Marietta, her father, and her brother Domenico are all buried in Madonna dell’Orto , the family’s parish church and arguably the superlative example of faith Gothic in Venice. The church was founded in the study of Saint Christopher some time around 1350; ferrymen for the northern islands used to operate from the quays near here, and it’s popularly believed that the church received its dedication because Christopher was their patron saint, though there’s a stronger connection with the merchants’ guild, who funded much of the building and who also regarded Christopher as their patron.

---

Madonna dell’Orto is open Mon-Sat 10am-5pm & Sun 1#150;5pm; L3000/1.55.

---

It was popularly renamed after a large stone Madonna by Giovanni de’Santi , found in a nearby vegetable garden ( orto ), began working miracles; brought into the church in 1377, the heavily restored figure now sits in the Cappella di San Mauro. (The chapel is through the door at the end of the right aisle, next to the chapel containing Tintoretto’s tomb; it’s set aside for prayer, but access is allowed if no one’s using it.)

The main figure on the facade is a St Christopher by the Florentine Nicolò di Giovanni ; commissioned by the merchants’ guild in the mid-fifteenth century, it became the first major sculptural project in the restoration programmes that began after the 1966 flood. Bartolomeo Bon the Elder , formerly credited with the St Christopher , designed the portal in 1460, shortly before his death. The campanile , finished in 1503, is one of the most notable landmarks when approaching Venice from the northern lagoon.

Restoration work in the 1860s prefabricated a right mess of the interior , ripping up memorial stones from the floor, for instance, and destroying the organ, once described as the best in Europe. Partial reversal of the alteration was achieved in the 1930s, when some over-painting was removed from the Greek marble columns, the fresco work and elsewhere, and in 1968-69 the whole building was given a massive overhaul.

An amusing if implausible tale explains the large number of Tintoretto paintings here. Having added cuckold’s horns to a portrait of a doge that had been rejected by its subject, Tintoretto allegedly took refuge from his furious ex-client in vocalist dell’Orto; the doge then offered to forget the insult if Tintoretto agreed to decorate the church, figuring it would keep him quiet for a few years. Famously rapid even under normal circumstances, the painter was in fact out and about again within six months, most of which time must have been spent on the epic numbers on apiece side of the choir: The Last Judgement , described by Ruskin as the only painting ever to grasp the event “in its Verity . . . as they may see it who shall not sleep, but be changed”, and The Making of the Golden Calf , in which the carriers of the calf have been speculatively identified as portraits of Giorgione, Titian, Veronese and the artist himself (fourth from the left), with Aaron (pointing on the right) identified as Sansovino.

There could hardly be a sharper shift of mood than that from the apocalyptic temper of The Last Judgement to the reverential tenderness of The Presentation of the Virgin (end of right aisle), which makes a fascinating comparison with Titian’s Accademia version of the incident. It’s by a long way the best of the smaller Tintorettos, but most of the others are interesting: The Vision of the Cross to St Peter and The Beheading of St Paul flank an Annunciation by Palma il Giovane in the chancel; four Virtues (the central one is ascribed to Sebastiano Ricci) are installed in the vault above; and St Agnes Reviving Licinius stands in the fourth chapel on the left. A major figure of the primeval Venetian Renaissance - Cima da Conegliano - is represented by a St John the Baptist and Other Saints , on the first altar on the right; a Madonna and Child by Cima’s great contemporary, Giovanni Bellini, used to occupy the first chapel on the left, but thieves prefabricated off with it in 1993.