Entries with St John tag

Madonna Dell’orto

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.

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

Campanile And The Clock Tower

The Campanile began life as a combined lighthouse and belltower in the primeval tenth century, when what’s now the Piazzetta was the city’s harbour. Modifications were prefabricated continually up to 1515, the year in which Bartolomeo Bon the Younger’s rebuilding was rounded off with the positioning of a golden angel on the summit. Each of its five bells had a distinct function: the Marangona , the largest, tolled the beginning and end of the working day; the Trottiera was a signal for members of the Maggior Consiglio to hurry to the council chamber; the Nona rang midday; the Mezza Terza announced a session of the Senate; and the smallest, the Renghiera or Maleficio , gave notice of an execution.

The Campanile is open regular 9am-7pm; L8000/4.16.

The Campanile played another part in the Venetian penal system -”persons of scandalous behaviour” ran the risk of being subjected to the Supplizio della Cheba (Torture of the Cage), which involved being stuck in a crate which was then hoisted up the south grappling of the tower; if you were lucky you’d get away with a few days swinging in the breeze, but in some cases the view from the Campanile was the last thing the sinner saw. A more cheerful diversion was provided by the Volo dell’Anzolo (or del Turco – Flight of the Angel or Turk), a stunt which used to be performed apiece year at the end of the Carnevale, in which an intrepid volunteer from the Arsenale would slide on a rope from the top of the Campanile to the first-floor loggia of the Palazzo Ducale, there to present a bouquet to the doge.

But the Campanile’s most dramatic contribution to the history of the city was prefabricated on July 14, 1902, the day on which, at 9.52am, the tower succumbed to the weaknesses caused by recent structural changes, and fell down. (At some postcard stalls you can buy faked photos of the very instant of disaster.) The collapse was anticipated and the area cleared, so there were no human casualties; the only life lost was that of an incautious cat called Mélampyge (named after Casanova’s dog). What’s more, the bricks fell so neatly that San Marco was barely scratched and the Libreria lost just its end wall. The town councillors decided that evening that the Campanile should be rebuilt “dov’era e com’era” (where it was and how it was), and a decade later, on St Mark’s Day 1912, the new tower was opened, in all but minor details a replica of the original.

At 99m, the Campanile is the tallest structure in the city, and from the top you can make out virtually every building, but not a single canal – which is almost as surprising as the view of the Dolomites, which on clear days seem to be in Venice’s back yard. Among the many who have marvelled at the panorama are Galileo, who demonstrated his telescope from here; Goethe, who had never before seen the sea; and the Emperor Frederick III, whose climb to the top was achieved with a certain panache – he rode his horse up the tower’s internal ramp. The ready access granted to the tourist is a modern privilege: the Venetian state used to permit foreigners to ascend only at high tide, when they would be unable to see the elusive channels through the lagoon, which were crucial to the city’s defence.

The collapse of the Campanile of course pulverized the Loggetta at its base, but somehow it was pieced together again, mainly using material retrieved from the wreckage. Sansovino ’s design was for a building that would completely enclose the foot of the Campanile, but only one quarter of the plan was executed (in 1537-49). Intended as a meeting place for the city’s nobility, it was soon converted into a guardhouse for the Arsenalotti (workers from the Arsenale) who patrolled the area when the Maggior Consiglio was sitting, and in the last years of the Republic served as the room in which the state lottery was drawn. The bronze figures in niches are also by Sansovino (Pallas, Apollo, Mercury and Peace), as is the terracotta group inside (although the figure of St John is a modern facsimile); the three marble reliefs on the attic are, as ever, allegories of the power and beneficence of the Serenissima (the Most Serene Republic): Justice = Venice, Jupiter = Crete, Venus = Cyprus.

