Basilica di Sant’Andrea: A Romanesque-Gothic Basilica in Vercelli
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- Holy Roman Empire
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- Religious
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- Basilica
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History
Basilica di Sant’Andrea is a Roman Catholic church in Vercelli, Italy, founded by Cardinal Guala Bicchieri in 1219 and completed in 1227. It is an early Italian example of Gothic architecture and a major work of the Romanesque-Gothic transition. Dedicated to the Apostle Andrew, it has held the status of a minor basilica since time immemorial and belongs to the Archdiocese of Vercelli.
Foundation and Saint-Victor Canons
The foundation stone was laid on 19 February 1219 in the presence of Bishop Ugone. Guala Bicchieri, a thirteenth-century Italian cardinal and papal legate, returned from England with perpetual revenues from Saint Andrew’s Abbey at Chesterton near Cambridge, granted by King Henry III. These resources allowed him to bring canons from the Congregation of Saint-Victor in Paris to Vercelli and establish the basilica and its abbey.
The new religious community was first entrusted to regular canons of Saint-Victor. The Paris-educated theologian Thomas Gallus, also known as Thomas of Saint-Victor, probably helped introduce the Gothic innovations of the Γle-de-France to the Vercelli area. The abbey also included a hospital for pilgrims, begun in 1224 to serve travellers on the Via Francigena, the medieval route linking northern Europe with Rome.
Bicchieri expanded the abbey’s possessions through donations and secured privileges from Pope Honorius III and Emperor Frederick II. Frederick’s protection diploma dates from 1226. The cardinal died in Rome in 1227, the same year in which construction of the basilica was completed.
Architectural Formation and Monastic Change
The architect who designed the church and directed its construction is unknown. Thomas Gallus may have taken an active part because of his knowledge of French Gothic, while Giulio Carlo Argan proposed Benedetto Antelami as a possible architect. The building reflects the combined work of architects familiar with Cistercian models, a restrained Gothic tradition associated with monastic architecture, and builders connected with Lombard-Emilian Romanesque traditions.
The original abbey complex has retained much of its appearance. The regular canons of Saint-Victor were later replaced by Lateran regular canons, and the monastery cloister was rebuilt during the sixteenth century. A detached bell tower was added to the right of the church at the beginning of the fifteenth century.
Damage, Restoration, and Later Use
Age and military events damaged the complex, including the Spanish siege of Vercelli in 1617. A restoration commission appointed Carlo Emanuele Arborio Mella in 1818, and the work was completed in 1840. Further campaigns followed in 1927 and between 1955 and 1960. During the 1818-1840 restoration, the travelling case of Cardinal Guala Bicchieri was discovered in the complex. Known as the Scrinium, it is now preserved in the Turin City Museum of Ancient Art.
Between 1875 and 1881, the cloister housed a municipal lapidary museum established in honour of Luigi Bruzza, author of Ancient Vercelli Inscriptions. The museum was dismantled in 1924, and its collection was transferred to the Leone Museum. In 1987, the facade was consolidated following preparations by Giacomo Donato of the Polytechnic University of Turin. A precision survey by the architect Valter Vijno identified an incipient rotation of the two facade towers.
The sculptures in the central and left portal lunettes belong to the building period. The central scene represents the martyrdom of Saint Andrew at Patras, while the left relief shows Guala Bicchieri offering the church to the enthroned saint. Because its dedicatory inscription praises the dead cardinal, the left relief was probably made after Bicchieri’s death in 1227. The authorship is uncertain. The sculptures have been attributed to Benedetto Antelami, or more probably to followers from the construction site of the Baptistery of Parma.
Thomas Gallus was entrusted with the new abbey and established an important centre of theological reflection in Vercelli. His monument dates from about the middle of the fourteenth century. The wooden choir stalls were damaged in 1802 during the suppression of religious orders and restored in 1829 by the Vercelli cabinetmaker Ignazio Revelli. The portal connecting the cloister with the left nave was also restored in a later campaign.
Remains
Exterior Layout and Materials
The basilica has a Latin-cross plan, specifically a crux commissa, a T-shaped form in which the crossbar meets the top of the vertical shaft. Its exterior joins Lombard-Emilian Romanesque features with Cistercian Gothic innovations. Red brick or terracotta and white plaster contrast with green stone from Pralungo, pale calcarenite from Monferrato, and serpentine from Oria in Valsolda, producing the building’s characteristic polychromy.
The Facade
The narrow facade is placed between two towers, an arrangement described as unusual in northern Italy. It has a gabled profile, three strongly splayed Romanesque portals, two levels of small arcaded galleries, and a large rose window divided by twelve small columns. Two slender bundled pilasters frame the central portal and the rose window above it. The galleries extend between the towers and end below a triangular, classically inspired pediment crowned by an elegant aedicule.
A gallery of colonnettes with crochet capitals, capitals decorated with hooked foliage, runs around the exterior and continues the lower facade gallery. Above it, pairs of intersecting hanging arches rest on carved corbels bearing heads, fantastic animals, and vegetal motifs. Beneath the sloping roof, these details form a white band against the red brick.
The Portal Sculpture
Each portal has four orders of paired colonnettes and arches in contrasting colours, including red marble from Verona. The central lunette, the semicircular field above a doorway, shows Saint Andrew crucified on a rough cross. The proconsul of Achaea, Aegea, orders the execution, while a Christian woman and two worshippers bury the saint’s body. A floral archivolt, the decorated band following an arch, contains an angel carrying the saint’s soul to heaven, and a semi-Gothic inscription on the lintel identifies the scene.
