Mannerist and Baroque architecture

The process of centralization and control of public life initiated by Philip II of Spain marked the end of the prerogatives and administrative autonomy of medieval origin, which the island had continued to enjoy during the Catalan-Aragonese age.

The history of architecture in Sardinia between the 16th and 17th centuries is therefore characterized by an essentially conservative commission, represented above all - if we exclude a few feudal lords, religious orders and some wealthy merchants from major urban centers - by a backwater clergy and a small bourgeoisie, constitutionally resistant to any innovation that could weaken the link with tradition and, therefore, with the history into which it aspired to enter.

The construction of the Sant'Agostino Nuovo church in Cagliari (1577-80) is emblematic of a new orientation in the Italian sense, introducing a sense of Renaissance space into its Latin cross plan, its classical ornaments and its dome.

However, in the rest of the island, classicist aesthetics was reserved a marginal role and the penetration of Renaissance innovations did not entail any stylistic revolution in Sardinia, but it took place through a slow process of symbiosis and hybridization, even more discontinuous in peripheral areas, where the late Gothic language lasted at least until the mid-seventeenth century.

Relegated mainly to the openings and the ornamental solutions of the facades, Classicism reworked the Gothic structures, giving life to modest but equally original works, such as the parish church of Nughedu Santa Vittoria, which overlooks a large square of which it constitutes the spectacular architectural backdrop.

At the end of the 16th century, the installation of the Jesuit church of Jesus and Mary from Sassari, today of Saint Catherine, translated for the first time in Sardinia the counter-reform liturgical language codified during the Council of Trent (1545-1563) and widely used by the Society of Jesus. The need to have a building equipped with a unitary space, in which the attention of the faithful was concentrated on the main altar, had in fact led to the elaboration of a new ecclesiastical model, codified for the first time in the Church of the Jesus in Rome (about 1568), designed by the architect Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola in collaboration with Giovanni Tristano. The Sassari church takes up the model of Jesus, both in the structural structure and in the symbolic value of the architectural elements, differing, however, by some original solutions adopted during construction.

At the beginning of the 17th century, a bitter controversy broke out on the island between the archbishops of Sassari and Cagliari who were fighting for the title of primate of the Sardinian and Corsican Churches. A controversy that, beyond its political meaning, played no secondary role in the process of assimilating Baroque artistic trends, imported by the fathers of the Society of Jesus and by the military engineers who arrived on the island for the construction of works of fortification and defense.

In Porto Torres as in Cagliari, the “invention of holy bodies”, that is, the discovery of the relics of the martyrs, whose quantity and sacredness would have legitimate the island supremacy of one of the two archdioceses, determined at different times the baroque adaptation of traditional places of worship and the restructuring of their respective cathedrals.

In Cagliari, work began in 1615 by the will of Archbishop Francisco De Esquivel, who had the crypt of the martyrs dug under the presbytery of the cathedral of Santa Maria di Castello, destined to house their relics in sparkling environments of colored marble in Baroque fashion. Between 1669 and 1674, this was followed by the restructuring of the Cagliari cathedral itself, which took on the late-mannerist forms that it still preserves today, and that of the Turritan cathedral, San Nicola di Sassari, concluded at the beginning of the 18th century with its exuberant façade rich in late baroque sculptural decorations.

Update

10/9/2023 - 15:45