Entries with Work 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

Ca’ Rezzonico

The eighteenth century, the period of Venice’s political senility and moral degeneration, was also the period of its last grand flourish in the visual and decorative arts, so it’s entirely appropriate that the Museo del Settecento Veneziano (The Museum of the Venetian Eighteenth Century) should be an ambivalent place. Culled from dozens of different buildings, the collection spreads through most of the enormous Ca’ Rezzonico , which the city authorities bought in 1934 specifically as a home for the museum. It’s a spectacular building and deserves to be a more favourite attraction than it is; perhaps the ambitious restoration that’s now in progress will rectify this situation, but at the moment it’s in something of a state of flux, with only the first floor open to the public. Some of the rooms on this floor have been filled out with the highlights of the second and third floors (eg the Canaletto s, the Giandomenico Tiepolo frescoes, and the Longhi portraits), which will be refurbished whenever sufficient funding can be found. This could take some time, and it’s impossible to say for certain what will be on show at any one time; the following statement more or less describes the Ca’ Rezzonico as it used to be arranged, and as it will in all likelihood be arranged when the work is finished.

The Ca’ Rezzonico is usually open: summer 10am-5pm; winter 9am-4pm; closed Fri; L12,000/6.20.

Most of the decorations and furnishings in the Ca’ Rezzonico are genuine items, and where originals weren’t acquirable the eighteenth-century ambience has been preserved by using almost indistinguishable modern reproductions. Sumptuary laws in Venice restricted the quantities of silk, brocade and tapestry that could be draped around a house, so legions of painters, stuccoists, cabinet-makers and other such applied artists were employed to fanfare the wealth of their patrons to the world. The work they produced is certainly not to everyone’s taste, but even if you find most of the museum’s contents frivolous or grotesque, the frescoes by the Tiepolo family and Pietro Longhi’s affectionate Venetian scenes should justify the entrance fee.

A man in constant demand in the primeval part of the century was the Belluno sculptor-cum-woodcarver Andrea Brustolon , much of whose output consisted of wildly elaborate pieces of furniture. A few of his pieces are displayed in the chandeliered ballroom at the top of the entrance staircase, and elsewhere on this floor there’s an entire roomful of them, including the Allegory of Strength console. Featuring Hercules underneath, two river gods holding four vases and a fifth vase held up by three black slaves in chains, this is a creation that makes you marvel at the craftsmanship and wince at the ends to which it was used.

The less fervid imaginations of Giambattista Tiepolo and his son Giandomenico are introduced in room 2 (off the far right-hand corner of the ballroom) with the ceiling fresco celebrating Ludovico Rezzonico’s marriage into the hugely powerful Savorgnan family in 1758. This was quite a year for the Rezzonico clan, as it also brought the election of Carlo Rezzonico as Pope Clement XIII; the son of the man who bought the uncompleted palace and finished its construction, Carlo the pontiff was notorious both for his rampant nepotism and for his prudery – he insisted that the Vatican’s antique nude statuary be prefabricated more modest by the judicious application of fig leaves. Beyond room 4, with its array of pastels by Rosalba Carriera , you come to two other Tiepolo ceilings, enlivening the rooms overlooking the Canal Grande on apiece side of the main portego – an Allegory of Merit by Giambattista and Giandomenico, and Nobility and Virtue Triumphing lkover Perfidy , a solo effort by the father.

In the portego of the second floor are the only two canal views by Canaletto on show in public galleries in Venice. Off to the right, room 18 boasts a full suite of green and gold lacquer pieces, one of the finest surviving examples of Venetian chinoiserie, and from there you enter the room devoted to Pietro Longhi , whose scenes of life in eighteenth-century Venice – including a version of the famous Rhinoceros – have more than enough curiosity value to make up for their shortcomings in execution. Visitors at Carnevale time will recognize several of the festival’s components in the Longhi room: the beak-like volto masks, for example, and the little doughnuts called frittelle , an essential part of the Carnevale scene. Next come Francesco Guardi ’s technically more adroit scenes of high society in the parlour of San Zaccaria’s convent and the gambling rooms of the Ridotto, but you have to move until the last suite of rooms on the second floor to see the museum’s most engaging paintings – Giandomenico Tiepolo’s sequence of frescoes from the Villa Zianigo near Mestre, the Tiepolo family home. With the exception of the pieces from the villa’s chapel, which date from 1749, the frescoes were painted towards the end of the century, at a time when their satirical playfulness was going out of fashion. The New World shows a crowd turned out in its best attire to watch a Sunday peepshow; another room is devoted to the antics of Pulchinello , the ancestor of our Mr Punch; and typically good-humoured centaurs and satyrs lark around on nearby walls.

