Southern span 2

The second altar is called the altar of St. Lucia because mass has been celebrated there on her feast day since at least 1627. 

The chapel was originally dedicated to St. Lorenzo, who is depicted in the keystone of the cross vault. 

The altar-piece is dated 1492    and it reveals the updating of the Renaissance perspective. It is signed by Tommaso Rodari, the sculptor who was also, since 1487, the architect of the Fabbrica del Duomo. The subject represented in the six panels is the Passion of Jesus culminating at the top with the Crucifixion and finalized, over the frame, with the Risen Christ among the angels.

The clients were the canon Bartolomeo Parravicini and his nephew, the lawyer Giacomo Parravicini, of an aristocratic Como family. The two characters are portraited in profile in the two rounds at the bottom, following the humanistic model drawn on ancient coins.

In the predella there are depicted from the left St. Anthony of Padua, St. Peter, the Madonna and the Child, St. Catherine of Alexandria, St. Gregory Pope.

On each side of the altar there are two large tempera paintings on canvas by Bernardino Luini which depict St. Sebastian  and St. Christopher. 

Under the altar-table a five-piece relief by Alberto from Campione carved between the 14th and the 15th centuries acts as an altar-cloth.   

The stained glass window depicts the Annunciation and the Marriage of the Virgin by Giuseppe Bertini (1857-1858). Six Virtues are carved on the window frame. 

The tapestry hanging towards the central nave depicts Abraham and Melchizedech a 1595 work by the Medicean tapestry maker Guasparri Papini from Florence designed by Alessandro Allori for the Confraternita del Ss. Sacramento. 

St. Lorenzo is the titular saint of the chapel and is sculpted in the middle of the vault. 

The martyr Lorenzo is depicted as a beardless young man holding the palm of martyrdom and the gridiron on which he was burned. He wears the pink dalmatic as a deacon. The relief is by unknown masters, carved and painted after 1473, the year the chapel was founded..

The aforementioned altarpiece of 1492  carved by Tommaso Rodari was commissioned by the canon Bartolomeo Parravicini, who in 1462 was already “decretorum doctor” and Vicar of the Bishop.

In the polyptych the six episodes of the Passion of Christ are set in perspective spaces vertically divided by candelabra pilaster, horizontally by classical trabeations, closed at the top by a three lunette cymatium, with motifs of shells in the lateral ones, and the Resurrection in the central one. 

 

The sleeping soldiers near the sarcophagus, but ready to awake, are a very ancient theme (the early Christian Anastasis), a theme recovered a few years earlier by Piero della Francesca in Sansepolcro. The very tall cross, embraced by the Magdalen between Mary and John, in the central and more slender panel that stands out against a distant landscape, is a theme of Nordic origin, perhaps copied from Venetian pictorial models, as well as the theme of the Piety in the German version of the Vesperbuild, with Mary holding Jesus’ dead body on her kneels, in the panel at the top right.

The story takes place starting from the bottom, properly from the central panel with the Crowning of thorns, centrally placed to reaffirm the kingship of Christ, solemnized by the arch which links in perspective the buildings of the two side panels with the Flagellation and the Ascent to Calvary. The episode in which Christ is waiting to be crucified, while a torturer Is peircing the cross with a drill, is full of anguish, but it would non have been included among the fourteen stations of the Via Crucis, then not yet elaborated by the spirituality of the Franciscan friars.