The Cathedral of Cremona: Guide

A complete guide to the Cathedral of Cremona, in a handy format to accompany the visitor in the discovery of one of the most important churches in Lombardy.

Santa Maria Assunta in Cremona, among the great Romanesque cathedrals of the Po Valley in northern Italy, is not only one of the most renowned for its artwork, but also one in which the slow stratification of time is most evident. The names of the greatest masters, in the first person or in the medieval sense of workshop, follow one another in quick succession: Wiligelmo, Antelami, the excellent Marco Romano, the Campionesi, enrich the façade with grandiose and superb sculptures, aristocratic and earthy. In the interior, the cycle of frescoes in the main nave with the Stories from the Life of the Virgin and Christ shows, as nowhere else, the symptoms of the pressing renewal taking place in early 16th century Italian painting, from the faultless classicism of Boccaccio Boccaccino to the eccentric Altobello Melone and Gianfrancesco Bembo, the Brescian Romanino and the Friulian Pordenone, who is given the grand finale with the resounding Crucifixion on the counter façade. Alongside these two poles, the façade and the nave, there are masterpieces from all centuries: paintings, sculptures, and goldsmithing, including frescoes and canvases by the Campi, the greatest exponents of the 16th-century Cremonese school of painting.

Francesco Frangi is full Professor of Modern Art History and Museology at the University of Pavia (Cremona campus). He is one of the leading experts on 16th- and 17th-century Lombardy. Marco Tanzi is full Professor of History of Modern Art at the University of Salento. He mainly deals with figurative culture in northern Italy from the 15th to the 17th century, with wandering artists along routes that are by no means canonical in the artistic geography of the peninsula and, more recently, with the Renaissance in the Terra d'Otranto.