EN
In over less than a century, namely between the Northern War (1700) and Napoleon’s Campaign (1812), thirty-five Uniate and Catholic churches were raised in Witebsk located in the north-eastern borderlands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As many as 12 of them had a nave and two aisles. None, even larger building centres in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, could boast of a similar dynamics. To many Russians visiting Witebsk in the 19 th and 20 th c., sacral Baroque architecture (until its final extinction in the era of Stalin and Khrushchev) represented an attribute of an alien culture and national identity, designating the limits of the Latin, Catholic, and Polish world. Following the monographs on the Greek-Catholic Cathedral of St Josaphat, the Jesuit Church, and the Parish Church of the Holy Trinity, the author presents the history of the Bernardine Church of St Anthony, which until 1958 stood by the town hall in the eastern frontage of the market. The author of the design of the church (1742-49), monastery (1749-55), and the high altar (1749-53), was the Warsaw-born architect Józef Fontana (1716-ca.1772), who represented a classicizing tendency of the late Baroque inspired by the art of 17 th -c.- Rome as well as of Warsaw.