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The Oratory of S. Biagio

Currently a dependency of the parish of S. Lorenzo, this chapel appears briefly in documents from 1430 to 1460 as the seat of a hospital. It is a small room, about the size of a pleasant dining-room, with a door onto the street, and not so very encouragingly, not one but two former "porte del morto", now glassed in. The charm of this minor edifice is entirely due to the quality and number of the frescoes that adorn it. I'm particularly fond of S. Biagio because it was my introduction to Spello; but also because for many years I was an interpreter, and its patron (Blasius or Blaise) is also that of throat diseases — and thus, by extension, of interpreters.

Its façade is certainly simple enough.

The 2 overlapping clickmaps above cover pretty much the whole inside of the chapel (the St. Michael in the right corner is particularly beautiful and interesting) except for this fragmentary fresco of St. Francis receiving the stigmata, by an unknown painter of the school of Foligno, on the N wall, i.e., to the left of the first view above:

Now Assisi is only 8 km N of Spello, so St. Francis lived most of his life very close to here; and Foligno is the next town S by about five more kilometers: on the other hand this was painted in the late 14c or even the early 15c, nearly 200 years after Francis died, so it is at best at the very limits of living memory, unlike the Cimabue portrait in the Basilica of Assisi.

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
Thanks to the Pinacoteca Civica di Spello for opening to the general public all the minor churches and monuments in town as part of their excellent Aug 1997 program, "Viviamo la nostra città"; for staffing each of them with student guides, often enthusiastic and sometimes very knowledgeable; and for providing careful fact sheets, authored by Stefano Felicetti and Giulio Proietti Bocchini, from which I drew much of the detailed information you see here about this church.
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