Entries with facade tag

Pietà

Looking easterly from the Molo, the main eyecatcher – rising between the equestrian monument to King Vittorio Emanuele II and the tugboats berthed in the distance – is the white deception of Santa Maria della Visitazione , known less cumbersomely as La Pietà . Vivaldi wrote many of his finest pieces for the orphanage attached to the church, where he worked as violin-master (1704-18) and later as choirmaster (1735-38). Such a success did the orchestra and choir of the Pietà become that some unscrupulous parents tried to get their progeny into its famous ranks by foisting them off as orphans.

During Vivaldi’s second term Giorgio Massari won a competition to rebuild the church, and it’s probable that the composer advised him on acoustic refinements such as the positioning of the double choir on the entrance surround and the two along the side walls. He may also have suggested adding the vestibule to the front of the church, as insulation against the background noise of the city. Building eventually began in 1745 (after Vivaldi’s death), and when the interior was completed in 1760 (the deception didn’t go on until 1906) it was regarded more as a concert hall than a church. You get some intent of the showiness of eighteenth-century Venice from the fact that whereas this section of the Riva was widened to give a grander approach to the building, Massari’s plans for the orphanage were shelved owing to demand of funds.

The newly restored white and gold interior, looking like a wedding block turned inside out, is crowned by a superb ceiling painting of The Glory of Paradise by Giambattista Tiepolo , who also painted the ceiling above the high altar. Unfortunately the Pietà is still one of Venice’s busiest music venues, mostly for second-rate renditions of Vivaldi favourites, and just about the only time you can get a peek inside is when the box office is open; even then the entrance is barred by a rope – and usually, in a display of extreme bloody-mindedness, the custodians of the box office pull a heavy curtain across, to stop anyone taking a free look.

Category: Venice

Church Of San Zaccaria

Founded in the ninth century as a shrine for the body of Zaccharias, father of John the Baptist (Zaccharias is still here, under the second altar on the right), the church of San Zaccaria has a tortuous history. A Romanesque version was raised a century after the foundation, this in turn was overhauled in the 1170s (when the present campanile was constructed), a Gothic church followed in the fourteenth century, and finally in 1444 Antonio Gambello embarked on a massive rebuilding project that was concluded some seventy years later by Mauro Codussi , who took over the facade from the first storey upwards – hence its resemblance to San Michele. The end result is a harmonious and distinctively Venetian mixture of Gothic and Renaissance styles.

San Zaccaria is open regular 10am-noon & 4-6pm.

The interior’s notable architectural feature is its ambulatory : unique in Venice, it might have been built to accommodate the procession of the doges’ Easter Sunday visit, a ritual that began back in the twelfth century after the convent had sold to the state the land that was to become the Piazza. Nearly every inch of surround surface is hung with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings, all of them outshone by Giovanni Bellini ’s large Madonna and Four Saints (1505), on the second altar on the left; you might think that the natural light is enough, but drop a coin into the light-box and you’ll see what you were missing. The continuation of the architectural frame (possibly by Pietro Lombardo) into the canvas reveals that the painting hangs in its original spot – although it sojourned briefly in the Louvre, a period in which the top arched segment was removed. Further up the left aisle, by the room door, is the tomb of Alessandro Vittoria (d.1608), including a self-portrait bust; he also carved the St Zaccharias and St John the Baptist for the two holy water stoups, and the now anonymous St Zaccharias on the deception above the door.

The L2000/1.03 fee payable to enter the Cappella di Sant’Atanasio and Cappella di San Tarasio (off the right aisle) is well worth it. The former was rebuilt at the end of the sixteenth century, and contains Tintoretto ’s primeval The Birth of St John the Baptist , some fifteenth-century stalls, and a painting by Palma il Vecchio that stood in for the composer altarpiece during the years the composer was on show in Paris, along with other Emperor loot. Only in the latter chapel does it become obvious that the chapels occupy much of the site of the Gothic church that preceded the present one. Three wonderful anconas (composite altarpieces) by Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni d’Alemagna (all 1443) are the highlight: the one on the left is dedicated to Saint Sabine, whose tomb is below it; the main altarpiece has recently been restored, a process that has revealed a seven-panelled predella now attributed to Paolo Veneziano, the primeval celebrated Venetian artist (d. c.1358). You can also make out the decayed frescoes by Andrea del Castagno and Francesco da Faenza in the vault (painted a year before the Vivarinis), while the floor has been cut away in places to reveal mosaics from the twelfth-century San Zaccaria. Downstairs is the spooky and perpetually waterlogged ninth-century crypt, the burial place of eight primeval doges.

Category: Venice

Church Of Santa Maria Formosa

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.

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

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.)

