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PALLADIO AND THE VENETO | Church of Santa Maria Nova - Vicenza - (1578) | |||||||||||||||||
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In 1578 the Vicentine noble Lodovico Trento earmarked a sizeable sum of money for the reconstruction of a small church attached to the convent of the Augustinian nuns of Santa Maria Nova in Borgo Porta Nuova, west of the city. By 1590, twelve years later, the church had been completed and was decorated with canvases by foremost artists like Maffei, the Maganza, Andrea Vicentino, and Carpioni. The convent, constructed from 1539 onwards, was amongst the most important in the city and hosted numerous daughters from the aristocratic families of Vicenza, such as the Valmarana, Piovene, Angarano, Revese, Garzadori and Monza. Although neither documents nor autograph drawings exist to prove Palladio’s authorship of the church, it seems very probable that the building resulted from a project he had drawn up around 1578 and was then realised (after Palladio’s death in 1580) under the supervision of the capomastro Domenico Groppino, whose name appears in the relevant documentation. Furthermore, in 1583, Montano Barbarano — the patron of Palladio’s palace in the Contra’ Porti — also set aside a notable amount of money for the construction of the church of the convent which accommodated his two daughters, and Domenico Groppino is known to have been Montano’s tried and trusted builder. The evidence of the architecture itself excludes the possibility that Groppino, a simple capomastro, could have been the church’s designer. The church has a single nave, in the form of an ancient temple cella, entirely bounded by engaged Corinthian columns on plinths: quite close in appearance to the Roman temple at Nîmes which Palladio had drawn in the Quattro Libri. It would be most difficult to distance the name of Andrea Palladio from the power, but also inventive freedom, of this interior and also of its façade, if for no other reason than the fact that a simple imitator would have operated within a much more conventional register. Certain errors and uncertainties of construction should probably be ascribed to Groppino. |
© CISA A.Palladio 2010