Church sights in Venice
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Basilica di San Marco
Luminous angels trumpet the way into San Marco in glittering mosaics above vast portals. Inside, the soaring stone structure still sets standards for razzle-dazzle, from the intricate geometry of 12th-century polychrome marble floors to 11th- to 15th-century mosaic domes glittering with millions of gilt-glass tesserae (tiles). This show-stopper took a brains trust of Mediterranean artisans almost 800 years and grand larceny to complete. Legend has it that Venetian merchants smuggled the corpse of St Mark out of Egypt in 828; the arrival of St Mark’s body in Venice is depicted in mosaics dating from 1270 on the left of the facade. Riots and fires thrice destroyed exterior …
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Chiesa dei SS Giovanni e Paolo
Who does brick Gothic best? When the Dominicans undertook the 100-year effort to build Zanipolo in 1333 to rival the Franciscans’ Chiesa diSanta MariaGloriosa dei Frari, the church stirred passions and partisanship more common to Serie A football than architecture. Both have red-brick facades with high-contrast detailing in white stone. But since Zanipolo’s facade remains unfinished, the Frari won a decisive early decision over Zanipolo with its soaring grace – and with Titian’s Assunta altarpiece front and centre, the Frari seemed impossible to surpass. Over the centuries, Zanipolo may have at least tied the score with the sheer scale and variety of its masterpie…
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I Frari (Chiesa di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari)
Like moths to an eternal flame, visitors are inexorably drawn to the front of this cavernous, dimly lit Gothic church by a small altarpiece that seems to come equipped with its own sunlight. This is Titian’s 1518 Assunta (aka Madonna of the Ascension ), capturing the split second the radiant Madonna reaches heavenward, her signature Titian-red robe in glorious disarray as she finds her footing on a cloud. Both inside and outside the painting, onlookers below gasp and point out the ascending Madonna to one another. As if this weren’t too much to handle already, the lofty brick Gothic I Frari (or Chiesa di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari) has other fascinating features: mi…
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Chiesa di San Francesco della Vigna
Designed and built by Jacopo Sansovino with a facade by a precocious Palladio in his first church commission, this enchanting Franciscan church is one of Venice’s most underrated attractions. The Madonna positively glows in Bellini’s 1507 Madonna and Saints in the Capella Santa just off the flower-carpeted cloister courtyard, while swimming angels and strutting birds steal the scene in Antonio da Negroponte’s c 1460–70 delightful Virgin Enthroned. Palladio and the Madonna are tough acts to follow, but father–son sculptors Pietro and Tullio Lombardo’s 15th-century marble reliefs of saints and the life of Christ, housed in the Cappella Giustiniani, in the north …
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Chiesa di San Zaccaria
When 15th-century Venetian Paris Hiltons showed more interest in sailors than saints, they might be sent for a stint at the convent adjoining Chiesa di San Zaccaria; Venice’s spoiled daughters passed their time in prayer here, with breaks for concerts and occasionally scandalous masked balls. The wealth showered on this church by their grateful (or at least hopeful) parents is evident. To your right as you enter, the Cappella di Sant’Anastasia holds works by Tintoretto and Tiepolo and magnificently crafted choir stalls, and through another chapel from here you’ll reach the frescoed Cappella di San Tarasion (also called Cappella d’Oro or Golden Chapel). Twelfth-centu…
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Chiesa di San Nicolò dei Mendicoli
Other churches in town may be grander and glitzier, but San Nicolò dei Mendicoli earns a special spot in local hearts for being the most essentially Venetian. From the outside, this low, spare brick Veneto-Gothic church dedicated to serving the poor hasn’t changed much since the 12th century, when its cloisters functioned as a women’s shelter and its portico sheltered mendicoli (beggars). The tiny, picturesque campo out front is a Venice in miniature, surrounded on three sides by canals and bearing a pylon bearing the winged lion of St Mark, one of the few in Venice to have escaped target practice by Napoleon’s troops. Dim interiors are illuminated by a golden arcade…
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Chiesa di Santa Maria dei Miracoli
