Basilica di Sant’Anastasia Historical Timeline

The largest church in Verona took the better part of two centuries to build and was consecrated 181 years after work started. The facade was never finished, which is the first thing anyone notices and the least interesting fact about it.

Chronology

1. 1260 Bishop Manfredo Roberti grants the Dominicans land for a church and convent. A preaching order needed room for crowds rather than monastic seclusion, and the scale of what follows comes directly from that.
2. 1290 Major construction begins. Bishop Pietro I della Scala donates further land in 1292 — Scaliger patronage is what makes a building of this size possible.
3. 1319 Guglielmo da Castelbarco’s will, dated 13 August, orders his burial here and leaves 1,000 lire to the work. He dies the following year, by which time the apses and transept are complete.
4. 1433–1438 Pisanello paints Saint George and the Princess in the Pellegrini chapel — one of the few surviving works by the painter who defined late Gothic courtly art. It sits high and awkwardly, because it was made for a position above an arch rather than for comfortable viewing.
5. 1435 Michele da Firenze completes twenty-four terracotta reliefs for the same chapel.
6. 1462 Pietro da Porlezza begins the floor on 12 August — the geometric pavement of red, white and grey stone that runs the length of the building and is original work rather than a later refit.
7. 1471 Solemn consecration by Cardinal Giovanni Michiel on 22 October, 181 years after building began.
8. 1498 The rose window and side windows are glazed. The church has been in use for decades by this point; glazing is among the last things done, not the first.
9. 1591 Paolo Orefice carves the telamone bearing the holy water basin — one of the two crouching figures at the entrance, i gobbi, which remain the most photographed thing in the building.
10. 1807 Napoleon suppresses the Dominicans on 19 March. The convent goes; the church survives because a parish still needed it.
11. 1878–1881 An intensive restoration, followed by further campaigns through the 1970s and a comprehensive one completed in 2010.

Why it looks the way it does

This is Italian Gothic rather than the northern kind: wide, tall and calm, with broad bays and no flying buttresses. Italian builders solved the same structural problem with thicker walls, wider spacing and iron tie-rods across the arches — the bars visible overhead are structural, not later additions.

Twelve monolithic columns of Verona marble divide the naves, polished rather than carved. The city had this stone in quantity and used it where others would have used painted plaster: here the colour is the decoration.

Because the marble facing was never applied to the front, the brick structure it was meant to hide is visible, along with the beginnings of the cladding at the base. It is a section drawing of how an Italian Gothic facade was actually assembled.