Discover Church of San Nicolò

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.