When Nicolò di Pietro’s Madonna icon started miraculously weeping in its outdoor shrine around 1480, crowd control became impossible in this cramped corner of Cannaregio. Out of deference to her holiness – and possibly to disperse foot-traffic jams – the neighbours took up a collection to build a chapel to house the painting and its ecstatic admirers. But there was another miracle in store for the neighbourhood: Pietro and Tullio Lombardo’s design, which completely ignored then-current Gothic in favour of a simpler, more classical approach that would come to be known as Renaissance architecture. Although frequently described as a ‘jewel box’, the church is not especially …
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Chiesa dei Gesuati
If you’re not yet sold on baroque art, just duck inside Giorgio Massari’s 1735 high baroque church and look up. On ceiling panels completed in 1737–39, Tiepolo tells stories in the life of St Dominic in trompe l’œil skies with such brilliantly sunny colour, you may momentarily wonder if you’re wearing enough sunscreen. Fellow Venetian virtuoso of luminosity Sebastiano Ricci painted the crystalline, 1730–33 Saints Peter and Thomas with Pope Pius V on the right side of the nave – quite a contrast to Tintoretto’s adjacent 1565 Crucifixion, with mere hints of deep red and green amid the gathering gloom.
If you find the side door to the cloisters open, you mig…
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Chiesa di Santa Maria Formosa
Rebuilt in 1492 by Mauro Codussi on the site of a 7th-century church, this house of worship bears a curious name (Curvaceous St Mary) that has spawned two local legends. One claims the name was caused by confusion over a confusingly abbreviated listing and address for a local courtesan in a Venice guidebook in the dark, pre–Lonely Planet days of the early 16th century. The other tells the story of San Magno, Bishop of Oderzo, who is said to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary on this spot. Unlike standard views of Our Lady, this Venetian vision was beautiful and formosa. The inside of the church was damaged when an Austrian bomb went off in 1916, but among the works of…
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Chiesa di San Giovanni Decollato
Heady rumours swirl like canal mists around this long-abandoned church named for San Zan Degolà, or St John the Headless, known rather less dramatically in English as St John the Baptist. On the south wall facing the campo is a sculpted medallion of a freshly severed head that presumably represents St John after his head was lopped off by Salome. But according to Venetian urban legend, this is an effigy of Biagio (aka Biasio) Cargnio, who had a butcher shop near here in the 16th century where the sausages contained a secret ingredient: children. When his recipe was discovered, he was promptly beheaded and quartered by the authorities, and his house and shop were demolish…
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Chiesa di San Moisè
Scrumptious icing flourishes of carved-stone ornament across the 1660s facade make this church appear positively lickable, though 19th-century architecture critic John Ruskin found its wedding-cake appearance indigestible: ‘one of the basest examples of the basest schools of the Renaissance’, gagged the outspoken advocate for spare Venetian Gothic. This may seem a tad excessive, but from an engineering perspective Ruskin had a point: several of the facade statues had to be removed in the 19th century to prevent the facade from collapsing under their combined weight. The remaining statuary by Flemish sculptor Heinrich Meyring (aka Merengo in Italian) includes scant devotio…
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Chiesa di San Giorgio Maggiore
Sunglasses become essential as you approach San Giorgio in a vaporetto, because Palladio’s 1565–80 masterpiece is set to dazzle. The white Istrian marble facade is almost blinding head-on, but close up you’ll notice the depth of the massive columns that support the triangular tympanum, with echoing triangles to represent the Holy Trinity. These strict, elegant classical proportions immediately evoke ancient Roman temples, rather than the bombastic baroque trendy in Palladio’s day. Inside, this is the only Venetian church where you’ll have to remind yourself to look at the paintings. Ceilings billow over the generous nave, with high windows distributing filtered suns…
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Chiesa di San Martino
