Description
The Church of Santa Sofia, on Contrà Altinate in Padua, is one of the finest examples of Venetian Romanesque: a hall of stone and brick, austere and harmonious, that seems to have come straight out of the Middle Ages.
The façade faces west and leans slightly to the north: the foundations were already giving way while it was being built. Niches, blind arches and small arches bring it to life, and high up stands out a large fourteenth-century oculus.
The real highlight, though, is round the back. The apse is the oldest part, a play of blind arches and a gallery in stone and terracotta converging on the great central niche. Some date it to the tenth century, others even earlier.
Above one of its vaults rises the Romanesque-Gothic bell tower of 1296. Inside, piers and columns carry a row of arches that runs all the way to the apse; many of the columns and capitals are reused Roman and Byzantine pieces.
Along the walls, frescoes from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries come to light, some of them from Giotto's school. In the apse niche there is an enthroned Virgin with female saints, and above the apse hangs a fifteenth-century wooden crucifix.
In the left aisle, stop for the Pietà by Egidio da Wiener Neustadt, a late Gothic sculpture from around 1430. A little further on, the holy water stoup is carved from an unfinished Roman capital of the imperial age.
Tradition has it that the church was founded by Saint Prosdocimus on the ruins of a temple of Apollo. The first document dates from 1123, when Bishop Sinibaldo urged on works that had been going on for decades, slowed down by the earthquake of 1117 among other things.
It was here, in 1448, that a seventeen-year-old Andrea Mantegna signed his first independent work: the high altarpiece, a Madonna with saints that was lost in the seventeenth century.
In the 1950s a radical restoration gave the church back its original look, sacrificing most of its Mannerist and Baroque furnishings. And here is a detail for the curious: in the baptismal font, which came from nearby Santa Caterina, Livia and Gianvincenzo, children of Galileo Galilei, were baptised.
The façade faces west and leans slightly to the north: the foundations were already giving way while it was being built. Niches, blind arches and small arches bring it to life, and high up stands out a large fourteenth-century oculus.
The real highlight, though, is round the back. The apse is the oldest part, a play of blind arches and a gallery in stone and terracotta converging on the great central niche. Some date it to the tenth century, others even earlier.
Above one of its vaults rises the Romanesque-Gothic bell tower of 1296. Inside, piers and columns carry a row of arches that runs all the way to the apse; many of the columns and capitals are reused Roman and Byzantine pieces.
Along the walls, frescoes from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries come to light, some of them from Giotto's school. In the apse niche there is an enthroned Virgin with female saints, and above the apse hangs a fifteenth-century wooden crucifix.
In the left aisle, stop for the Pietà by Egidio da Wiener Neustadt, a late Gothic sculpture from around 1430. A little further on, the holy water stoup is carved from an unfinished Roman capital of the imperial age.
Tradition has it that the church was founded by Saint Prosdocimus on the ruins of a temple of Apollo. The first document dates from 1123, when Bishop Sinibaldo urged on works that had been going on for decades, slowed down by the earthquake of 1117 among other things.
It was here, in 1448, that a seventeen-year-old Andrea Mantegna signed his first independent work: the high altarpiece, a Madonna with saints that was lost in the seventeenth century.
In the 1950s a radical restoration gave the church back its original look, sacrificing most of its Mannerist and Baroque furnishings. And here is a detail for the curious: in the baptismal font, which came from nearby Santa Caterina, Livia and Gianvincenzo, children of Galileo Galilei, were baptised.