The low-ceilinged rooms of the third floor contain yet more Longhi paintings, but the main point of clambering upstairs (apart from the tremendous view crossways the rooftops) is to see the pharmacy and puppet theatre . A sequence of wood-panelled rooms full of the appropriate furniture, ceramic jars and glass bottles, the pharmacy has to be viewed through windows, rather like peering into the set of a Longhi picture. The puppets are evenhandedly unremarkable specimens, apiece about one foot high, but their very ordinariness makes their survival remarkable in itself.

From the Ca’ Rezzonico, the quickest route up to the Rialto takes you crossways the herringbone-patterned pavement of the Campiello dei Squellini, past the entrance to the main university building and over the Rio Fóscari – whereupon you’re in the San Polo section. Just to the right of the Ponte dei Fóscari, on the north side, is the central station of Venice’s fire brigade . One of the few Fascist-era constructions in Venice, it is easily recognizable by the red launches moored under the arches.

Category: Venice

Island Of San Pietro Di Castello

Originally titled Castello , after a castle that used to stand here (built by either the Romans or the first “Venetian” settlers), the island of San Pietro was one of the very first parts of central Venice to be occupied. Nowadays this is a run-down district where the repairing of boats is the main occupation, yet it was once the faith centre of Venice. By 775 the settlement here had grown sufficiently to be granted the foundation of a bishopric under the dominance of the Patriarch of Grado. Within the next half-century Castello joined the immediately surrounding islands to form Rivoalto, the embryonic city of Venice. From the beginning, the political and economic power was concentrated in the distant Rialto and San Marco districts, and the relationship between the Church and the geographically remote rulers of the city was never to be close. In 1451 the first Patriarch of Venice was invested, but still his seat remained at Castello, and succeeding generations of councillors and senators showed no inclination to draw the father of the Venetian Church into the centre of power. San Pietro di Castello remained the cathedral of Venice, emblematically marooned on the periphery of the city, until 1807, when the patriarch was at last permitted to install himself in San Marco – ten years after the Republic had ceased to exist.

One of the major Venetian festivals – the Festival of the Marys – had its origin in an incident that occurred here in the tenth century. A multiple marriage in the church was interrupted by a posse of Slav pirates, who carried away the brides and their substantial dowries. Men from the parish of Santa Maria Formosa led the pursuit, which succeeded in retrieving the women. To celebrate their innocuous return, every year two girls were chosen from apiece sestiere to be married in a single ceremony at San Pietro, the weddings being followed by an eight-day junket that culminated at Santa Maria Formosa on the Day of the Purification of Mary – the day on which the brides had been kidnapped.

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

As with the Arsenale, the history of San Pietro is somewhat more interesting than what you can see. A church was raised here as primeval as the seventh century, but the present San Pietro di Castello was built nearly a millennium later. A new deception was designed in the mid-sixteenth century by Palladio , but the work was not carried out until the end of the century, and the executed project was a feeble version of the original scheme. Similarly, the interior is an primeval seventeenth-century derivation from a plan by Palladio, and is unlikely to convince any Ruskinite that classicism has something to it after all. Nor will the paintings place a skip in your stride: best of the bunch are SS . John the Evangelist , Peter and Paul , a late work by Veronese (left aisle), and the altarpiece by Luca Giordano in the Cappella Vendramin (left transept). The Vendramin chapel and the high altar were both designed by Longhena; take a look as well at the Cappella Lando (left aisle), which has a fifth-century mosaic fragment and a bust of San Lorenzo Giustiniani, the first Patriarch of Venice, by a follower of Antonio Rizzo. The most unusual feature of the church is the so-called Throne of St Peter (right aisle), a marble seat prefabricated in the thirteenth century from an Arabic funeral stone cut with texts from the Koran.