Stick your hand into the lion’s mouth by the door, and say something nice about your neighbours: maybe that will help atone for all the dangerous rumours spread through the years via this bocca di leoni (the mouth of the lion of San Marco). Venetians were encouraged to slip anonymous denunciations of their neighbours through these slots, reporting unholy acts ranging from cursing (forgivable) to Freemasonry (punishable by death) for investigation by Venice’s dread security service, the Council of Ten. The theme of persecution continues indoors with Palma Il Giovane’s canvases of Jesus being flogged and on the way to Calvary, which are hung almost out of sight in the cho…
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Chiesa di Santa Maria della Salute
Shows of appreciation don’t get much more monumental than Venice’s magnificent baroque church to the Sainted Mary of Health, dedicated by Venice’s Senate to the Madonna for sparing the city further devastation after a brutal 1630–31 bout of plague killed a third of the city’s population in 18 months. At least 100,000 pylons had to be driven deep into the barene (mud banks) to shore up the tip of Dorsoduro and support the weight of this baroque engineering marvel. Baldassare Longhena’s unusual domed octagon is an inspired design that architectural scholars have compared to Graeco-Roman temples and Jewish cabbala diagrams, and the site of Venetians’ annual pilgrim…
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Chiesa di San Sebastian
A hidden treasure of Venetian art in the heart of Dorsoduro, this otherwise stark neighbourhood church was embellished with floor-to-ceiling masterpieces by Paolo Veronese over three decades. Veronese’s horses rear over the frames of the coffered ceiling; the organ doors are covered inside and out with episodes from the life of Christ in vivid Veronese colour; and in Veronese’s Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian near the altar, the bound saint stares down his tormentors amid a Venetian crowd of socialites, turbaned traders and Veronese’s signature frisky spaniel. This last work may have held some personal significance for Veronese. According to popular local legend, Verones…
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Chiesa di San Salvador
A dream made real, San Salvador was conceived in the 7th century when Jesus appeared to a sleeping Bishop Magnus and pointed out the exact spot on a lagoon map where he should build a church. There was, however, a minor technical glitch: the city of Venice didn’t exist yet, and the area was mostly mud banks. But Bishop Magnus had faith that once the church was built the parishioners would follow – and today this church perched on a bustling campo (square) proves his point. Built on a plan of three Greek crosses laid end to end, San Salvador has been embellished many times over the centuries, with the present facade erected in 1663. Among the noteworthy works inside ar…
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Chiesa di San Bartolomeo
German traders didn’t have to stray far from the trading floor of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi to pray for an upswing in the market for their goods. Through several incarnations and shifting fortunes, this church attended to the spiritual needs of Venice’s active German trading community. Originally a three-aisled church built in 1170, San Bartolomeo’s style was cramped by the buildings that cropped up around it after the Rialto bridge was completed. The current look is the result of a 1723 reworking by Giovanni Scalfarotto, whose sombre approach to exterior decoration was befitting a church dedicated to a martyr who was skinned alive – note the grimacing figure above the doo…
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Chiesa di San Polo
Most travellers speed past San Polo without realising it’s there, because the 9th-century Byzantine church kept a low profile over the centuries while housing cropped up around it. With a high ship’s-keel ceiling and14th- to 15th-century stained glass windows, San Polo is surprisingly airy inside, if a little dark – and the same is true of the art. Tintoretto’s Last Supper is rife with tension, as apostles react with outrage, hurt and anger at Jesus’ news that one of them will betray him. In the sacristy, Giandominico Tiepolo (son of baroque ceiling maestro Giambattista) shows dark sides of humanity in his Stations of the Cross: jeering onlookers torment Jesus, …
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Chiesa dell’Arcangelo Raffaele
The neighbours called, and they want their grime back: when a recent cleaning to the 17th facade removed centuries of accumulated dirt on carved stone angels’ wings above the portals, it caused a local uproar. Had Venice lost its respect for the patina of age? But there’s been no similar argument raised about the restoration of the interiors, where in the baptistry behind the altar Francesco Fontebasso’s newly restored baroque frescoes seem to emit the early light of dawn in shades of pink, gold and pale green. The cycle of paintings inside above the main altar has been attributed to the Guardi brothers, but no one is sure which one – the vedutista (landscape arti…
