Basilica di San Gaudenzio

The Basilica of San Gaudenzio in Novara combines a late-Renaissance interior with Alessandro Antonelli's brick dome. Its artworks include a polyptych by Gaudenzio Ferrari, canvases by il Fiammenghino and frescoes by Tanzio da Varallo, alongside the silver urn of Saint Gaudenzio.

Why it matters

The Basilica of San Gaudenzio gives Novara its defining silhouette, and its dome is the reason. Rising 121 metres entirely in masonry, Antonelli's structure was a daring statement built between 1840 and 1888, decades after the church itself had been finished. For the city it carried civic meaning as well as religious weight: when construction began in 1577, Novara under Spanish rule wanted a church that asserted its own identity, dedicated to its bishop-saint. The basilica is an artistic treasury of the diocese, with paintings documenting Piedmontese and Lombard painting from the early sixteenth to the seventeenth century.

What to notice

The Chapel of the Nativity, second on the left, holds Gaudenzio Ferrari's polyptych, commissioned around 1514 for the earlier church of San Vincenzo, in its original Renaissance frame of columns and cornices. The Nativity panel at the centre is flanked by the Annunciation above and panels of saints below, painted while Ferrari was working at the height of his powers. The first chapel on the left contains Tanzio da Varallo's 1629 frescoes for the Nazari family, which move from biblical scenes to visions of Heaven and Purgatory. A dramatic canvas of the Battle of Sennacherib shows his engagement with central European painting. The Chapel of the Santissimo Sacramento holds eight seventeenth-century canvases by il Fiammenghino narrating scenes from the life of Saint Gaudenzio in the city. Below the main altar, an eighteenth-century scurolo protects a silver urn with the saint's remains; an ancient bishop's throne survives nearby.

Context and history

The church was built between 1577 and 1590, probably to a design associated with Pellegrino Tibaldi, but the complete building — a single nave with a Latin cross plan — was not finished until the second half of the seventeenth century. The bell tower followed in 1786 to drawings by Benedetto Alfieri. The decisive transformation came with Alessandro Antonelli, the Novarese architect and engineer who conceived the colossal dome between 1840 and 1888. Built entirely of brick without a metal skeleton, it was repeatedly criticised during construction yet became the landmark of the city and the prototype of Antonelli's structural audacity, later echoed in his Mole Antonelliana in Turin. At the summit, a gilded copper statue of Christ the Saviour — Pietro Zucchi's work — has crowned the dome since 1873. The basilica is the burial church of the patron saint of Novara and the diocese's most important sanctuary.