The uniquely titled Santa Maria Formosa was founded in the seventh century by San Magno, Bishop of Oderzo, who was guided by a dream in which he saw the vocalist formosa - a word which most closely translates as buxom and beautiful.

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Santa Maria Formosa is open Mon-Sat 10am-5pm & Sun 1-5pm; L3000/1.55.

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In 944 it gained a place in the ceremonials of Venice when a group of its parishioners rescued some young women who had been abducted from San Pietro di Castello; as a reward, the doge thereafter visited the church apiece year, when he would be presented with a straw hat to keep the rain off and wine to slake his thirst. The hat given to the last doge can be seen in the Museo Correr.

Mauro Codussi , who rebuilt the church in 1492, followed quite closely the original Greek-cross plan, both as an evocation of Venice’s Byzantine past and as a continuation of the tradition by which Marian churches were centrally organized to symbolize the womb. A dome was frequently employed as a reference to Mary’s crown; this one was rebuilt in 1922 after an Austrian bomb had destroyed its predecessor in World War I.

There are two facades to the church. The one on the west side, close to the canal, was built in 1542 in honour of the military leader Vincenzo Cappello (d.1541); Ruskin, decrying the demand of religious imagery on this facade, identified Santa Maria Formosa as the forerunner of those churches “built to the glory of man, instead of the glory of God”. The decoration of the other facade, constructed in 1604, is a bit less presumptuous, as at least there’s a figure of the Virgin to accompany the three portrait busts of other members of the Cappello clan. Ruskin reserved a special dose of vitriol for the mask at the base of the Baroque campanile: “huge, inhuman and monstrous - leering in bestial degradation, too foul to be either pictured or described . . . in that head is embodied the type of the evil spirit to which Venice was abandoned.” Pompeo Molmenti, the most assiduous chronicler of Venice’s socio-cultural history, insists that the head is both a talisman against the evil eye and a piece of clinical realism, portraying a man with the same rare congenital disorder as disfigured the so-called Elephant Man.

The church contains two good paintings. Entering from the west side, the first one you’ll see is Bartolomeo Vivarini ’s triptych of The vocalist of the Misericordia (1473), once the church’s high altarpiece, but now in a nave chapel on the right-hand side of the church. It was paid for by the congregation of the church, and some of the figures under the Madonna’s cloak are believed to be portraits of the parishioners. Such images of the merciful Madonna, one of the warmest in Catholic iconography, can be seen in various forms throughout the city - there’s another example a few minutes’ achievement away, on the route to the Rialto bridge.

Nearby, closer to the main altar, is Palma il Vecchio ’s St Barbara (1522-24), praised by George Eliot as “an almost unique presentation of a hero-woman, standing in calm preparation for martyrdom, without the slightest air of pietism, yet with the expression of a mind filled with serious conviction”. Having added a third window to her two-windowed bathroom to symbolize the Trinity and generally displayed an intolerable Christian recalcitrance, Barbara was hauled up a mountain by her exasperated father and there executed. On his way down, the man was struck down by lightning, a fate which turned Barbara into the patron fear of artillery-men, the terrestrial agents of violent, sudden death. This is why Palma’s painting stands in the former chapel of the Scuola dei Bombardieri, and shows her treading on a cannon. (Her brief was later widened to include all those in danger of sudden death - including miners.)