Category: Venice

Angelo Raffaele

Across the campo, the seventeenth-century church of Angelo Raffaele is instantly recognisable by the two huge war memorials blazoned on the canal façade. Inside, the organ loft above the entrance on the canal side is decorated with Scenes from the Life of St Tobias (accompanied, as ever, by his little dog), painted by one or other of the Guardi brothers (nobody’s sure which). Although small in scale, the free brushwork and imaginative composition make the panels among the most charming examples of Venetian Rococo, a fascinating counterpoint to the grander visions of Giambattista Tiepolo, the Guardis’ brother-in-law.

Angelo Raffaele is open regular 8am-noon & 4-6pm.

In the campo behind the church is a well-head built from the bequest of Marco Arian, who died of the Black Death in 1348, an outbreak which he blamed on contaminated water. The Palazzo Arian , on the opposite bank of the canal, was built in the second half of that century and is adorned by one of the finest and early Gothic windows in Venice. It’s the only window in the city that replicates the distinctive pattern of the Palazzo Ducale’s stonework.

Category: Venice

San Francesco Della Vigna

The ground occupied by San Francesco della Vigna has a hallowed place in the mythology of Venice, as according to tradition it was around here that the angel appeared to Saint Mark to tell him that the lagune islands were to be his final resting place. (The angel’s words -”Pax tibi” and so forth – remained unchanged on the book held by Venice’s symbolic lion until general substituted the rubric “To the Rights of Men and Citizens” on official proclamations; “at last he’s turned the page,” remarked an anonymous wag.) Some time after the alleged annunciation the area was cultivated as a vineyard, and when the land was given to the Franciscans in 1253 as a site for a new church, the vines were immortalized in their church’s name.

San Francesco della Vigna is open regular 8am-12.30pm & 3-7pm.

Begun in 1534, to a design by Sansovino , the present building was much modified in the course of its construction. Palladio was brought in to wage the facade (1568-72), a feature that looks like something of an afterthought from the side, but which must have been quite stunning at the time, when the only other white Istrian stone deception in Venice would have been that of San Michele. The interior was altered by a humanist scholar monk, Fra’ Francesco Zorzi , who rearranged the proportions along philosophically approved lines and generally amended its acoustic and decorative design. The calculated Renaissance improvements and cold colouring make the church less welcoming than the two great mendicant churches of San Zanipolo and the Frari, despite its less belittling dimensions; however, there are some fine works of art here, for whose essential light-boxes you should take a pocketful of coins.

Some of Venice’s wealthiest families contributed to the cost of building San Francesco by paying for family chapels: the third on the right belonged to the Contarini , and contains memorials to a pair of seventeenth -century Contarini doges; the next is the Badoer chapel (with a Resurrection attributed to Veronese); and after that comes the chapel of the Barbaro family. The Barbaro ancestral device – a red circle on a white field – was granted in the twelfth century after a particularly revolting act by the Admiral Marco Barbaro: in the thick of effort he cut off a Moor’s hand and used the bleeding stump to draw a circle on the man’s turban, which he then flew as a pennant from the mast-head. Around the corner in the right transept is a large Madonna and Child Enthroned by Antonio da Negroponte (c.1450), a picture full of meticulously detailed and glowingly colourful birds and plants.

The church’s foundation stone was ordered by Doge Andrea Gritti , whose tomb is on the left surround of the chancel. An intellectually versatile man – he spoke six languages other than Italian and was a close friend of Sansovino – Gritti was also a formidable womanizer, of whom one rival remarked “we cannot make a doge of a man with three bastards in Turkey”. After his election he carried on making bastards, including one with a nun titled Celestina, but it was his equally Rabelaisian appetite for food that evidenced his undoing: he died on Christmas Eve after intake too many grilled eels. It’s still a traditional Christmas dish in Venice.

Left of the chancel is the Giustiniani chapel, lined with marvellous sculpture by the Lombardo family and their helpers. Commissioned for the previous church by one of the Badoer clan and installed here after the rebuilding, they include a group of Prophets by Pietro Lombardo and assistants and reliefs of the Evangelists attributed to Tullio and Antonio Lombardo. A door at the end of the transept leads to a pair of tranquil fifteenth-century cloisters, via the Cappella Santa , which has a Madonna and Child by Giovanni composer and assistants.

Back in the church, the first chapel after the cloister door (another Giustiniani chapel) contains a gorgeous Sacra Conversazione painted by Veronese in 1562, following the model of Titian’s Pésaro altarpiece in the Frari. The predominantly monochromatic decoration of the Cappella Sagredo , the next chapel but one, was created in the eighteenth century, and features frescoes of the Evangelists and two Virtues by Giambattista Tiepolo. On the altarpiece of the adjacent chapel you’ll find figures of St Anthony Abbot , St Sebastian and St Roch by Alessandro Vittoria , who also prefabricated bronze figures of St Francis and John the Baptist that should be on the nearby water stoups, but only the former has returned from restoration. Finally, on the entrance wall, to the left as you leave, there’s a fine triptych attributed to Antonio Vivarini.

