Tempio di San Lorenzo

San Lorenzo is a warm-brick Gothic preaching church begun in 1280 for the Franciscan Friars Minor. It has served Vicenza as convent, civic temple and resting place. Andriolo de' Santi's sculpted portal, the cenotaph of architect Vincenzo Scamozzi and triple-aisled vaulting mark its architectural and civic history.

Why it matters

The Franciscans reached Vicenza during Saint Francis's own lifetime, and the great church they started in 1280 became the principal religious building of the city's north-west quarter. Its Lombard-influenced Gothic — three naves carried on enormous pillars under cross vaults — is of a scale Vicenza otherwise reserves for its civic monuments, and it announced the mendicant orders' transformation of Italian cities a full generation before Palladio was born. San Lorenzo also gathered the dead of the Vicentine elite: funerary monuments line the deep arches of the facade, and the memorial to Vincenzo Scamozzi, the city's other great architect, stands against the counter-façade. Today the church belongs to the Diocese of Vicenza, and its daily offices keep a medieval quarter alive around it.

What to notice

The gabled brick facade stacks two orders above tall pointed arches occupied by four funerary monuments. The doorway is a projecting porch on columns and lion supports, with sculpture from 1342–44 by the workshop of the Venetian Andriolo de' Santi. In the lunette the Virgin and Child appear between Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence above the kneeling donor; the architrave shows Christ flanked by eight saints, while Annunciation figures stand on the jambs. Inside, the central nave leads to the counter-façade monuments, including the cenotaph of Vincenzo Scamozzi and the memorial of Giambattista Porto. Other works include the Poiana altar in the right transept, the sixteenth-century Gualdo altar with a late seventeenth-century Deposition copied from Luca Giordano, and Antonino da Venezia's sculptural group of the Madonna with Saints Peter and Paul, alongside a Madonna and Child with Saint Anthony of Padua by Carpioni. The Municipal Art Gallery holds Paolo Veneziano's Dormition of the Virgin, once on the high altar.

Context and history

The convent founded in 1280 grew with the church and with the city: by the late fourteenth century San Lorenzo ranked among Vicenza's most important places of worship. The suppressions of the Napoleonic age reached the friars in 1797; the Comune of Vicenza bought the church in 1836 and restored the complex between 1837 and 1839, while the convent served more profane uses. Clearance work in the early twentieth century uncovered a stretch of Roman road beside the transept, a reminder that this ground has been sacred and strategic for two millennia. The friars returned in 1927 — the property remained municipal — and stayed until 2017, when declining vocations forced the Franciscan order to withdraw; on 5 October 2018 pastoral care passed formally to the Bishop of Vicenza, who presents San Lorenzo as the city's civic temple.