ARDARA AND SANT’ ANTIOCO DI BISARCIO
EVERY visitor will have his own favourites among the Romanesque churches of northern Sardinia. The largest is San Gavino of Porto Torres, with apses at either end; more charming are the black and cream striped San Pietro di Simbános on an isolated ridge inland from Castelsardo and its pink neighbour at Terqu. But to sense the resilience of the twelfth-century church we can do no better than visit the sequence of five churches of the period on a forty-kilometre stretch of the main road from Sassari to Olbia.
The best known is the controversially restored abbey of La Trinità di Saccargia, founded in 1116, with an assertive striped church and a soaring campanile. The apse was frescoed in the thirteenth-century, with Christ in Majesty above the Virgin and the apostles and, below, Passion scenes above fictive hangings, the only such scheme to survive on the island. A couple of kilometres east, abandoned on a rise between the modern road and a power station, is San Michele di Salvènero, also radically restored. This was built in 1110–30 for the Vallom-brosan Order – which of course had strong Tuscan connections – and altered a century later. The apse is particularly successful, and there are numerous parallels in design with the church’s larger neighbour.
La Trinità di Saccargia.
Some ten kilometres further on is Ardara. The black church of Santa Maria del Regno lies on a terrace east of the town. External detail is pared down to the point of severity. But the interior is remarkable. The entire altar wall of the wide nave is filled by a glowing retable with scenes from the life of the Virgin by a later Quattrocento master, possibly Martin Torner from Majorca. The predella, however, is from a different world. The central panel, Christ set against a landscape, bears a cartellino with the date 1515 and signature of Giovanni Moru, who must have known northern Italian pictures of the previous generation. On the left wall is a damaged dossal of the Passion by a Pisan of the late Trecento.
Sant’Antioco di Bisarcio is some six kilometres east, easily visible from the road: a great church with a campanile and the remains of associated buildings on a platform above the valley floor. Bisarcio was the seat of a bishopric until 1503. The original church, of before 1090, was destroyed by fire and reconstructed after 1150 by builders aware of developments at Santa Giusta (see no. 98). A generation later, after 1170, an extension on two floors was set against the entrance front; part of this was lost when the north-west corner collapsed in the fifteenth century, but the elaborate decoration of what survives implies an understanding of French work. There are worn carvings of animals and, above the left door, of prophets; much of the detail is classical and acanthus plentiful. The entrance opens to a narthex, above which were three rooms reached by a narrow stair and, originally, by a passage from the episcopal palace. The first, with a bench and a chimney, was the chapter house, and beside this was the bishop’s chapel, its altar below the central window of the original façade. The church itself is admirably coherent, the uniform columns with capitals of Corinthian derivation, with heads or stylized flowers between the volutes. The exterior of the apse, splendidly placed above a low cliff, is beautifully handled. So is the campanile, with generous angle shafts and narrower central ones that are linked by pairs of twin arcades.
Sant’Antioco is so perfect in its way that it may seem pointless to go on to the less ambitious Nostra Signora di Castro on an isolated rise east of Oschiri. But this too has a rare charm, not least on a morning when the buildings emerge from swirling mist and you rouse the resident cats. The controlled façade, with plain pilasters and blind arcades defining the roof line, might stand as a microcosm of the Sardinian Romanesque.
Sant’Antioco di Bisarcio.