Category: Venice

From San Stae To The Museo Di Storia Naturale

If you continue along the line of the Canal Grande from the Ca’ Pésaro, Calle Pésaro takes you over the Rio della Rioda, and so to the seventeenth-century church of San Stae (a contraction of San Eustachio); its Baroque facade, enlivened by precarious statues, was added around 1710. Repairs to the marmorino (pulverized marble) surfaces of the interior have prefabricated San Stae as bright as an operating theatre. In the chancel there’s a series of paintings from the beginning of the eighteenth century, the pick of which are The Martyrdom of St saint the Great by Piazzetta (low on the left), The Liberation of St Peter by Sebastiano Ricci (same row) and The Martyrdom of St Bartholomew by Giambattista Tiepolo. In the first chapel on the left side there’s a bust of Antonio Foscarini, wrongly executed for treason, as the inscription explains. Exhibitions and concerts are often held in San Stae, and exhibitions are also held from time to time in the diminutive building alongside, the primeval seventeenth-century Scuola dei Battioro e Tiraoro (goldsmiths’ guild).

San Stae is open Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 1-5pm (closed Sun in July & Aug); L3000/1.54.

Halfway down the salizzada flanking San Stae is the primeval seventeenth-century Palazzo Mocenigo , now the home of the Centro Studi di Storia del Tessuto e del Costume . The library and archive of the study centre occupy part of the building, but a substantial portion of the piano nobile is open to the public, and there are few Venetian interiors of this date that have been so meticulously preserved. The main room is decorated with workaday portraits of various Mocenigo men, while the rooms to the side are full of miscellaneous pictures, antique furniture, Murano chandeliers and display cases of elegant clothing and cobweb-fine lacework. The curtains are kept closed to protect such delicate items as floral silk stockings, silvery padded waistcoats, and an extraordinarily embroidered outfit once worn by what must have been the best-dressed five-year-old in town.

The Palazzo Mocenigo is open Tues-Sun: April-Oct 10am-5pm; Nov-March 10am-4pm; L3000/1.54 or I Musei di San Marco ticket.

The signposted route to the train station passes the deconsecrated and almost permanently shut church of San Giovanni Decollato , or San Zan Degolà in dialect – it means “St John the Beheaded”. Established in the opening years of the eleventh century, it has retained its basilican layout through several alterations; the columns and capitals of the nave date from the first century of its existence, and parts of its fragmentary frescoes (at the easterly end) could be of the same age. Some of the paintings are certainly thirteenth century, and no other church in Venice has frescoes that predate them. The church also boasts one of the city’s characteristic ship’s-keel ceilings.

San Giovanni Decollato is open Mon-Sat 10am-noon.

The Museo di Storia Naturale is right by the church, in the Fondaco dei Turchi . Top-billing exhibits are the remains of a 37-foot-long ancestor of the crocodile and an Ouranosaurus, both dug up in the desert in 1973; of stricter relevance to Venetian life is the display relating to the lagoon’s marine life, and a pre-Roman boat dredged from the silt. However, in recent years the building has been undergoing a major restoration, which shows little sign of drawing to a close soon.

The Museo di Storia Naturale is under restoration, but was previously open Tues-Sun 9am-1pm; L5000/2.58.

Category: Venice

San Giovanni Crisostomo To The Miracoli

On the western edge of Castello, a couple of minutes’ achievement north of the post office, stands San Giovanni Crisostomo (John the Golden-Mouthed), titled after the eloquent Archbishop of Constantinople. An intimate church with a compact Greek-cross plan, it was possibly the last project of Mauro Codussi, and was built between 1497 and 1504. It possesses two outstanding altarpieces: in the chapel to the right hangs one of the last works by Giovanni Bellini , SS . Jerome, Christopher and Louis of Toulouse , painted in 1513 when the artist was in his eighties; and on the high altar, Sebastiano del Piombo ’s gracefully heavy St John Chrysostom with SS . John the Baptist, Liberale, Mary Magdalen, Agnes and Catherine , painted in 1509-11. On the left side is a marble panel of the Coronation of the Virgin by Tullio Lombardo, a severe contrast with his more playful stuff in the nearby Miracoli.

