Why go
Walk the nave with a few anchors in mind instead of trying to identify every painting. The cupola over Saint Dominic’s chapel, the Filippino Lippi panel and the choir reveal different periods and kinds of art within the same church.
The full story
Carlo Francesco Dotti renewed the basilica’s interior in the eighteenth century, giving the nave its Baroque proportions and Ionic columns. Paintings in the lunettes above them recount episodes in the church’s history. The side chapels hold works accumulated across a much longer span, so the interior is less uniform than the nave first appears. Saint Dominic’s chapel, designed by Floriano Ambrosini in place of an earlier Gothic chapel, houses the Arca beneath a cupola. Guido Reni painted the Glory of Saint Dominic in the cupola in the early seventeenth century. Elsewhere, the chapel of Saint Catherine Virgin and Martyr holds Filippino Lippi’s Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine, one of his late works. The choir’s inlaid wooden stalls provide another shift in material and purpose. Moving between these anchors shows how burial, worship and artistic patronage shaped the same space over time. The elaborate monument should not eclipse the rest of the church.