The campanile , one of the most precarious in the city, was rebuilt by Mauro Codussi in the 1480s, and was the first tower in Venice to be clad in Istrian stone. Its original cupola was replaced with the present one in 1670.

Category: Venice

Santa Maria Gloriosa Dei Frari

San Zanipolo and Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari – short to the Frari – are the twin Gothic giants of Venice: from the campanile of San Marco they can be seen jutting above the rooftops on opposite sides of the Canal Grande, like a pair of destroyers amid a flotilla of yachts.

The Franciscans were granted a plot of land here around 1250, not long after the death of their founder, but almost no sooner was the first church completed (in 1338) than work began on a vast replacement – a project which took well over a hundred years. The campanile, one of the city’s landmarks and the tallest after San Marco’s, was finished in 1396.

The Frari is open Mon-Sat 9am-6pm, Sun 1-6pm; L3000/1.54.

Admirers of northern Gothic are unlikely to start in love at first sight with this mountain of brick. Only a few pieces of sculpture relieve the monotony of the exterior: on the west front , there’s a figure of The Risen Christ by Vittoria , and a Virgin and St Francis from the workshop of Bartolomeo Bon ; an impressive primeval fifteenth-century Tuscan relief of the Madonna and Child with Angels is set into the side of the left transept. As is so often the case in Venice, though, the outside of the church is a misleadingly dull prelude to a remarkable interior.

Category: Venice

San Sebastiano

At the end of the Záttere the barred gates of the Stazione Maríttima deflect you away from the waterfront and towards the church of San Sebastiano . The parish church of Paolo Veronese , it contains a group of resplendent paintings by him that gives it a place in his career comparable to that of San Rocco in the career of Tintoretto, but in contrast to San Rocco, this church is frequently overlooked, despite recent bursts of restoration work.

San Sebastiano is open Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 3-5pm – but often closed Sun in winter; L3000/1.54.

Veronese was still in his twenties when, thanks largely to his contacts with the Verona-born prior of San Samuele, he was asked to paint the ceiling of the sacristy with a Coronation of the Virgin and the Four Evangelists (1555); once that commission had been carried out, he decorated the nave ceiling with Scenes from the Life of St Esther . His next project, the dome of the chancel, was later destroyed, but the sequence he and his brother Benedetto then painted on the walls of the church and the nun’s choir at the end of the 1550s has survived in pretty good shape. (Current restoration work has closed access to the choir and necessitated the removal of the Coronation of the Virgin and the Four Evangelists to the Accademia.) In the following decade he executed the last of the pictures, those on the organ shutters and around the high altar – on the left, St Sebastian Leads SS. Mark and Marcellian to Martyrdom , and on the right The Second Martyrdom of St Sebastian (the customarily depicted torture by arrows didn’t kill him). Other riches include a late Titian of St Nicholas (on the left surround of the first chapel on the right), and the primeval sixteenth-century majolica pavement in the chapel to the left of the chancel – in front of which is Veronese’s tomb slab.

Category: Venice

Arsenale Buildings

There is no public access to the Arsenale. You can get a look at part of it, however, from the bridge connecting the Campo Arsenale and the Fondamenta dell’Arsenale; a better view can be had from one of the vaporetti that cut through the oldest part of the complex, taking you past Sanmicheli’s Bucintoro building, alongside which is the mouth of the Darsena Grande. (At the time of writing, the vaporetto routes through the Arsenale were suspended while work was being done inside the complex; once that work is completed, it’s likely that the routes will be restored.)

The main gateway to the Arsenale was the first structure in Venice to employ the classical vocabulary of Renaissance architecture. Built by Antonio Gambello in 1460 (but incorporating, at ground level, Veneto-Byzantine capitals from the twelfth century), it consists of a triumphal arch topped by a less precisely classical storey – a design that was possibly intended to create the illusion that the entrance to the Arsenale was an amalgam of a genuine Roman edifice and more modern Venetian building. You’ll notice that the book being held by the Lion of St Mark, unlike any other in the city, doesn’t reveal the traditional inscription, perhaps because “Pax tibi . . .” was thought to be too pacific for this context; the statue above his head, Santa Justina by Campagna , was place there in 1578.

