Antonio Cano

[2] He studied architecture in Rome[3] at the Accademia di San Luca, and trained as a sculptor as a pupil of Antonio Canova.

[1] An example of such work is a statue of the Immaculate Conception he made for the church of Santa Maria di Betlem (St Mary of Bethlehem) in his home-town of Sassari.

[2] An English commentator in 1849 noted that Cano had "shown considerable taste and knowledge in the style and proportions" of his neoclassical cathedral.

[9] After the death of Cano, Count Alberto della Marmora, Governor-General of Sardinia, accused him of being a mediocre architect who had destroyed "a considerable number of former basilicas".

[10] A twentieth-century assessment similarly was that while his activity as an architect was extraordinarily intense, it was often unjustly destructive, in its hostility towards the Gothic heritage.