Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta

Novara's cathedral is a neoclassical statement by Alessandro Antonelli, raised in the 1850s and 1860s over an early Christian complex. Beneath its stucco columned nave survive a twelfth-century mosaic of Adam and Eve, paintings by Guercino and Gaudenzio Ferrari, and, beside the portico, a fifth-century baptistery that the rebuild spared.

Why it matters

Novara's cathedral took shape through a major nineteenth-century rebuilding led by Alessandro Antonelli. In 1854 and 1855 Alessandro Antonelli drew a radically new cathedral, and between 1857 and the later 1860s the Romanesque church consecrated in 1132 — itself the successor of an early Christian basilica — was demolished and replaced. The resulting neoclassical interior has a barrel-vaulted nave divided by faux-marble stucco columns, a pronaos of four giant fluted columns on the facade, and daylight handled with academic discipline. Antonelli's scheme was never fully completed — the transept and deep choir he imagined were never built — which gives the church a compact, almost domestic grandeur. The art inside spans nearly eight centuries around that classical frame.

What to notice

Set into the floor near the presbytery is a black-and-white mosaic from about 1132, saved from the Romanesque cathedral and showing Adam and Eve beside the four rivers of Paradise. It is the oldest thing in the building and the direct witness of what Antonelli replaced. On the walls, look for Guercino's Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata of 1633, Gaudenzio Ferrari's Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, Bernardino Lanino's altarpiece of 1575 in the Chapel of St Benedict, Sperindio Cagnola's sixteenth-century Last Supper, and Carlo Francesco Nuvolone's Adoration of the Magi, painted to replace a lost Titian. Sculpture is present too, from the Collino brothers' Saint Agabus to Grazioso Rusca's Saint Lawrence, and the Madonna del Riscatto chapel of 1728 with Giuseppe Rusnati's marble group. Two organs flank the nave, the older built by the Mentasti workshop in 1902.

Context and history

The site has been the city's episcopal centre since late antiquity: an early Christian basilica of San Gaudenzio stood here around 350-400, replaced in turn by the Romanesque cathedral consecrated by Pope Innocent II on 17 April 1132. Fragments of that world remain in the mosaic floor and, crucially, in the octagonal baptistery of the fifth century, which Antonelli deliberately spared when he demolished the surrounding structures — the quadriportico came down in 1857 and was rebuilt in neoclassical form, and from 1865 the Romanesque nave and dome were taken down. Antonelli, already engaged on the dome of San Gaudenzio, treated the cathedral as a total design, but funding and politics trimmed his ambition, and the grand transept and choir were never realised. The building remains the seat of the Diocese of Novara.