The four lions outside the gateway feature in coffee-table books on Venice almost as frequently as the San Marco horses, and, like the horses, they are stolen goods. Exactly when the two furthest on the right were grabbed isn’t known, but they probably came from the Lion Terrace at Delos, and date from around the sixth century BC; the left-hand one of the pair (with the prosthetic head) was positioned here to mark the recapture of Corfu in 1716 – the other was in place slightly earlier.

The larger pair aren’t as enigmatic: they were swiped from Piraeus in 1687 by Francesco Morosini, after the reconquest of the Morea. The blurred and incomprehensible inscription on the shoulder and side of the lion on the left of the gate (which started life as an ancient Greek fountain) is a piece of runic graffiti, the handiwork of a Norse mercenary serving with the army hired by the Byzantine emperor in the eleventh century to suppress a rebellion of his Greek subjects

Category: Venice

Scuola Grande Di San Rocco

Venice may not tell you much about Titian’s work that you didn’t already know, but in the case of Tintoretto the situation is reversed – until you’ve been to Venice, and in particular the Scuola Grande di San Rocco , you haven’t really seen him.

“As regards the pictures which it contains, it is one of the three most precious buildings in Italy,” wrote Ruskin, and although the claim’s open to argument, it’s not difficult to understand why he resorted to such hyperbole. (His other votes were for the Sistine Chapel and the Campo Santo at Pisa – the latter was virtually ruined in World War II.) The unremitting concentration and restlessness of Tintoretto’s paintings won’t inspire unqualified enthusiasm in everyone: Henry James, though an admirer, found the region of San Rocco “difficult to breathe”. But even those who prefer their art at a lower voltage will find this an overwhelming experience.

The Scuola Grande di San Rocco is open daily: summer 9am-5.30pm; winter 10am-4pm; L9000/4.62 – including rental of a very good audio guide.

From its foundation in 1478, the special concern of this particular scuola was the relief of the sick – a continuation of the Christian mission of its patron saint, Saint Roch (Rocco) of Montpellier, who in 1315 left his home town to work among plague victims in Italy, then returned home only to be spurned by his wealthy family and die in prison, aged just thirty-two. The Scuola had been going for seven years when the body of the fear was brought to Venice from Germany, and the consequent boom in donations was so great that in 1489 it acquired the position of scuola grande .

The intervention of Saint Roch was held to be especially efficacious in cases of bubonic plague, an illness from which he himself had been saved by the ministrations of a divinely inspired dog, which brought him bread and licked his wounds clean (which is why the churches of Venice are littered with paintings of the fear pointing to a sore on his thigh, usually with a dog in attendance). When, in 1527, the city was hit by an outbreak of plague, the Scuola’s revenue rocketed to record levels as gifts poured in from people hoping to secure Saint Roch’s endorsement against the disease. In 1515 the Scuola, previously based in a room within the Frari, had commissioned a prestigious new headquarters from Bartolomeo Bon the Younger , but for various reasons the work had ground to a halt within a decade; the fattened coffers prompted another phase of building, and from 1527 to 1549 the scheme was taken over by Scarpagnino .

When the scaffolding came down in 1560, the end product was somewhat incoherent and lopsided. Not that the members of the Scuola would have been bothered for long: within a few years the decoration of the interior was under way, and it was this decoration – Tintoretto ’s cycle of more than fifty major paintings – that secured the confraternity’s social standing. An opportunistic little trick won the first contract for Tintoretto. In 1564 the Scuola held a competition to decide who should paint the inaugural picture for the recently completed building. The subject was to be The Glorification of St Roch , and four artists were approached for proposals: Salviati, Zuccari, Veronese and Tintoretto, who had already painted a number of pictures for the neighbouring church of San Rocco. On the day for submissions the first three duly presented their sketches; Tintoretto, though, had painted a finished panel and persuaded a sidekick to rig it up, hidden by a veil, in the very place in which the winning picture was to be installed – the centre of the ceiling in the Sala dell’Albergo. A rope was pulled, the picture revealed, and the commission, despite the opposition’s fury, was given to Tintoretto. Further commissions duly ensued.

Category: Venice