Sant'Agostino, Cremona

Cremona came to the Sforza as a dowry. When Bianca Maria Visconti, heir of the dukes of Milan, married the soldier Francesco Sforza here in 1441, the city was part of her settlement. In the Gothic church of Sant'Agostino, built by Augustinian friars in the 1340s, the couple still look out from two portraits painted in 1460 by Bonifacio Bembo, a painter who worked for the Sforza court. They were first painted on pillars outside the chapel of Saints Daria and Chrysanthus and were later transferred to canvas and moved inside it.

Bembo is also credited with the late Gothic frescoes of the Cavalcabò Chapel, decorated in 1447 for a local noble family.

The painting a visitor should not miss is an altarpiece by Perugino, the Umbrian master who trained Raphael. It shows the Madonna and Child between Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Augustine, and it is dated 1494.