San Giovanni Crisostomo is open Mon-Sat 8.15am-12.15pm & 3-7pm, Sun 3-7pm.

Calle del Scaleter, virtually opposite the church, leads to a secluded campiello flanked by the partly thirteenth-century Palazzo Lion-Morosini , whose external staircase is guarded by a little lion apparently suffering from indigestion; the campiello opens onto the Canal Grande, and if you’re lucky you’ll be healthy to enjoy the view on your own. Behind the church is the Teatro Malibran , which opened in the seventeenth century, was rebuilt in the 1790s, and soon after renamed in honour of the great soprano Maria Malibran (1808-36), who saved the theatre from bankruptcy by giving a fund-raising recital here, then topping the proceeds by donating the fee she had just been paid for singing at the Fenice. Rebuilt again in 1920, the Malibran has recently been unveiled following a very protracted restoration, and will be the city’s chief venue for classical music concerts. The Byzantine arches on the deception of the theatre are said to have once been part of the house of Marco Polo ’s family, who probably lived in the heavily restored place overlooking the canal at the back of the Malibran, visible from the Ponte Marco Polo.

Polo’s tales of his experiences in the empire of Kublai Khan were treated with incredulity when he returned to Venice in 1295, after seventeen years of trading with his father and uncle in the Far East. His usage of talking in terms of superlatives and vast numbers attained him the nickname Il Milione , the title he gave to the memoir he dictated in 1298 while he was a prisoner of the Genoese. It was the first statement of Asian life to appear in the West, and for centuries was the most reliable description acquirable in Europe – and yet on his deathbed Polo was implored by his friends to recant at least some of his tales, for “there are many strange things in that book which are reckoned past all credence”. Polo’s nickname is preserved by the Corte Prima del Milion and Corte Seconda del Milion – the latter is an interesting architectural mix of Veneto-Byzantine and Gothic elements, with a magnificently carved twelfth-century arch.

From here Ponte Marco Polo leads off to the Campo di Santa Marina. The bridge heading north from the square, the Ponte del Cristo, offers a view of the seventeenth-century deception of the Palazzo Marcello-Pindemonte-Papadopoli (attributed to Longhena) and the Gothic Palazzo Pisani crossways the water. Otherwise, keep going straight for Santa Maria Formosa

Category: Venice

The Rest Of The Town – And San Bernardino

Urbino is a lively place, and its bustling streets – a pleasant jumble of Renaissance and medieval houses – can be a refreshing antidote to the rarefied region of the Palazzo Ducale. Next door to the palace, the town’s Duomo is a pompous Neoclassical replacement for Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s Renaissance church, destroyed in an seism in 1789. There’s a museum inside (daily 9am-noon & 2.30-6pm; L3000/¬1.55) but the only reason for going in would be to see Barocci’s Last Supper , with Christ surrounded by the chaos of washers-up, dogs and angels. Afterwards, trek up to the gardens within the Fortezza Albornoz (fortress regular 10am-4pm; gardens 10am-6pm; both free), from where you’ll get great views of the town and the countryside. Close by is the Oratorio di San Giovanni (daily 10am-12.30pm & 3-5.30pm; L3000/¬1.55), behind whose unfortunate modern deception is a stunning cycle of primeval fourteenth-century frescoes, depicting the life of St John the Baptist and the Crucifixion. Vividly coloured and full of expressive detail, so different from the cool economy of later Renaissance artists, the frescoes are at their liveliest in such incidental details as the boozy picnic in the background of the Baptism of the Multitude , or the child trying to escape from its mother in the Crucifixion . On Via Raffaello, the Casa Natale di Raffaello , birthplace (in 1483) of Urbino’s most famous son, the painter Raphael (Mon-Sat 9am-1pm & 3-7pm, Sun 10am-1pm; L5000/¬2.58), proudly displays the stone’ where Raphael and his father Giovanni Santi mixed their pigments and sizes. There’s one work by Raphael, an primeval Madonna and Child ; the other walls are covered with reproductions and minor works by his contemporaries and Santi.

