cathedral Basilica of St. Cyriacus

About

Perched atop the hill once occupied by the acropolis of the ancient Greek city, the Cathedral Basilica of St. Cyriacus commands a sweeping view over Ancona and its Adriatic gulf. As the seat of the Archbishop of Ancona, it serves both as a functioning centre of diocesan life and as a living monument to layer upon layer of sacred occupation. The building's most arresting feature is the harmony it achieves between seemingly contrasting architectural vocabularies: Romanesque solidity, Byzantine spatial logic, and Gothic ornament are woven together without internal contradiction.

The exterior is clad in pale stone quarried from nearby Mount Conero, lending the cathedral a cool luminosity. Decorative Lombard banding runs across all exterior surfaces, while the façade is preceded by a broad staircase and crowned by a thirteenth-century portal attributed to Giorgio da Como. Four columns sustain a round arch, with the two front columns resting on lions carved in Veronese red marble, one grappling a basilisk, the other gripping a ram. Above the portal an oculus in a Romanesque frame is flanked by slender mullioned windows. The dome, raised over the crossing in the thirteenth century and attributed to Margaritone d'Arezzo, is among the oldest of its kind in Italy: an ogival form set on a twelve-sided drum, later given a copper covering in the sixteenth century.

Inside, the Greek-cross plan reveals a nave and side aisles formed by re-used columns of Roman antiquity bearing Byzantine capitals. Pendentives beneath the dome carry Byzantine-inflected figures of angels in prayer. The Chapel of the Crucifix in the south transept preserves twelfth-century sgraffito tiles of 1189, whose intricate imagery, prophets, evangelists, phoenixes, peacocks, and gryphons, speaks to the richness of the medieval decorative imagination. Beneath the northern transept's Madonna Chapel, a crypt holds the relics of Saint Cyriacus alongside those of Saints Liberius, Marcellinus, and Palatia.

History

A Greek Temple stood on this headland as early as the fourth century BC, and a Christian basilica rose over its foundations in the sixth century. The church gained cathedral status between the tenth and eleventh centuries, then was rebuilt on a Greek-cross plan between the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, when its entrance was turned to face the port. Luigi Vanvitelli added the Madonna Chapel's niche in 1739 to house a venerated seventeenth-century image of the Virgin, and Giuseppe Sacconi's 1883 restoration stripped away later ornament to recover the building's medieval character. The cathedral was damaged in both World Wars and restored after each; Pope Pius XI raised it to the rank of basilica minor in 1926.

Significance

The crypt beneath the Madonna Chapel holds the relics of Saint Cyriacus together with those of Saints Liberius, Marcellinus, and Palatia, anchoring the cathedral as a site of veneration as well as episcopal governance. Its dome, raised over the crossing in the thirteenth century, is among the earliest in Italy built over a church crossing rather than a separate baptistery, a distinction it shares with the basilica of Sant'Antonio in Padua and St. Mark's in Venice. Renaissance painters including Vittore Carpaccio and Giovanni Bellini set the cathedral's silhouette into their canvases, and it appears again in the Vatican's Gallery of Maps.

Architecture

Romanesque-Byzantine-Gothic religious architecture; Greek-cross plan with a 13th-century dome on a twelve-sided drum