Antonio Cano

Frà Antonio Cano (1779–1840) was a sculptor, architect, and lay friar of the Kingdom of Sardinia.

He is best known as the architect of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Snows at Nuoro, but also designed churches in Oristano.

Early life Born in 1779 at Sassari, on the island of Sardinia, Cano became a sculptor and a lay friar of the Order of Friars Minor Conventual. He studied architecture in Rome at the Accademia di San Luca, and trained as a sculptor as a pupil of Antonio Canova.

Cano also claimed to be a painter and an archaeologist.

By 1836, the cathedral church of the Diocese of Nuoro in Sardinia was judged too small, and Giovanni Maria Bua, Archbishop of Oristano, ordered it to be pulled down, to make way for the projected new cathedral dedicated to Our Lady of the Snows. The work of designing this was entrusted to Cano. and died within hours. The building was largely complete by 1853 and was consecrated on 3 July 1873.

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". 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.