Sanmicheli's design and direction Around 1527, having finished his stay in
Rome and before being commissioned to build important fortifications for the
Venetian Republic,
Michele Sanmicheli resided in
Verona with his cousin Paolo, with whom he collaborated on numerous construction sites. her father-in-law and finally, in 1528, her 18-year-old son Niccolò, with whom the line of descent of the Raimondi-Pellegrini family was permanently interrupted. The idea of building a chapel, rather than a simpler tomb, probably came to her after she learned of the construction of the Emilei chapel at the church of
San Michele in Isola, while the decision to have such a monumental work erected certainly contributed to the fact that it took on the significance of wanting to hand down to posterity the importance of the family, which was destined to disappear. The design of the work was entrusted to Sanmicheli, who created a space endowed with a great harmony of parts and a clear distribution of light, with an architecture reminiscent of ancient buildings, particularly the
Pantheon in Rome,
Porta Borsari and the
Gavi Arch in Verona. Construction began between the second half of 1528, after Niccolò's death, and October 15, 1529, the date of one of Margherita Pellegrini's wills, in which it is confirmed that work had already begun.
Controversy and completion by the Marastoni Initially Sanmicheli personally directed the work, but in 1534 he had to abandon it to go to
Venice for further assignments, so his cousin Paolo took over the direction of the building site. Disagreeing over some contractual issues, on July 8, 1538 Margherita obtained from the
podestà of Verona the cancellation of the contract and compensation for damages. From then on, the architect and his collaborators no longer worked on the building. The countess's dislike of Paolo Sanmicheli's management of the building site was due to her eagerness to see the chapel completed, given her precarious health condition: seeing that the work was proceeding very slowly caused her anxiety and concern. In addition, among the reasons that led to the dismissal of the Sanmicheli cousins was probably the high cost of the work, which was characterized (like Michele's other early works) by a rich and articulate decorative apparatus, combining elements and themes from Verona's Roman monuments with the proportions and modules of
Renaissance architecture.
Giuliari's restoration work After two centuries of neglect, in 1793, Abbot Giuseppe Luigi Pellegrini became interested in the work and decided to restore it with the approval of his brother Carlo Pellegrini, marshal of the
Austrian Empire. The work, completed in 1795, thus went on to re-establish a decorative and stylistic continuity between the first and second orders, where the work of the Marastoni had impoverished the Sanmichelian architecture, even if it meant designing and executing a rather invasive intervention. After years of poor maintenance that had resulted in a certain level of deterioration inside the aristocratic chapel, at the urging of the owners, represented by engineer Ottorino Pellegrini, in 1925 action was taken with the restoration of the dome and lantern: the roofing was redone, the window frames and decorations of the cupola were restored, and the stained glass windows of the lantern were replaced. The construction site was supervised by the Royal Superintendence of
Monuments of Verona, headed by engineer Alessandro Da Lisca. In the decades following
World War II, the roof and the stained glass windows were repaired on several occasions: in the early 1960s, when the Superintendence contributed an expenditure of 1,200,000
liras; in 1971, with Superintendent Piero Gazzola overseeing the work of re-roofing, with replacement of purlins, planking and brick tiles, for an amount of about 600,000 liras; finally between 1987 and 1993, when with a state grant of 150,000,000 liras, the restoration of the roof (consolidation of the wooden ribs, restoration of the
brick eave cornice and insertion of eaves channels) and the lantern (lead lining of the canopy and recomposition and plumbing of the windows) continued. Considerable conservation work finally took place between 1987 and 2000, supervised by the Superintendence official Pietro Maria Cevese. During the work, efforts were made to solve problems related to rising damp in the perimeter walls of the structure, as well as water infiltration from the glass windows of the
drum. The opportunity was taken to carry out work to clean the stone surfaces of the chapel and vestibule, as well as to restore the plaster, stucco and coloring; in particular, the original colors of the dome were recovered, with the reappearance of the blue background in the
coffers. == Description ==