Vidoni bequest. All the original exhibits in the museum section devoted to life in Friuli during the late Middle Ages are fully described, thus giving visitors a taste of everyday life in the castles which were to be found all over Friuli in the Middle Ages, especially in the hills. 
    At the dawn of the Christian era’s third millennium San Daniele still offers its visitors a “short, exciting tour” of its cultural attractions that leads to a deliciously inevitable… culinary conclusion! 

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