Baptistery and Baptismal font

Church of Santa Maria Annunciata: liturgical notes

The Cathedral takes its name from the Episcopal "cathedra". For Vicenza the first bishop known to us was Oronzio, who participated in 589-591 AD in the Council of Marano. It is to be supposed however that a bishop in whose diocese there existed two important basilicas could not leave the city without entrusting them to someone responsible to officiate over them; this indicates the presence of a regularly constituted ecclesiastical body at least since the 4th century, and presupposes that the city had been the Episcopal seat for a long time.
In origin the definition of a church as a cathedral also and of necessity depended on the presence of a baptistery, a place specially built where the Bishop administered the sacrament of Baptism, a rite which in the early times of Christianity was his exclusive responsibility. For about the whole of the High Middle Ages in the city the Cathedral was the "ecclesia baptismalis", and the point of reference for all rural churches too. The celebration of Baptism, sustained by a long period of preparation intensified and made solemn throughout the forty days preceding admission to the sacrament, was followed by the short rite of Confirmation and then Communion. The two liturgical poles were therefore the baptistery and the church altar, separate places which allowed the adult neophyte to receive Catechesis and Baptism in the first and then, in procession, to be received in the ecclesia for the celebration of the Eucharist. Only with the lowering of the age for Baptism to children, who could not however follow the catechesis, did the need for the baptistery as a separate place decline and the baptismal font become part of the basilica, placed to the side of the central nave. For the original Cathedral of Vicenza it cannot be said that there was a building with this function. Only in 1264 do the documents give news of a town project for a baptistery, and for building it the Commune of Vicenza, with the consent of the bishop, decreed that the area next to the Cathedral would be chosen to build it. The project was born in the period immediately after the end of the tyranny of Ezzelino III da Romano (1259) in the wake of the fervour inspired by this newly-won freedom. Under the guide of the Dominican Bartolomeo, also known as da Breganze, the city was reborn both from a building and religious point of view, and in the same year the foundations were laid for another very important Christian church: the Church of Santa Corona. The Baptistery however was not built, if only because of Vicenza's sudden loss of freedom, as it now fell at the end of the 13th century under the dominion of the Paduan Carraresi family.
It seems that the Vicenza citizens compensated for their lack of a baptistery by using a Longobard stone drinking-trough ("lavellum") in place of a baptismal font, with one side against a well. It was placed in the Chapel of St John the Baptist and served as a font at least until the 19th century. It was then deemed indecorous, and in 1824 was replaced by a new font, the work of the stonemason Sguarise brothers after the design of the Bassano-born Antonio Bernati. On the top there is a little statue of the Baptist by Girolamo Albanese (17th century). Following this, the Baptistery was shifted from the Chapel of St John the Baptist to that of Santa Giustina or Da Schio and here the new work finally came to rest together with its original font.

By Michela Fantin (Arts Office of the Diocese of Vicenza)