involved in building the cathedral in Gemona also worked here (although whether just as a stonemason or also as an architect is not known). In 1338 the building was consecrated by Patriarch Bertrand who was immortalised, together with the prelates in his retinue, in a fresco that can still be seen inside the cathedral, probably painted immediately after 1365 when Venzone returned under patriarchal control after fifteen years of Austrian domination. After being destroyed by the 1976 earthquake the cathedral, with its two distinctive towers set against the apses (the only one of its kind in Fruili), was rebuilt by anastylosis. The simple, central gable main façade has an avant-corps with an early fifteenth-century Flamboyant-Gothic portal, the work of Master Scaco whose fine lunette with a Crucifixion (mid-fourteenth c.) has great expressive impact. The outside of the cathedral is richly decorated with relieves and sculptures, particularly noteworthy are the sculptures on the avant-corps of the transept’s North façade, the work of Master John (1308): the lunette over the door has a Christ benedicens with the symbols of the evangelists; an elegant grape-vine frieze traces the archivolt flanked by full-relief statues of Sts Peter and Andrew dominating the huddled figures of their persecutors. Many works of art are still being restored and will be repositioned inside the cathedral which has a Latin-cross plan with three apses and a single nave that is joined to the presbytery by two wide arches that go beyond the transept.
    In the parvis, the round Romanesque churchyard chapel dedicated to St. Michael was built around the middle of the thirteenth century and altered in the fourteenth century when the semicircular apse was added; only the crypt survived the 1976 earthquake. The chapel has now been rebuilt and of its original decorations it still has the group of wooden statues, Mourning Over the Dead Christ, made in the first half of the sixteenth century by a German woodcarver; it now houses the Museum of the Mummies, the fifteen surviving mummies out of a large number which were preserved by a natural process and were found, starting from 1647, under the cathedral.

  

fresco taken from the Binfar house has been placed on the southern wall of the council chamber and depicts St Elegius and two jousting knights, the work of a local painter of the first half of the fourteenth century.
    Without doubt, the symbol of Venzone are its fifteenth-century walls which, after the demolitions of the nineteenth century, are the finest example in Friuli of the fortified towns of the Middle Ages that were built all over the peninsula. The walls were almost totally razed in 1976 but the mighty, austere circle of double curtain walls and towers, surrounded by a moat, has been almost completely rebuilt and today it still encloses the eighteen insulae of the medieval quarter in an irregular hexagon that was originally 1300m long. Only one of the three towered gates survives, Porta S. Genesio built in 1309, as the other two were demolished in the nineteenth century.
    Outside the walls, at the foot of Mt Belede, stand two small churches dedicated to Sts James and Anne and to St. Catherine. They were rebuilt after the 1976 earthquake and both have large porticoes in front of the main body of the church which has a trussed roof. The first church was probably built around the tenth-eleventh century, the two bas-reliefs of Sts Peter and Paul, now placed on each side of the triumphal arch, date from the early part of the church’s history. During the fourteenth century it was enlarged significantly and a portico was later added (1525). Inside, the only surviving piece of pictorial decoration is a fragment of fresco (detached) with the Holy Trinity and an episode from the life of St Francis (second half sixteenth c.). Before the 1976 earthquake there was a cycle of frescoes in the presbytery, “after the Spilimbergo style” dating from the second half of the fourteenth century; today there are only a few portions, now restored: the Annunciation on the rear wall, the Apostles on the side walls, Christ benedicens with the symbols of the evangelists on the barrel vault. Above the altar table on the right is a polychrome wooden statue of St James (German school, sixteenth c.).
   The church dedicated to St Catherine dates from the fifteenth century. On the right wall the scene of St Catherine of Alexandria’s mystic 

 
 

Il palazzo comunale di Venzone. Venzone’s town hall. Rathaus von Venzone.

 
 

Piazza Municipio, one of the most attractive squares in the region, is surrounded by numerous fifteenth-sixteenth centuries historical buildings, especially the magnificent town hall built between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, restyled in 1547 after the Renaissance taste and completely rebuilt on two occasions. The two-storey building has a loggia with eight round arches, the council chamber on the upper floor is reached by a grand outside staircase and is illuminated by a series of attractive Flamboyant-Gothic two-light tracery windows of the Veneto-Tuscan type; it has a Gothic-Venetian main door. At the corner of the building, looking over the square, is the sixteenth century clock tower with a niche containing a lion of St Mark dated 1543. The loggia is decorated with frescoes painted in 1584 by Pomponio Amalteo portraying the Madonna and Child between Sts Andrew and John the Baptist, the lion of St Mark and the personifications of the virtues of the good judge with, above, Latin maxims explaining their meaning. A

  

marriage (beginning fifteenth c.) is part of the original frescoes, as is a fragment with a floral motif and an eagle repeated by stencil (fifteenth-sixteenth c.) while on the church’s left wall is a copy of a polychrome wooden statue of the saint with the wheel of her martyrdom and a foot on her persecutor, attributed to Antonio d’Incarojo (1497). The original statue and the coeval wooden altarpiece from the apse altar, perhaps by the same artist, were salvaged from the ruined church.
    Another church outside the walls, Sant’Bartolomeo, the parish church of Portis, had been rebuilt in the nineteenth century over a thirteenth-century building but the earthquake destroyed it almost completely. However, some works of art were salvaged, including a large wooden late thirteenth-century crucifix of the Friuli school which now hangs in the new church (1990-1991).

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