This article retraces the history of the Confraternita di San Rocco (Confraternity of St. Roch) in Modena from its foundation in the late fifteenth century to its abolition in the eighteenth century. Thanks to newly examined archival documents, the article details the building and decorative work supported by the confraternity for the construction and decoration of the oratory. The result is a varied pic­ture of the craftsmen responsible for the work, which was carried out by minor, lesser-known artists such as the foremen Paolo Bisogni and Giovanni Battista Biavardi. The confraternity’s scarce resources were constantly invested in structural interventions on the walls, which were periodically threatened by water from the underlying ca­nal. Nevertheless, the documents also reveal the members’ commit­ment to decorating the interior. The three altars completed between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries involved stuccoists such as Sebastiano Caula and Giovanni Antonio Franchini, as well as artists Marco Antonio Mazzarini, Flaminio Veratti and the more famous Giulio Secchiari and Sigismondo Caula, who created two monumen­tal altarpieces. This article provides some new information about the patrons and their respective chronology.

Original publication: Sirocchi, Simone. “A Lost Confraternity: San Rocco in Modena and its Church.” Confraternitas 29 (2): 2019. 22-39. DOI: . This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Confraternitas. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Confraternitas under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.