L'INTERNO - INSIDE

The interior, also renovated to a design by Bonvicini, is of particular value for the harmony of its layout and the intelligence with which it unifies real architecture, painted architecture, and furnishings. The typological layout is typical of confraternity churches: a simple yet solemn hall space, accompanied by a large choir behind the presbytery for the prayers of the brothers, equipped with wooden stalls from the mid-eighteenth century and covered by a barrel vault, as well as two smaller rooms intended respectively for the sacristy and chapel of San Vittore.

The presbytery was delimited by the marble balustrade decided in 1753 and communicated with the choir through two reduced openings left on the sides of the altar. The new high altar, all in marble, occupies almost all the available space: the table, raised by three steps, is supported by two marble columns and shows, despite using the same stones as the balustrade, a different taste for inlays and ornaments that harks back to the Empire Style and therefore to a dating of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century; Above the table rises the marble tabernacle with a small crucifix, leaning against a concave reredos about two metres high and organised on three shelves intended to house wooden candlesticks painted in silver and gold.

In 1760 the church was enriched with an altarpiece depicting the Marriage of the Virgin, donated by the lawyer Crosa, a prominent figure in the brotherhood, together with his wife. The canvas, by an unknown artist, shows a young Madonna receiving the ring from an elderly Saint Joseph with a flowering staff, a sign of the divine choice of groom according to tradition and the apocryphal gospels; the two spouses, kneeling, stand before the High Priest in liturgical robes, surrounded by other figures, while above, among clouds and the heads of angels, appears the dove of the Holy Spirit. The church's embellishment work was then forced to halt, also in connection with Bernardo Vittone's major project for the reconstruction of the church of San Michele, which involved the demolition of the old parish church.

The decorative apparatus of the church is one of the most important aspects of the complex and was born from a unitary project by Bonvicini, developed between 1774 and the spring-summer of 1775 together with the painter in architecture Carlo Felice Bianchi and Vittorio Amedeo Rapous. Bianchi, an artist already active in the circles of the Turin court and called by the confraternity at Bonvicini's suggestion, painted walls and vaults simulating almost all the architectural elements: columns, pillars, pilasters, niches and many other moldings are in fact only exceptionally made of masonry or stucco, while the rest are the result of illusionistic painting, built with a wide chromatic fan and with a skillful use of chiaroscuro. The most notable result is seen in the vault of the presbytery, where the painting simulates a small dome after the demolition of the small royal dome and its replacement with a normal basin vault, and even more so in the back wall of the choir, where perspective and color fake a large curved apse.

Rapous, a Turin painter born in 1729 and died in 1800, was by then an established artist, active both in the secular decoration of noble palaces and in religious painting for churches and oratories. He was commissioned to paint figures within the architecture designed by Bianchi: in the first panel of the nave vault he painted the Ascension of Jesus into Heaven, with the Eleven Apostles; in the vault of the presbytery he painted God the Father; in the panel on the choir the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove; on the walls of the nave, in the four niches painted by Bianchi, he executed in grisaille the four Fathers of the Western Church, Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine on the right, Saint Ambrose and Saint Gregory the Great on the left; in the false pendentives above the presbytery he finally depicted the four major prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel, with scrolls praising the Name of Jesus. The vault decorations are also described as a Trinity developed in three figurative moments, Ascension, God the Father and the Holy Spirit, confirming the strong theological structure of the entire program.

Probably again on the initiative of the prior Carlo Giuseppe Antonio Crosa, Rapous painted in 1776 the canvas for the altar of the Sisters, recently built in the chapel of the right nave, today identified as Madonna degli Angeli between Saint Erasmus and Saint Ursula, restored in 2009; in the upper part appears the Virgin seated on a throne of clouds among flights of angels, as patron saint of the Company of the Sisters, while below Saint Ursula kneeling indicates Mary to the faithful as a model of love and virtue, and Saint Erasmus, in liturgical robes with a crosier in his hand and a miter on the ground, invokes the protection of the Virgin over the devotees. Saint Ursula, virgin and martyr, is the English princess of the well-known late medieval legend who wants her killed by Attila after refusing to marry him, and was already linked to Rivarolo by the Company of Virgins, attested since 1637 under her title; Saint Erasmus, or Saint Elmo, bishop and martyr venerated as the patron saint of sailors and invoked against evil in the belly, appears here precisely as a particular protector of women giving birth and belly pain.

The brotherhood then commissioned Rapous to paint the large canvas to be placed on the back wall of the church, registered as the Circumcision of Jesus but in reality interpretable as the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, today commonly referred to precisely by this second title and dated 1778. Although starting from the theme of the eighth day ceremony, the composition in fact presents elements that refer rather to the Gospel story of Candlemas: the bearded old man holding the Child in his arms recalls Simeon, the elderly woman behind him seems like the prophetess Anna, Mary is kneeling on the right with a serious face and downcast eyes, Joseph carries the basket with the two doves of tribute and on the left a kneeling man holds a candle, symbol of the light of Christ. This canvas, together with Our Lady of the Angels, forms the main core of Rapous's work in the church, completed by two minor canvases with Saint Peter and Saint Paul, restored in 2001.

The choir, supported by four large volutes, has a curvilinear shape and is adorned with floral motifs; it housed a small pipe organ, of which only the wooden structure remains today, as the pipes and keyboards have been removed. The organ, attributable to Giovanni Bruna and built around 1785, was placed in the wooden choir above the entrance door, within an elegant three-bay case, and the entire design of the choir is attributed to Bonvicini.

The counter-façade features a large, visually striking wooden structure, also designed to regularize the building's irregular parallelogram plan through the use of differentiated thicknesses. This apparatus combines the portal with the compass, the two side confessionals, the upper gallery for the choir, and the organ; construction was entrusted to Agostino Borgarello, while the sculptor Rampone oversaw the decorative bas-reliefs. The central wooden portal closely resembles the larger one in the parish church of San Michele, also designed by Bonvicini; the doors are arched at the top and feature sculpted floral decorations in the center, while the confessionals protrude with a convex profile, and in the left portal, a small door conceals the spiral staircase leading to the organ gallery.

The picture gallery was further expanded thanks again to the lawyer Crosa, who donated six other small-format paintings with the four Evangelists and Saints Peter and Paul to the brotherhood. The author is unknown, but the canvases were already considered to be of good workmanship and of notable value: the Evangelists, recognizable by their respective symbols — angel for Matthew, lion for Mark, ox for Luke and eagle for John — were hung on the side walls of the choir; Saint Paul, with sword and book, and Saint Peter, represented in an intensely pathetic scene with the rooster at the back, the keys laid aside, the handkerchief in hand and the face streaked with tears of repentance for Christ's denial, were instead placed on the side walls of the presbytery. Other canvases were also added to the brotherhood's heritage, including the Penitent Magdalene, Saint Charles Borromeo, Saint Philip Neri and a saint with a palm of martyrdom and a Mauritian cross on his chest, identified as a martyr of the Theban Legion and perhaps Saint Maurice; other paintings are also preserved, including a beautiful seventeenth-century Annunciation, not documented in the confraternal documents and probably coming from the convent of San Francesco after the Napoleonic suppression of 1802.

The last major structural and furnishing intervention was the 1880 pulpit, elegant and well-made, which takes up the floral and ornamental motifs of the counter-façade. Designed by Matteo Amateis for the carpentry and by Giovanni Chiolerio for the irons and ladder, it constitutes one of the key points in the building's construction history and at the same time one of the most refined elements of the interior furnishings. Another notable space is the side chapel which has preserved the wax statue and relics of Saint Victor since 1780.