Cosseria
The Parish Church of the Immaculate Virgin Mary
The village of Cosseria, located in an elevated position overlooking two stretches of the Bormida River, houses late Gothic frescoes attributed to the anonymous Master of Cosseria within the current sacristy of the parish church. These are two votive panels, dating to 1515, which were accidentally discovered in the 1980s following balls kicked by some boys during parish games.
Located in an elevated position overlooking two stretches of the Bormida River, on the road connecting Liguria to Piedmont, lies the village of Cosseria. It is also known in medieval historiography as Cruxferrea, most likely due to the presence of a cross atop the hill where the castle once stood.
Mentioned in 991 among the sites donated to the Benedictine Abbey of Spigno Monferrato and subsequently in the imperial diplomas granted to the church of Savona between 998 and 1014, Cosseria was a crossroads of important roads and the seat of a castellany, or feudal jurisdiction that controlled a vast territory, including Millesimo, which a few centuries later would be awarded the title of mountain capital of the Del Carretto fiefdom.
The medieval castle was built strategically to control the roads connecting the Ligurian hinterland to the sea. Although today reduced to ruins, archaeological excavations have demonstrated that it was once an imposing structure, composed of at least three sets of walls: an older core with a square watchtower, a religious building, a residential building, and a moat (attributed to between the 10th and 11th centuries), a second set of walls dating back to the 13th century, and a third, very extensive 14th-century wall, so extensive that it surrounded the entire summit of the mountain, including an inhabited village. The castrum, specifically mentioned in 1256, assumed particular military importance in historiographical tradition when it was the scene of battles in the following decade. Its presence in the 12th century can be traced back to the reorganization of the Carretto domains that occurred after the death of Henry the One-Eyed in 1185, when the territory was divided between his sons, Otto and Henry II. The latter inherited the possessions that extended from Finale to the upper Bormida Valley, including Cosseria itself.
The Parish Church of the Immaculate Virgin Mary
The ancient parish church dedicated to Saint Mary and Saint Bartholomew, mentioned as early as 1257, is remembered at the end of the 16th century for a cemetery adjacent to the church itself. The exterior façade still retains a 15th-century sandstone rose window, the only visible remnant of the sculptural and architectural elements of the older building. It stands next to the rectory and the oratory of the Disciplinanti, and appears to be the reconstruction of the parish church when the core of Cosseria was moved from the fortified site to its current location.
The building appears to be the union of at least two different and successive structures, an initial 15th-century structure to which an extension was added during the 17th century. At the end of the 16th century, the church is recorded as having undergone various renovations, including whitewashing of the walls and moving of the altars: it was perhaps on one of these occasions that the frescoes were covered.
In what is now used as part of the sacristy, among liturgical furnishings and a walled-in stone basin (likely an ancient holy water stoup), one can admire an important example of late Gothic painting, the only one preserved in the area. Fortuitously, in the 1980s, following some balls kicked by children during parish games, two sections of frescoes were surprisingly uncovered in the ancient presbytery area.
The surviving wall, likely the apse area of the fifteenth-century church (also following the orientation of the church), houses two votive panels, each exceptionally certified by the patron and dated 1515. Both pictorial episodes feature the customary phrase “hoc opus fecit fieri” (this work was commissioned by) at the top of the frame, followed by the patron’s name and the date, executed in black brushstrokes. The rightmost panel features the Madonna enthroned with the Child between Saints Bartholomew, Sebastian, and Roch, commissioned by a certain Franciscus Barlochus, a member of one of the oldest families in Cosseria and probably, as has been suggested, a man close to the feudal lords.
The second votive episode, instead, places the Madonna and Child enthroned next to the figure of Saint Martha of Bethany, sister of Mary and Lazarus. Only her face with her nun’s wimple remains, with no other recognizable features. It is attributed to a commission by a man whose name, Petrus [..] Cunii, remains.
Both devotional panels feature a specific Marian model: the Madonna carries the Child on her lap, who is wearing a red coral necklace and a transparent robe, while he is playing with a bird. This is a remarkably common motif in 15th-century Ligurian-Piedmontese painting, thus pointing to the authorship of a local workshop.
The recognized artist is the so-called Master of Cosseria, an anonymous painter who headed a well-structured workshop that operated along popular routes between Lower Piedmont and the Ligurian hinterland between the late 15th and early 16th centuries. In the works documented so far, the Master’s compositional predilection for configuring religious scenes with selected saints, portrayed in monumental proportions, clearly recognizable in their iconographic characterization, is evident. These saints are placed within simple architectural spaces, highlighting a preference for communicative clarity over spatial exploration. The cultural context of this pictorial episode has been further defined, since the fresco’s dating has been linked to the presence of a member of the del Carretto family, Ottaviano, as parish priest in the ancient parish church dedicated to Santa Maria and San Bartolomeo (Virgin Mary and Saint Bartholomew) from 1502 to 1518, thus concurrent with the Master of Cosseria’s pictorial intervention.
The Carretto Family's Presence
The road to the parish church passes through the Cuori hamlet, where until a few decades ago a particularly interesting, stratified late medieval building stood.
One of the entrance facades retained some recognizable reused elements, including a mullioned window with an architrave decorated with the Carretto family’s coat of arms, a terracotta plant frieze, and a stone pointed arch portal engraved with the trigram of Christ next to two hearts. These ancient Del Carretto heraldic symbols likely originally came from their noble residence or were part of the abandoned decoration of the parish church, likely during its renovations in 1660.