St Ann’s Church was built between 1914 and 1917 by French-Canadian millworkers in the modern French Renaissance style. BELOW, TOP: all kinds of
lighting, representing 57,400 watts of electricity, illuminate St Ann’s. BELOW, BOTTOM: 475 images of parishioners are immortalized in the frescoes.
D
riving past the St. Ann Arts and Cultural Center in Woonsocket, you’d be excused if you
wrote it off as just another church. Maybe a glimpse of its glittering stained glass or its towering
height could make you pause for a moment before continuing your day. Like so many other people,
you would be passing by a building overflowing with art and history.
St. Ann’s Church was originally constructed
in 1890 as an uninspired brick building that
housed both the church and a school. It served
the growing working-class French-Canadian
community in Woonsocket, which eventually
comprised 85 percent of the town’s popula-
tion. As the number of parishioners increased,
so too did the demands on the church. In 1914,
construction began on a bigger and better St.
Ann’s. It was estimated to cost $150,000, an
enormous sum of money at the time.
“And the parishioners literally donate nick-
els and dimes, and that’s how this place gets
built,” says Joe Petrucci, a tour guide at St.
Ann’s Arts and Cultural Center.
With a ceiling sixty-five feet high, enormous
bell towers and a sprawling nave, the church
was a massive structure when it opened for
its first mass in 1918.
“This was the hub of the community. All
around here were tenements, and people
72 RHODE ISLAND MONTHLY l
MARCH 2020
would flock to the church,” says Petrucci. “The
church provides entertainment and socializa-
tion, as well as religious service. Next door,
they built St. Ann’s Gymnasium. It had a
vaudevillian theater with 750 seats, workout
room, running track and bowling lanes. It had
a library with 1,000 books, all in French.
Everything was all brand new, and it became
part of the community.”
But for all its bulk and grandeur, the church
was curiously lacking in ornamentation. The
windows were all plain glass and the walls
were unremarkable gray.
“For the thirty-fifth anniversary of the
founding of the church, they want stained
glass. They don’t want to fool around. They
want French stained glass — it’s a French com-
munity,” says Petrucci.
Father Morin, the church’s leader at the time,
commissioned windows from Lorin studio,
which had produced windows for Chartres
Cathedral, Notre Dame and St. Patrick’s
Cathedral in New York. A decade later, to
commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the
church, Father Morin commissioned an artist
to further enliven the interior. In his research,
he stumbled upon the work of Guido Nincheri,
dubbed by some of his contemporaries as the
“Michelangelo of Canada.”
Born in Italy in 1885, Nincheri studied art
in Florence for twelve years, honing his craft
and gaining an appreciation for the work of
classic Renaissance artists. In 1914, during the
midst of World War I, Nincheri emigrated to
Canada and began contributing a massive vol-
ume of work to churches in Quebec and New
England. He was even knighted by the papa-
cy and Canadian and Italian governments for
his extraordinary quality and quantity of work.
In the stucco walls of St. Ann’s, Nincheri
saw a blank canvas — an opportunity to cre-
ate his own masterpiece in fresco.