Duomo di San Michele Arcangelo

The parish cathedral that anchors Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II pairs a Palladian-style facade with an interior full of Friulian Renaissance painting: a Trinity by Pordenone, canvases by Pomponio Amalteo, oil sketches connected with Tiepolo, and a baptismal font carved by Carlo da Carona. Consecrated in 1806, it remains the artistic centrepiece of San Daniele del Friuli.

Why it matters

The eighteenth-century cathedral, dedicated to San Michele Arcangelo and consecrated in 1806, stands on the main square beside the Guarneriana Library. Its collection brings together important works by Friulian artists.

What to notice

The facade, attributed to Venetian architect Domenico Rossi, has Palladian inspiration. Sculptor Nino Gortan created the bronze portals in 1982. The adjoining bell tower follows a design attributed to Giovanni da Udine, a pupil of Raphael born in nearby Udine.

The large altarpiece of the Santissima Trinità is by Antonio de' Sacchis, known as il Pordenone. The version on display is a copy painted by Domenico Fabris in 1870. Two triptychs flank the nave with canvases by Pomponio Amalteo, dated 1549 — the Sposalizio della Vergine and the Circoncisione di Gesù on the central panels — and by Girolamo Lugaro, dated 1625, whose four side canvases show Caino e Abele, the Sacrificio di Isacco, Mosè e Aronne and the Raccolta della manna. Oil sketches connected with Tiepolo hang here as well, an unusual presence this far north-east. A sixteenth-century baptistery contains a stone font attributed to the circle of Carlo da Carona and dated 1510. The interior surfaces are painted to imitate coloured marble.

Context and history

San Daniele's medieval cathedral stood at the heart of a town that had flourished inside the Patriarchate of Aquileia and later under Venetian rule. By the eighteenth century the community commissioned the rebuilding that produced the church, and the new cathedral was consecrated in 1806, in the middle of the Napoleonic upheavals. The building then absorbed the artistic patrimony of the area: Pordenone's altarpiece, the Amalteo and Lugaro triptychs, and the sixteenth-century baptismal furniture all migrated into the new setting, so that the eighteenth-century vessel preserves a fifteenth- and sixteenth-century core of painting and sculpture. The twentieth century added only discreetly, with Gortan's 1982 bronze portals the most visible modern layer.