The left lunette depicts Guala Bicchieri presenting the church to the enthroned Saint Andrew. Its lintel bears a dedicatory inscription beginning with Lux cleri patriaeque decus and praising the cardinal. The right lunette has a later decoration of radial colonnettes and trefoil arches that does not correspond to the original scheme.
The Towers and Transept Exterior
The two facade bell towers are built in stone nearly to the level of the pediment, then continue in brick and white-plastered sections. Their openings form a vertical sequence of single, double, and triple-arched windows. Red string courses carry hanging terracotta arches, while dark brick pyramidal cusps support an iron-and-copper rooster on one tower and a cross of Saint Andrew on the other.
The church’s crossing is marked externally by a tall octagonal tiburio, a raised tower over the crossing, with an octagonal bell tower above it and a pyramidal brick cusp. Similar white-and-red treatment appears here, including a gallery of slender columns, white-plastered sections, single- and double-arched windows, red string courses, a dark pyramidal summit, and pinnacles.
The outer ends of the transept arms and the apse have two superimposed galleries and aedicules near the pediment. The externally accessible right transept facade contains a rose window and three large, doubly splayed single-arched windows. The lower level of the opposite side is partly obscured by an adjoining cloister wing.
The Detached Bell Tower
The detached bell tower stands slightly obliquely to the right of the right transept. Built at the beginning of the fifteenth century, it rises 65 metres and is the tallest bell tower in Vercelli. Its form and colour treatment harmonize with the basilica.
Church Interior
Inside, pointed arches divide the three longitudinal naves. Each nave contains six bays, with the side aisles narrower and lower than the central nave. The central nave has rectangular bays, while the side aisles have square bays. Bundled piers consist of a central cylindrical element surrounded by eight colonnettes, whose members rise to meet the ribs of the Gothic cross vaults.
The interior is relatively austere, with red pointed arches and structural members set against largely undecorated white walls. The five-bay transept has the same width and height as the central nave. At its crossing, four pendentives, curved triangular supports transferring the load of the tower above, carry the high tiburio.
The Crossing and Apse
The pendentives and the conical transition elements of the tiburio contain colonnettes set on figurative stone corbels. Sculptures from the Antelami school represent the traditional symbols of the four Evangelists: the human or angelic figure for Matthew, the lion for Mark, the ox for Luke, and the eagle for John. Above them are frescoes with fan and spiral motifs, followed by blind arcades, three on each of the tiburio’s eight sides, and an eight-segmented domical vault.
The rectangular apse is characteristic of Cistercian Gothic architecture. Outside, it is flanked by polygonal apsidal projections belonging to four chapels that open from the transept arms. Each transept arm contains two apsidal chapels. Beyond the crossing are the presbytery and a large rectangular choir, lit by a rose window and three large single-arched windows.
The Thomas Gallus Monument
The funerary monument of Thomas Gallus stands in the last chapel on the right, opening toward the transept. Its mid-fourteenth-century sarcophagus has mutilated high-relief figures of the Virgin and Child, Thomas Gallus kneeling and presented to the Virgin by Saint Andrew, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.
Above the sarcophagus, a niche contains a Lombard-school fresco of Thomas Gallus seated in a chair and surrounded by angels playing instruments. The painter is conventionally called the Master of the Tomb of Thomas Gallus.
Choir, Crucifix, and Organ
The wooden choir stalls date from the early sixteenth century. They were made from 1511 by the Cremonese cabinetmaker Paolo Sacca, and twenty-five of his inlaid panels survive. The central choir seat bears an image of Saint Andrew, while the other panels show still lifes, liturgical objects, urban views, and the facade of Basilica di Sant’Andrea in one case.
A painted wooden crucifix, probably from the late fifteenth century and possibly made by an artist from Valsesia, stands in the first chapel of the left transept arm. In the counter-facade, a wooden choir loft holds a pipe organ built in 1839 by Luigi Maroni Biroldi. The instrument has fully mechanical action, a window console, two manuals, a 61-key Great Organ manual, a 56-key Echo manual, and a non-original 27-note pedalboard.
Monastery and Cloister
The monastery developed to the right of the basilica. Its surviving rooms include a chapter house with four central columns supporting the ribs of nine vault bays, and a cloister at the centre of the monastic complex.
The Sixteenth-Century Cloister
The cloister was rebuilt in the sixteenth century with round arches and cross vaults supported by reused original colonnettes. These are arranged in groups of four on a single base, and their crochet capitals correspond to the unified decorative treatment of the basilica’s exterior. Remnants of geometric and grotesque fresco decoration remain on the arch soffits.
Sixteenth-century terracotta cornices emphasize the arches opening onto the large courtyard, which contains a well. Before the rebuilding, the cloister corridors probably had sloping roofs supported by wooden trusses.
The Cloister Portal and Holy-Water Stoup
The restored portal joining the cloister to the left nave originally stood at the entrance to the chapter house. Its thirteenth-century lunette contains the Agnus Dei, or Lamb of God, surrounded by the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist.
To the right of the portal is a holy-water stoup. Its projecting basin rests on a corbel supporting two pairs of colonnettes and a trefoil arch. Above the basin, a relief shows vegetal motifs and a hand holding the cross of Christ. From the cloister, the left side of the basilica can be seen with its aisle oculi, flying buttresses, carved tuff frames, and the tiburio topped by the bell tower.
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