Duomo di Cividale (Santa Maria Assunta)

The cathedral that dominates Cividale's main square is a survivor of fires and earthquakes, its present form shaped by Pietro Lombardo's Renaissance rebuilding. Inside waits one of medieval Europe's great goldsmith works, the silver altarpiece Patriarch Pellegrino II gave his native city around 1200.

Why it matters

Santa Maria Assunta is the principal church of Cividale and the seat around which the town's religious institutions organised themselves from the Lombard period onward. A bishop stood here from about 705, and after the Patriarch of Aquileia transferred to the city in 737 the cathedral complex became the administrative heart of one of Italy's most influential sees. The present building carries that authority in stone: a Gothic three-nave design begun in the fifteenth century, completed in a Renaissance idiom by Pietro Lombardo and his sons after the nave collapsed in 1502, and refreshed in the eighteenth. Its artistic anchor, the Pala d'argento of Pellegrino II — more than two metres of gilded silver sheet worked with filigree halos in the opus veneciarum manner — is routinely described as a masterpiece of medieval goldsmithing, and it remains on the high altar where it was meant to be seen.

What to notice

On the high altar, Pellegrino II's silver altarpiece, dated about 1200–1204, shows the Madonna enthroned with the blessing Child flanked by archangels, saints in lateral compartments, and the kneeling patriarch himself among the figures; 123 gilded silver sheets carry the design. The building combines Gothic bay proportions from Bartolomeo delle Cisterne's design with a Renaissance presbytery reworked by Pietro Lombardo and his sons Tullio and Antonio, and an eighteenth-century interior setting by Giorgio Massari, executed by Bernardino Maccaruzzi. Around the walls: Pomponio Amalteo's Annunciation of 1546, the funerary monument of Patriarch Nicolò Donato carved by Giovanni Antonio da Carona around 1513, a painted Pietà of German make from the early fifteenth century, and a painted silk gonfalone of 1539 linked to Giovanni da Udine. Behind the bell tower, remains of the canons' medieval cloister with hook-shaped capitals still survive.

Context and history

Disaster built this church as much as patronage did. A fierce fire in 1186 was answered by Patriarch Pellegrino II with a restoration funded by some 380 local donors; enlargement followed under Gregorio da Montelongo between 1259 and 1269; lightning struck the tower in 1299 and fire returned in 1342. The earthquake of 25 January 1348 badly damaged the building, and Patriarch Bertrando drove its recovery; another quake in 1448 weakened the structure beyond repair. Rebuilding began with Erardo da Villaco, commissioned in 1451, then passed to Bartolomeo delle Cisterne, whose Gothic design progressed from 1457 — the portal by Jacopo Veneziano dates to 1465 — until his death in 1480 stalled the works. On 29 January 1502 the central nave collapsed, and Pietro Lombardo took charge that May with his sons Tullio and Antonio. The church was consecrated on 9 May 1529; the facade was finished from 1535 and the red-and-white marble floor only in 1549. Excavations of 1906 before the church uncovered the octagonal baptistery built or restored by Patriarch Callisto, whose font and the altar of Duke Ratchis now rest in the adjacent Christian Museum.