Architecture in Sardinia from the 5th to the 16th Centuries 493
insubordination to the local authority of the viceroy. In the seventeenth cen-
tury, the demands of the nobility, clergy, and the citizens of Sardinia hardly ever
found an audience in the court in Madrid, which condemned the Sardinian
economy to a level of bare subsistence. Relegated to the political and economic
periphery, the island participated only passively in the great cultural events of
the period, though it emerged from an exclusive dependence on Iberia and de-
veloped stronger artistic ties to the Italian mainland, particularly to Campania,
Rome, and Liguria, by virtue of their geographic proximity.
In the realm of architecture, the period between the sixteenth and the
seventeenth centuries initially saw the development of an autochthonous
language built on Catalan Gothic foundations. Onto this, architects later
grafted Renaissance forms and canons drawn from Iberian and Spanish Late
Mannerism, and finally the achievements of the Baroque, again mediated by
both the Iberian and the Italian variant. These syntheses generated distinctly
eclectic, aesthetic and technical solutions.
Into the first category of monuments falls San Francesco in Alghero (1480–
1598). Isabelline decorative and architectonic elements characterized its origi-
nal fifteenth-century structure, which was expanded in the late Cinquecento
with forms distinguished by their adherence to classicist modes (Fig. 18.12). The
church of San Giorgio in Perfugas, erected in the first quarter of the sixteenth
centuries, as well as the parish churches of Sant’Andrea in Sedini (1527), and
Santa Giulia in Padria (before 1520), are of the Catalan Gothic type. Straddling
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the reorganization of the dioceses led to
the remodeling of certain cathedrals. The first was the Romanesque San Nicola
in Sassari, rebuilt between 1480 and 1518 with a cross-vaulted nave (a tradi-
tionally Catalan Gothic technique) and a dome resting on pendentive brack-
eting—one of the first adaptations of Renaissance models. In the church of
San Pietro di Silki in Sassari, the opening of the Vergine delle Grazie chapel on
the right side of the nave (1472–1478) followed the dictates of a spatiality and
decorative practice still in use by workers trained in the Catalan Gothic style,
as was also the case in the chapel of Nostra Signora degli Angeli (last quarter
of the sixteenth century) and the Franciscan church of Santa Maria di Betlem.
The Sardinian acceptance of innovations from abroad, always mediated by
the Iberian use thereof, is evident in the construction of certain churches in
both the north and south, which seem to have appropriated the Plateresque
language of architectural developments in Spain. The need for an austere solu-
tion for wall ornament kept San Francesco in Iglesias within the tradition of
Catalan Gothic architecture. Yet, a group of parish churches, built in the sec-
ond half of the sixteenth century (San Giorgio in Pozzomaggiore, Santa Chiara
in Cossoine, Sant’Andrea in Giave, Santa Vittoria in Thiesi), embraced novel