Chiesa di San Domenico

The Dominicans settled in Faenza in 1223. Their church, rebuilt in the 1760s to a design by a Bolognese architect, has a Redentore-inspired colonnaded choir, sixteenth-century carved stalls and paintings with disputed attributions.

Why it matters

San Domenico is both a foundation document and a set-piece. The friars' arrival in 1223 and the commune's grant of a vineyard plot in 1231 anchor the mendicant orders' entry into Faenza, while the eighteenth-century rebuilding shows how thoroughly the city reinvented its medieval churches in Baroque dress. The interior's choir, with its Corinthian colonnade, echoes Palladio's Redentore in Venice. The adjacent cloister preserves a sixteenth-century cistern by Faentine friar-architect Domenico Paganelli and was largely rebuilt after wartime destruction.

What to notice

• The choir and presbytery: an opulent Corinthian colonnade framing the high altar, consciously modelled on Palladio's Redentore in Venice.
• The sixteenth-century carved wooden choir stalls associated with Fra Domenico Paganelli, the Faentine Dominican whose octagonal Madonna del Rosario chapel (built 1611–1617) stands nearby.
• A wooden crucifix carved at the close of the fifteenth century is attributed to the same anonymous northern sculptor as the crucifix of the Cathedral of San Pietro.
• The painting of San Vincenzo Ferreri by Felice Torelli, dating from the church's reconstruction era.
• The pair of canvases — the Visitazione and Saint Dominic led by angels into Faenza — whose attribution divides between Cristoforo Unterberger and Giovanni Gottardi; recent research favours Gottardi.
• The cloister layout, reworked after the Second World War, with Paganelli's central cistern at its heart.

Context and history

The Dominicans settled in Faenza in 1223, and eight years later the commune handed them land with vineyards — "in loco vinearum" — where they raised a church and convent first dedicated to Saint Andrew. The medieval complex served the order for five centuries before the decision to rebuild: demolition came in 1760 and construction ran from 1761 to 1765 to a design by Francesco Tadolini of Bologna, with the Faentine master builders of the Tomba family directing the site; the marble high altar followed in 1766. The bishop consecrated the finished church in 1842. The Madonna del Rosario chapel, an octagonal design by Paganelli of 1611–1617, keeps its vestment statue made in Bologna in 1612. Damaged again in the twentieth century, the cloister was substantially rebuilt after the Second World War, and in 2008 the Dominicans transferred ownership of the complex to the diocese.