Basilica di San Giacomo Maggiore

On Via Zamboni, the university street, the Augustinians raised a church that became the stage of Bologna's most powerful family. San Giacomo Maggiore blends late Gothic body and Renaissance soul: the Bentivoglio chapel glows with Lorenzo Costa's Triumphs, the Poggi chapel shows Pellegrino Tibaldi's Roman manner, and the portico outside is a textbook of the Bolognese Renaissance.

Why it matters

The hermit friars who followed the Rule of Saint Augustine laid the first stone on 25 April 1267 on the road to San Donato, financed by donations and by taxes the commune granted them; the church was complete by 1315, and after the apsidal section of 1331-1343 it was consecrated in 1344. In the fifteenth century the Bentivoglio lords took the basilica under their protection and transformed it into their dynastic stage, rebuilding the interior with sail vaults and a dome between 1483 and 1498 and adding the portico of 1477-1481, paid for by public funds under Giovanni II Bentivoglio and counted among the great works of the Bolognese Renaissance. The church is therefore a double document: of the long Augustinian association with the church, and of the family that ruled Bologna until 1506.

What to notice

The Bentivoglio Chapel, built between 1463 and 1468 to a design by Pagno di Lapo Portignani da Fiesole in a plan inspired by Brunelleschi, is a major part of the basilica. Lorenzo Costa frescoed the Triumph of Death and the Triumph of Fame there in 1490, and Francesco Francia's altarpiece of the Madonna and saints followed in 1494; the nearby tomb of Anton Galeazzo Bentivoglio, opposite the chapel, is the work of Jacopo della Quercia and his workshop. The chapel's history is closely tied to the Bentivoglio family.

The Poggi Chapel, designed and frescoed by Pellegrino Tibaldi in 1552-1555 for Cardinal Giovanni Poggi, brings the Roman High Renaissance into the church and contrasts sharply with the older chapels. Elsewhere the basilica holds a polyptych with the relic of the Holy Cross by Paolo Veneziano, dated before 1344; fourteenth-century Stories of Saint Mary of Egypt by Cristoforo da Bologna; works by Ludovico Carracci and Lavinia Fontana; and the tomb of Anton Galeazzo Bentivoglio. The thirty-six Corinthian columns of the portico lead toward the oratory of Santa Cecilia, whose early sixteenth-century fresco cycle completes the ensemble. The bell tower, built in 1471 and about fifty-five metres tall, holds a notable bell ring.

Context and history

The Augustinian convent beside the church became one of the order's celebrated Studi Generali, a European centre of learning, and its memory survives in the music conservatory that has occupied part of the convent since 1804. The Bentivoglio patronage ended in 1506 when Pope Julius II drove the family from Bologna, but their chapel remained, complete with the imagery of a court that had fallen; the dome over the crossing had to be rebuilt after a lightning strike in 1562, and Baroque alterations arrived in the eighteenth century. The Augustinians were expelled under Napoleonic law yet returned as custodians, maintaining a connection with the basilica that survived the suppression of their convent.