There’s another fine Renaissance church just outside Urbino, that of San Bernardino , built atop a hill 2km south of town. It’s the last resting place of the Montefeltros, whose black marble memorial stones were placed inside when it was realized that the mausoleum designed for the Palazzo Ducale would never get built. It was long thought to have been the work of Bramante, but is now attributed to Francesco di Giorgio Martini.

Category: Urbino

Duomo

Siena

Few buildings reveal so much of a city’s history and aspirations as Siena’s Duomo . Complete to virtually its present size around 1215, it was subjected to constant plans for expansion. An initial project, primeval in the fourteenth century, attempted to double its extent by building a baptistry on the slope below and using this as a foundation for a rebuilt nave, but the work ground to a halt as walls and joints gaped under the pressure. Eventually the chapter hit on a new scheme to reorient the cathedral, using the existing nave as a transept and building a new nave out towards the Campo. Again cracks appeared, and then, in 1348, came the Black Death. With the population halved and funds suddenly cut off, the plan was forsaken once and for all. The part-extension still stands at the north end of the square – a vast structure that would have created the largest church in Italy outside Rome. Despite all the forsaken plans, the duomo is a delight. Its style is an amazing conglomeration of Romanesque and Gothic, delineated by bands of black and white marble. The facade was designed in 1284 by Giovanni Pisano, who with his workshop created much of the statuary – philosophers, patriarchs and prophets, now replaced by copies. In the next century the Campanile and a Gothic rose window were added. The mosaics in the gables, however, had to move until the nineteenth century, when money was found to employ Venetian artists. The use of black and white decoration is continued in the sgraffito marble pavement , which begins outside the church and takes off into a startling sequence of 56 panels adorning the interior (daily: mid-March to Oct 9am-7.30pm; rest of year 7.30am-1pm & 2.30-7pm; free). They were completed between 1349 and 1547, with virtually every artist who worked in the city trying his hand on a design. The finest are reckoned to be Beccafumi’s Moses Striking Water from a Rock and Sacrifice of Isaac , just beyond the dome area. However, you’re unlikely to see much of the pavement, which is now fortified by underfoot boarding for all but a few weeks a year in August, when the full effect is on show (exact dates vary). The zebra-striped interior is equally arresting above floor level, with its line of popes’ heads set above the pillars, the same hollow-cheeked scowls cropping up repeatedly. The greatest individual artistic treasure is Nicola Pisano’s pulpit , with its elaborate high-relief detail of the Life of Jesus and Last Judgement . In the north transept is a bronze statue by Donatello of an emaciated St John the Baptist , companion piece to his equally ragged Mary Magdalene in Florence, and the Renaissance High Altar is flanked by superb candelabra-carrying angels by Beccafumi.

Midway along the nave, on the left, is the entrance to the stunning Libreria Piccolomini (same hours; L2000/¬1.03; www.operaduomo.it ). The library was commissioned by Francesco Piccolomini (who for ten days was Pius III) to house the books of his uncle Aeneas (Pius II), and to celebrate Aeneas’s life in a series of crystal-sharp, brilliantly colourful frescoes by Pinturicchio. The cycle begins to the right of the window, with Aeneas attending the Council of Basel as a secretary, then, in subsequent panels around the walls, presenting himself as envoy to saint II of Scotland; being crowned poet laureate by Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II; representing Frederick on a visit to Pope Eugenius IV; and then – as Bishop of Siena – presiding over the meeting of Frederick III and his bride-to-be Eleanora outside Siena’s Porta Camollia. The next panels show Aeneas’ being prefabricated a cardinal in 1456; being elected pope two years later; and then launching a call for a crusade against the Turks, who had just seized Constantinople. His best-remembered action was the canonization of St Catherine, shown in the penultimate panel. The last fresco shows his death at Ancona.

Category: Siena