The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Snows

Frà Antonio Cano (1779–1840) was a sculptor, architect, and lay friar of the Kingdom of Sardinia.

He is best known as the architect of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Snows at Nuoro, but also designed churches in Oristano.

Early life

Born in 1779 at Sassari, on the island of Sardinia,[1] Cano became a sculptor and a lay friar of the Order of Friars Minor Conventual.[2] He studied architecture in Rome[3] at the Accademia di San Luca, and trained as a sculptor as a pupil of Antonio Canova.[1]

Career

Although trained in the neoclassical, Cano was drawn to the rococo style, which better suited his temperament.[1] An example of such work is a statue of the Immaculate Conception he made for the church of Santa Maria di Betlem (St Mary of Bethlehem) in his home-town of Sassari.[1]

An early commission was a tomb monument in Cagliari Cathedral for a child of the royal family, Carlo Emanuele, only son of Carlo Amedeo of Savoy and his wife Maria Theresa of Austria, who died of smallpox in 1799. The work did not please the child’s parents.[1]

As an architect, Cano combined the neoclassical with the rococo. His work includes the renovation of the palace of the Piarists in Oristano and the church at Sassari.[1] Cano was also given the task of demolishing and rebuilding churches in Oristano.[4]

Cano also claimed to be a painter and an archaeologist.[5]

By 1836, the cathedral church of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Nuoro in Sardinia was judged too small, and Giovanni Maria Bua, Archbishop of Oristano, ordered it to be pulled down, to make way for a projected new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Snows.[6] The work of designing this was entrusted to Cano.[3]

In 1840, Cano fell from scaffolding at the cathedral while work on it was under way[7] and died within hours.[2]

An English commentator in 1849 noted that Cano had "shown considerable taste and knowledge in the style and proportions" of his neoclassical cathedral.[8] The building was largely complete by 1853 and was consecrated on 3 July 1873.[9]

After the death of Cano, Count Alberto della Marmora, Governor-General of Sardinia, accused him of being a mediocre architect who had destroyed "a considerable number of former basilicas".[10] A twentieth-century assessment similarly was that while his activity as an architect was extraordinarily intense, it was often unjustly destructive, in its hostility towards the Gothic heritage.[5]

Notes

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  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Antonio Cano 1775-1840", paradisola.it, 4 January 2021, accessed 6 January 2023 (in Italian)
  2. 1 2 Pietro Meloni-Satta, Effemeride Sarda: Col l'aggiunta d'alcuni cenni biografici (1877), p. 170: "Lo scultore Antonio Lo scultore Antonio Cano, frate laico dei Minori Conventuali, cade da un pontaggio della Cattedrale di Nuoro, in costruzione, e dopo alcune ore cessa di vivere."
  3. 1 2 Giuseppe Dessì, Scoperta della Sardegna: antologia di testi di autori italiani e stranieri (Milan: Edizioni Il Polifilo, 1965), p. 320 (in Italian): "Quest'architetto era un monaco francescano per nome frà Antonio Cano, il quale credeva d'aver studiato in Roma l'architettura ..."
  4. ↑ Alberto Ferrero della Marmora, Itinéraire de l'ile de Sardaigne: pour faire suite au Voyage en cette contrée, Volume 2, Volume 149 (Frères Bocca, 1860), pp. 162–163 (in French)
  5. 1 2 Studi Sardi: archeologia e storia dell’arte, Vol. 27 (Gallizzi for University of Cagliari, 1986), p. 400: "Come dimostra l'opera del sassarese fra Antonio Cano (c. 1778-1840), eclettico conventuale, la cui attività di scultore e architetto (si professò anche archeologo, pittore e decoratore) appare oggi, specie nelle architetture, straordinariamente intensa, ma spesso ingiustamente demolitoria nella «forte carica di ostilità nei confronti del retaggio gotico».”
  6. ↑ Ireneo Bellotta, I santi patroni d'Italia (Rome: Newton Compton, 1988), p. 198 (in Italian)
  7. ↑ Gianmichele Lisai, Antonio Maccioni, Guida curiosa ai luoghi insoliti della Sardegna (Newton Compton Editori, 14 November 2019), p. 47 (in Italian): "Antonio Cano, morto improvvisamente nel 1840 in seguito alla caduta da un'impalcatura nel corso dei lavori della cattedrale di Nuoro."
  8. ↑ J. W. Tyndale, The Island of Sardinia, Including Pictures of the Manners and Customs of the Sardinians, and Notes on the Antiquities and Modern Objects of Interest in the Island (London: Richard Bentley, 1849), pp. 197–198
  9. ↑ "Cattedrale, anniversario della Dedicazione", diocesidinuoro.it, 2 July 2019, accessed 6 January 2023 (in Italian)
  10. ↑ Alberto Ferrero della Marmora, Itinéraire de l'ile de Sardaigne, Volume 1 (Frères Bocca, 1860), p. 505 (in French): "Fra Antonio Cano… n’a été que le destructeur d'un nombre considérables d'anciennes basiliques… pour les remplacer par des églises de sa façon… de style assez médiocre."
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