Church of San Nicolo Site Features

San Nicolò is a Dominican preaching church, which means one enormous unobstructed volume designed to hold a crowd within earshot of a pulpit. It is built of brick, with a high timber roof and tall lancet windows, and its scale is startling for a provincial city.

The nave columns are the point. Tomaso da Modena and his circle painted saints directly onto the round brick piers, so the figures curve away from you as you walk and the columns read as inhabited rather than structural.

The apse is unusually tall and light, and the monumental Onigo tomb on the north wall carries frescoes attributed to Lorenzo Lotto.

Next door, the Seminary chapter house is a plain rectangular room whose entire wall surface is given to Tomaso's forty scholars, each in a wooden study carrel.

The forty Dominicans

Tomaso da Modena's 1352 chapter house cycle in the Seminary, each friar individually characterised at his desk.

The first eyeglasses

Cardinal Hugh of Provence, painted wearing rivet spectacles -- the earliest known image of them anywhere.

The painted columns

Saints frescoed onto the round brick piers of the nave, curving around them.

The Onigo monument

A monumental wall tomb with frescoes attributed to Lorenzo Lotto.

The church stands near the western edge of the walled centre, a little apart from the main circuit of streets, which is much of why it stays so quiet. The Seminary and its chapter house adjoin it on the south side.