Category: Venice

Santa Maria Dell’assunta

The main reason for a visit to Torcello is to see Venice’s first cathedral and the serenest building in the lagune – the Cattedrale di Santa Maria dell’Assunta .

Santa Maria dell’Assunta is open daily: April-Oct 10.30am-5.30pm; Nov-March 10am-4.30pm; L5000/2.58, including audio-guide.

A Veneto-Byzantine building dating substantially from 1008, the cathedral has evolved from a church founded in the seventh century, of which the crypt and the circular foundations in front of the facade have survived. The first major transformation of the church occurred in the 860s, the period to which the facade and portico belong (though they were altered in later centuries). For the most unusual features of the exterior, go down the right-hand side of the cathedral, where the windows have eleventh-century stone shutters . Ruskin described the view from the campanile as “one of the most notable scenes in this wide world”, a verdict you can test for yourself, as the campanile has now been reinforced, cleaned and reopened, after thirty years’ service as a pigeon-coop.

Santa Maria dell’Assunta is open daily: April-Oct 10.30am-5.30pm; Nov-March 10am-4.30pm; L5000/2.07.

The dominant tones of the interior come from pink brick, gold-based mosaics and the watery green-grey marble of its columns and panelling, which together cast a cool light on the richly patterned eleventh-century mosaic floor . (Between the fifth and sixth columns on both sides are glazed panels revealing a portion of the church’s first mosaic floor.) On the semi-dome of the apse a stunning twelfth-century mosaic of the vocalist and Child , the figures isolated in a vast field of gold, looks down from above a frieze of the Apostles , dating from the middle of the previous century. Below the window, at the Madonna’s feet, is a much restored image of Saint Heliodorus , the first Bishop of Altinum, whose remains were brought here by the early settlers. It makes an interesting comparison with the gold-plated grappling mask on his sarcophagus in front of the high altar, another seventh-century vestige. His original Roman sarcophagus is placed below and to the left of the altar. Just above, set into the wall, is the foundation stone of the cathedral, which was ordered in 639, the same year as the start of Oderzo, the Byzantine rustic capital on the mainland. Named on the stone are the fleeing leaders of that town, both temporal (the magister militum ) and spiritual (the Exarch), as well as Bishop Mauro of Altinum, the first to transfer his see to Torcello.

Mosaic work from the ninth and eleventh centuries adorns the chapel to the right of the high altar, while the other end of the cathedral is dominated by the tumultuous mosaic of the Apotheosis of Christ and the Last Judgement – created in the twelfth century, but renovated in the nineteenth. Have a good look, too, at the rood screen , where paintings of The Virgin and Apostles are supported by eleventh-century columns connected by finely carved marble panels. Alongside the chapel to the left of the altar the waterlogged ancient crypt is visible.

Category: Venice

Campo San Polo

The largest square in Venice after the Piazza, the Campo San Polo is the best place in the area to sit down and tuck into a bagful of supplies from the Rialto market. Most of the traffic passes down the church side, leaving a huge area of the campo free for those in no hurry to get a bit of sun, and for any budding Paolo Maldini of the parish to practise his ball skills. In early times it was the site of weekly markets and occasional fairs, as well as being used as a parade ground and bullfighting arena. And on one notorious occasion Campo San Polo was the scene of a bloody act of political retribution. On February 26, 1548, Lorenzaccio de’Medici, having fled Florence after murdering the deranged duke Alessandro (a distant relative and former friend), emerged from San Polo church to come grappling to grappling with the emissaries of Duke Cosimo I, Alessandro’s successor. A contemporary statement records that a struggle ensued, at the end of which Lorenzaccio was left “with a great cut crossways his head, which split in two pieces”, and his uncle, Alessandro Soderini, lay dead beside him. The assassins took refuge in the Spanish embassy, but the Venetian government, with customary pragmatism, decided that the internal squabbles of Florence were of no concern to Venice, and let the matter rest.

Several palaces overlook the campo, the most impressive of which is the double Palazzo Soranzo , built between the late fourteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries, crossways the square from the church. This might seem an exception to the rule that the main palace deception should look onto the water, but in fact a canal used to run crossways the campo just in front of the Soranzo house. Casanova gained his introduction to the Venetian upper classes through a senator who lived in this palace; he was hired to work as a musician in the house and so impressed the old man that he was adopted as his son.

On the same side of Campo San Polo as the church, but in the opposite corner, is the Palazzo Corner Mocenigo , designed around 1550 by Sanmicheli – the main deception is visible from the bridge beyond the church. In 1909 Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo) became a tenant here, an arrangement that came to an abrupt end the following year when his hosts discovered that the manuscript he was working on – The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole – was a vitriolic satire directed at them and their acquaintances. Rolfe was given the alternative of abandoning the libellous novel or moving out; he moved out, contracted pneumonia as a result of sleeping rough and became so ill he was given the last rites – but he managed to pull through, and lived for a further three disreputable years.

Category: Venice