DEVOTA
Art and the Sacred
Territory and Community
Curated by Chiara Gatti
May 16–September 13, 2026
San Nicolao Contemporary Art, Giancarlo Vitali Museum, Church of Santa Marta, Church of Saints Nazaro and Celso, Church of San Rocco, Church of Sant’Andrea, Shrine of the Madonna delle Lacrime.
Alessandro Biggio, Gregorio Botta, Giammarco Cugusi, Cinzia Fiorese, Lucio Fontana, Chiara Lecca, Mirco Marchelli, Daniela Novello, Matteo Pizzolante, Paolo Ventura
Grand Opening Saturday, May 16 at 12 p.m., Piazza Santa Marta, Bellano (LC)
As part of the 2026 annual program “Being One with the Whole,” curated by artistic director Chiara Gatti, BAC Bellano Arte e Cultura presents a site-specific art project titled “DEVOTA. Art and the Sacred, Territory and Community.”
Seven locations for ten artists: spanning a map of sites, churches, oratories, and parish churches, the exhibition spreads through the town’s streets and branches out along the Sentiero del Viandante, fostering an ideal dialogue between the works of the past housed in sacred spaces and contemporary interventions that stem from the artists’ reflections on the themes of the absolute and the immaterial.
Inspired by the iconography of ex-votos—understood in the broadest sense of votive offerings, once cherished in popular piety—the exhibition charts a path of shared artistic experiences in off-the-beaten-path locations, in search of a common sensibility and a shared yearning for the realm of the invisible. A 14th-century wooden Christ, 16th-century altarpieces, a Renaissance Lamentation, Baroque tapestries, 17th-century paintings on slate, medieval frescoes, and Romanesque vaults interact with new site-specific installations housed in the chancels, niches, and sacristy cupboards. Unexpected guests inhabit sacred spaces. These are close encounters that, across the centuries, see the renewal of forms, concepts, and the power of images to guide humanity toward the divine, from the sensible world to the intelligible one.
The spiritual father of this journey into the ethereal, Lucio Fontana, in the former Church of San Nicolao—now SAN NICOLAO Contemporary Art—is the creator of a Spatial Concept—on loan from the Lucio Fontana Foundation in Milan—which presents the ancestral symbolism of the egg, often associated with Marian devotion and the cycle of life, but also adopted as a ritual icon. The sacred dimension of gold, since ancient times a vehicle of ascension and passing, enhances the installation within the church, particularly in relation to the 14th-century frescoes depicting, precisely on the central arch of San Nicolao, Christ Pantocrator in a gold-crowned mandorla. In the apse, a painting by Paolo Ventura alludes to the fragility of mortal life in a dystopian city, in a liminal landscape where one walks suspended between reality and the unknown. On the trusses, Giammarco Cugusi evokes the Michelangelesque touch of the Sistine Chapel through the brush of two mechanical arms and two work gloves, which bring the theme of comfort and an interrupted closeness into the realm of human relationships and their harshness.
Ideological affinities and synchronic dialogues return to the Sanctuary of the Madonna delle Lacrime in Lezzeno, whose altars house a historic collection of 18th-century votive offerings; here, a shroud by Alessandro Biggio, imbued with powdered clay, hangs from the top of a niche like an orphaned shroud and enters into a virtuous relationship with the drapery of an ancient scene from the Passion. While Gregorio Botta unfolds twelve lecterns in the presbytery of the Church of Santa Marta and allows twelve codices with icy pages to be ruffled by the wind, scattering the rustle of paper and unspoken words into the silence of the church, in San Rocco Matteo Pizzolante places a contemporary ex-voto that unfolds images of traffic accidents reworked by artificial intelligence into an ephemeral narrative preceding the accident itself, playing on the fragile boundary that separates life and destiny. A few steps away, the sacristy drawers conceal Cinzia Fiorese’s icons, inspired by 14th-century gold-ground paintings, synthesized through her painting that transcends the architecture depicted by the masters of the past into the abstract. Daniela Novello, on an altar in Sant’Andrea, sets up a Eucharistic table, a metaphor for a contemporary Last Supper. A large loaf of bread exudes a profound sense of suspension and inviolability. Carved into the light, pinkish stone of Vicenza is the broken loaf, like an epiphany.
At the heart of the exhibition, the provost Church of Saints Nazarius and Celsus features the precious Renaissance altarpieces in the side chapels of the high altar, which engage in a dialogue with Mirco Marchelli’s elegant ceramics: wooden and terracotta missals, fragile tabernacles crowned with surviving golden frames, like sacred shrines eroded by time and neglect. In the opposite nave, Chiara Lecca distills a multiple ex-voto into the space, orchestrating a harmonious ensemble of vases, ampoules, bowls, royal cups like Grails, enveloped in ultramarine blue—a Marian emblem, a symbol of infinity and purity—which, under the title “Fake Marble,” alludes to the theme of illusion hidden within organic materials, a critique of nature’s beauty and, at the same time, of humanity’s lack of respect. A similar theme is also present at the Giancarlo Vitali Museum, in the naturalistic installation that Lecca herself created for the Sala delle Carni, in direct dialogue with the paintings of the Bellanese master.
Giancarlo Vitali Museum
Bellano, Palazzo Lorla, 50 Via Alessandro Manzoni
San Nicolao Contemporary Art
Bellano, 9 Via San Nicolao
Admission tickets to the sites
Opening days and hours
Until May 31
Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Starting June 1, daily, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
More information at www.bacbellano.eu
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Church of Santa Marta
Bellano, Piazza Santa Marta
Church of Saints Nazaro and Celso
Bellano, Piazza San Giorgio
Sanctuary of the Madonna delle Lacrime
Bellano, Strada di Lezzeno, 11-13
Free admission
Opening days and hours
Daily, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
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Church of San Rocco
Bellano, Via Bartolomeo Nogara 2
Church of Sant’Andrea
Fraz. Bonzeno, Bellano
Free admission
Opening days and hours
Saturday, May 23 and Saturday, May 30, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Saturday, June 13 and Saturday, June 27, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Saturday, July 4 and Saturday, July 18, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Saturday, August 15, only the Church of San Rocco
Saturday, August 29, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Saturday, September 12 and Saturday, September 26, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Special opening hours for the inauguration on Saturday, May 16:
Church of San Rocco, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Church of Sant’Andrea, from 12 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Sanctuary of Lezzeno, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
