Church of San Nicolo Historical Timeline

Origins

Begun around 1231 and built through the fourteenth century by the Dominicans, reportedly with backing from Pope Benedict XI, a Treviso man.

Turning points

Tomaso da Modena worked here in the early 1350s, painting saints onto the nave columns and, in the adjoining convent, the chapter house cycle that is his masterpiece.

Influential people

The forty Dominicans of 1352 are painted at their desks reading, writing and copying -- individualised portraits of working scholars rather than generic saints, which was a genuinely new thing to do.

Cultural evolution

Among them, Cardinal Hugh of Provence is shown wearing rivet spectacles. Painted in 1352, roughly seventy years after eyeglasses were invented in Italy, it is the earliest surviving depiction of them known.

Present-day significance

The church escaped the worst of the 1944 bombing that levelled much of the centre, so what is here is original rather than reconstructed -- unusual in Treviso.