Why does one of the most important facades of the early Italian Renaissance stand on a side square, with no ticket office, and appear in only half the guidebooks to Perugia? The most honest answer is that it is small, it is off the main street, and whoever comes to town is heading for Perugino.
The Oratory of San Bernardino stands in piazza San Francesco, ten minutes downhill from corso Vannucci. Its facade is covered with reliefs in coloured marble carved between 1457 and 1461 by Agostino di Duccio, and it is one of the very rare cases in which Renaissance sculpture has kept its colour.
Entry is free, twenty minutes are enough, and it is worth the trip just to stand five minutes in front of the door.
Who Bernardino was, and why Perugia built him this
Bernardino of Siena was a Franciscan friar who in the first half of the fifteenth century travelled around Italy preaching in the squares, and who filled cities the way stadiums are filled today. He preached in Perugia several times, the last of them in 1425, and he left a lasting mark: his sermons against luxury ended with the “bonfires of the vanities”, where people burned playing cards, dice, cosmetics and false hair.
He died in 1444 and was made a saint just six years later, in 1450, a speed with almost no precedent. Perugia decided at once to dedicate an oratory to him, and finished it in 1452. The carved facade arrived five years after that.
The patron was not the city council but the confraternity of the disciplinati, that is an association of laymen: it is the reason why the building is small and the money all went on the facade, which was the part people saw.
Agostino di Duccio, the sculptor of the flattened relief
Agostino di Duccio was a Florentine, born in 1418, and his manner is recognisable at a glance: he works almost only in very low relief, with figures that rise from the ground by a few millimetres, and he obtains movement through the folds of the clothes instead of through depth.
His draperies are his signature. The fabrics move as if there were always a wind, they wrap around the bodies, they open out like fans, and the figures seem to dance even when they stand still. Anyone who loves the crisp, still sculpture of the Florentine fifteenth century finds him mannered; anyone who looks at this facade usually changes their mind.
Before Perugia he had worked on the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini for Sigismondo Malatesta, which is the other place where his way of carving shows in full.
What to look at, from top to bottom
Where do you start reading a facade as crowded as this one? The facade is organised like a triumphal arch, it is divided into bands, and the place to start is the top.
At the top, in the lunette, saint Bernardino stands in glory carried by angels. In the band below, on either side of the doorway, are the musician angels: they are the most famous part, six figures playing different instruments with their robes flying, and they are where Agostino’s manner shows best.
Along the lower band runs a series of reliefs with the miracles of the saint, and beside the doorway stand the Virtues. In the upper part, above everything else, God the Father gives his blessing.
Do not look only at the figures: look at the colour. The facade alternates white marble, red Assisi stone, glazed terracotta and blue glass paste, and the overall effect was designed for the afternoon sun, which is the right time to go.
Inside: an early Christian sarcophagus used as an altar
The interior is a single room, plain and almost bare, and the thing you notice is the altar. It is not a built altar: it is an early Christian sarcophagus of the fourth century, carved with biblical scenes, reused where it stands.
It holds the remains of Blessed Giles of Assisi, one of the first companions of saint Francis. It is a leap of a thousand years inside a church five centuries old, and it is worth going close to look at those reliefs, which come from a completely different age and a completely different hand from the ones outside.
Next to the oratory stands the basilica of San Francesco al Prato, which after centuries of collapses and restorations is today a roofed auditorium, and it is worth a look from outside.
The panels that are no longer here
In 1473, twenty years after the facade, the oratory received a set of eight panels painted with the miracles of saint Bernardino, the work of a team of young Perugian painters among whom Pinturicchio can be recognised. They were probably the doors of a cupboard for the sacred furnishings.
They are no longer here: they hang in the National Gallery of Umbria, where you can see them with the museum ticket. I mention them because they are one of the most important pieces of the Umbrian Renaissance and because their provenance explains what this oratory was in the fifteenth century: not a neighbourhood chapel, but a building site where the best painters passed through.
Practical information
Figures checked on 4 September 2026 on the website of the Comune di Perugia. Hours and access change: check again before you set off.
Tickets. Entry is free.
Opening hours. The oratory opens 8am to 12.30pm and 3.30pm to 5.30pm. It therefore closes between half past twelve and half past three, which is the easiest mistake to make when you arrive after lunch.
Getting there. The oratory stands in piazza San Francesco, next to the basilica of San Francesco al Prato. From corso Vannucci you go down via dei Priori in ten minutes, all downhill on the way there and all uphill on the way back.
How long it takes. It takes twenty minutes, at least ten of them outside, in front of the facade.
Where to go next
The eight panels that used to hang here are today among the works of the National Gallery of Umbria. In the same city, and fifty years later, the Collegio del Cambio shows what Umbrian painting had become by the end of the century.
The full itinerary is in What to see in Perugia in 2 days.
Photographs by Sailko and Georges Jansoone from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA licences.
