Monica Craparo

The monastery of the Observant Franciscans in Modica, with the attached Santa Maria di Gesù church, was built starting from 1478, thanks to financing by the count and countess of Modica, Fadrique Henriquez and Anna Cabrerà. The numerous transformations undergone by the complex over the centuries, down to the conversion of the convent into a prison after the Unification of Italy, caused a major upheaval to the original fifteenth-century plan, so that today only some reconstruction hypotheses can be formulated on the old building, on the basis of the few extant elements. The church presents a single room whose high masonry structures and the presence of the remains of big vault crowns found during recent restoration work suggest that the covering of the spans was resolved with three very big square cross vaults. On the right side of the nave, the presence of five side chapels, two for each span of the room, predominantly for funeral purposes, connects up with the general reorganization of monastic churches starting from the end of the 14th century. They are small square spaces, which must have been covered by cross vaults with groins, from which today there only remain the elegantly carved impost corbels. The façade is almost intact, with a fanciful portal that recalls analogous solutions in the Iblei area like the Candelora chapel in Santa Maria delle Scale and the portal of San Giorgio Vecchio, both in Ragusa. The wide splaying and the dense decoration with leaves and themes linked to sea fauna seem to date from the first decades of the 16th century. Above the portal at the centre, within a rhomboidal frame, there is inserted the coat of arms of the Henriquez family, with dolphins and anchors, while to the side there are two windows, one with a two-lobe arch and the other with a curved arch, also decorated with leaves and dense openwork. Lastly, this complex system is closed off above by a rectilinear cornice over which there is a big central oculus, in line with the portal.