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Chiesa della Madonna dell’Orto
One of Venice’s best-kept secrets, this elegantly spare 1365 brick Gothic cathedral dedicated to ferrymen, merchants and travellers (hey, that’s you) was the object of Tintoretto’s attention for decades. No wonder: he lived just over the footbridge from here. Tintoretto and his family were buried in the corner chapel, and he saved some of his best work for the apse here. His golden-tinged Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple shows throngs of star-struck angels and mortals vying for a glimpse of Mary, while in his 1546 Last Judgment, lost souls attempt to hold back a teal tidal wave while an angel rescues one last person from the ultimate acque alte (high tides).…
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Chiesa di San Pantalon
The stark, unfinished brick façade dates from the 17th century, although a church was here as early as the 11th century. Inside, the greatest impact comes from the 40 canvases representing the Martirio e Gloria di San Pantaleone (Martyrdom and Glory of St Pantaleone), painted for the ceiling by Giovanni Antonio Fumiani. The artist died in a fall from scaffolding while at work and is buried in the church.
Stroll off right down a dogleg blind alley to Campiello Ca' Angara. On the wall (numbers 3717 and 3718) is a sculpted medallion of what could be a Byzantine ruler, dating perhaps to the 8th century. That is one of the remarkable things about Venice - what would anywhere…
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Chiesa dei Scalzi
An unexpected outburst of baroque extravagance next to the dour Ferrovia, this Longhena-designed church has a facade by Giuseppe Sardi rippling with columns and statues in niches. This is an unusual departure for Venice, where baroque ebullience was usually reserved for interiors of Renaissance-leaning buildings – and in fact it was a deliberate echo of a style often employed in Rome, intended to help make the Carmelites posted here from Rome feel more at home. Sadly, the vault frescoes by Tiepolo in two of the side chapels are damaged. Before the main altar on your left, you might spot the tomb of Venice’s last doge, Ludovico Manin, who presided over the dissolution of t…
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Chiesa di San Stae
An aficionado of Venetian light, English painter William Turner loved painting the sun-washed Palladian exterior of this church, with its facade dotted by statues of angels and cardinal virtues. You can see what a painter obsessed with light effects might admire in this church: for all its gleaming white classical grandeur, it retains a languid seaside air, with early-morning lagoon mists that collect mystically around its base. The church was founded in 966 but finished in 1709, and though the interiors are surprisingly spare for a baroque edifice, there are a couple of notable works: Giambattista Tiepolo’s The Martyrdom of St Bartholomew and Sebastiano Ricci’s The L…
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Chiesa di Santo Stefano
This Gothic church has a bell tower that leans disconcertingly and a vast wood-ribbed carena di nave (ship’s hull) ceiling that looks like an upturned Noah’s ark. Enter the cloisters museum (admission €3 or Chorus Pass) to see Canova’s 1808 funerary stelae featuring gorgeous women dabbing their eyes with their mourning cloaks, Tulio Lombardo’s wide-eyed 1505 saint that Titian is said to have referenced for his Assunta at I Frari, and three brooding Tintoretto canvases: Last Supper, with a ghostly dog begging for bread; the gathering gloom of Agony in the Garden; and the almost-abstract, mostly black Washing of the Feet.
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Chiesa delle Zitelle
Designed by Palladio in the late 16th century, the Chiesa di Santa Maria della Presentazione, known as the Zitelle, was a church and hospice for orphans and poor young women ( zitelle is old local slang for ‘old maids’). The church bell only rings on Sundays and the doors are rarely open, but you can get a spa treatment in the adjoining convent and sleep in the orphanage – no, seriously. The Palladio Hotel & Spa has creatively tweaked the original structure without altering Palladio’s blueprint, marble walls, beamed ceilings, or the original cloisters garden, transforming the premises into a memorable high-end spa-hotel.
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