Venice: Three Churches

 

Edward Hutton's Venice and Venetia is a guidebook although an extremely well-informed and personal one. He walked and boated throughout the city's sestiere or districts, as well as the nearby islands. He loved the lagoons and the hidden byways but paid particular attention to its many churches. Below are descriptions of three out of the way churches that represent three different eras. * 

S. Francesco della Vigna

The Franciscans rebuilt it in 1534 with a façade by Palladio, and an interior by Jacopo Sansovino… It contains several fine pictures… but nothing to compare for a moment with the glorious enthroned Madonna by Frat’ Antonio da Negroponte, painted in the middle of the fifteenth century, which hangs in the right transept. This is a masterpiece I would walk many miles to see, and for which I would leave any sacred picture by the later great masters of Venice. It has everything that their works so conspicuously lack, and in every way is what we have learnt in Tuscany to expect an altarpiece of the Madonna to be. It is as though before our eyes the canticle of the Magnificat had become visible, as though in a vision we had seen our hearts’ desire. (102)

S. Maria dei Miracoli

... close by at the other end of the Campo stands one of the most beautiful architectural treasures of the city--I mean the church of S. Maria dei Miracoli. This was built in 1480 by Angelo Amadi, the nephew of Elena Badoer, "the most beautiful Venetian of her day,"who lived close by in this quarter. He built it to receive a picture of the Madonna supposed to be miraculous, which Francesco Amadi, his uncle, the husband of the beautiful Elena, had painted. ... There is no other Renaissance church in Venice to compare with this; both within and without it is altogether lovely, nor can we sufficiently praise its quadrangular domes choir uplifted above the nave, its beautiful ambones, the fine barrel vaulting with its gilded coffers by Girolamo da Treviso, nor the rich marble and carvings with which Pietro Lombardo adorned it. (117)

 

S. Maria dei Miracoli, interior

S. Maria Assunta, or I Gesuiti.

As one passes along the Fondamenta one presently sees the great statues of the façade of the Church of the Gesuiti up against the sky. It is but a step down a street on the right to the church door. As we see it, the church could, I suppose, have been created by no one but the Jesuits; it is so utterly barbarous in its flaming vulgarity and crude, insolen assurance, its flamboyant splendor. … their society was suppressed in 1773 in Venice and their convent turned into a barracks. They returned, however, in 1844. Like the cancer, to which Cardinal Manning likened them, they are hard to extirpate, yet with perseverance even this will be accomplished, and the church from being a Jesuit sect become once more Catholic. (120)

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* Edward Hutton, Venice and Venetia, 1911.

Venice: Piazza and Campanile

I believe it is best to arrive in Venice by train. The view as you exit the station is magnificent. On our first visit my wife and I shared a water taxi with some others down the Grand Canal to the Piazza. It is indescribable but no one has done a better job than Edward Hutton.* 

Canaletto--Eighteenth Century

The Piazza di S. Marco, in fact, is not merely the centre of modern or of medieval Venice; in many ways it is Venice herself. It not only contains the most famous and the most splendid buildings of the city—the Church, the Palace, the Government offices, the Library, the Bell Tower, and the Clock Tower of Venice—but it is the universal meeting place and the principal gateway of the calli, the canals, the lagoons, and the sea. All that is meant by the word Venezia is in truth there summed up and expressed.

These considerations would lead us to regard it, even though we did not know it, as the most famous Piazza in Italy and in the world; the most famous and perhaps the most beautiful. Not one of the spacious Piazzas we know so well in Rome, in Florence, in Siena, in Milan, or in Naples can be compared with it either for renown or for beauty; and as we tell over their names we have to admit that, after all, they are of no importance beside the Piazza of St. Mark. Even in Rome, where it would seem we might surely expect to find something at least to compare with it, there is, in fact, nothing; for the Piazza of S. Pietro is a mere vestibule to S. Peter’s church, and has very little to do with the life of the city; the Piazza Venezia is only a cul de sac and moreover a ruin, while the Piazza Colonna is just a gap in the Corso, the Piazza di Spagna a wilderness of strangers. There is no Piazza in Rome which may be said to be the centre of the city, or, to sum it up and in fact to stand as a symbol for it in the imagination of mankind, as the Piazza of S. Mark does even today sum up and symbolize Venice. (84-85)

 Campanile. 

But the great treasure of the Piazza was the Campanile, which came to so tragic an end in July, 1902…. That tragic day, when the Campanile rather subsided than fell, will never be forgotten by any who witnessed it, The whole of Venice seemed to be assembled in the Piazza, and very many were weeping. Men wrung their hands in frantic helplessness while the noblest tower in Italy sank, as it seemed, into the sea, weary with age. The excavations which were undertaken previous to the rebuilding, now happily nearly completed, and the scientific examination of the debris have shown that it was no insecurity in the foundations that brought the Campanile down, but rather the great old age of the bricks, many of which were little more than dust, blown through and through by the sea wind.

Happily the Campanile is now practically rebuilt—happily for to think of Venice without the Campanile of S. Mark is to us all almost an impossibility. It was not the Piazza alone that the famous bell-tower dominated, but all Venice across whose silent ways that bell, sounded by the watchman on the summit every quarter of an hour by day and night, seemed like an assurance of safety, of our civilization, of Europe, and our Faith. For it was, of course, first and foremost a belfry, and the great bells, that to some extent doubtless contributed by their vast weight to the fall, were the sweetest and noblest voices in Venice. That belfry that Buono made in 1510 was a beautiful open loggia of four arches on each face, which overlooked all Venice and the islands and might be seen from Asolo; for the height of the tower was very great, 323 feet on a base of 42 square feet. (89-90)

Modern view

* Edward Hutton: Venice and Venetia, 1911.   

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Venice: S. Marco

In Venice and Venetia Edward Hutton began his exploration of the fabled city and its environs at S. Marco, the incredibly beautiful chapel of the Doges.

  

If St. Mark’s strikes us first by the Byzantine character of its architecture, its crowd of domes, the vast width of its façade in comparison with its height, it impresses us next, I think, by its strangely lovely colour, the gold and blue and green and red of the mosaics, colour which changes with every change of the sky, which is one thing in the blaze of a summer morning and quite another on an autumn afternoon after rain, when the sky is still full of cloud and the wind comes in melancholy gusts out of the pale gold of a watery sunset. I do not know under the influence of which sky, or at what hour of the day or of the night the church is most beautiful; I only know it is always beautiful: in the golden summer heat or standing amid the winter snow, or in the spring or late autumn when the Piazza has been flooded by the gale in the Adriatic; but I think I love it best when the sky clears in the evening, after a day of rain in early autumn, when some delicate and pure light has suddenly fallen upon the world, and the great façade seems for a moment to be made of pearl and mother of pearl, to reflect every colour and shadow of a beauty that belongs to the sea….

At such an hour in the flagstones of the Piazza, still wet after the day’s rain, the great façade backed by its domes, the flagstaves that stand before it on the pavement, are reflected there as a ship might be at the same mysterious hour to the grey-blue sea; it is as though some vast ship, only by conduct of some star, made her way upon the waters; a ship of pearl in which a thousand vague colours burn and fade and are merged into the grey twilight into the night and it is gone.*

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*Edward Hutton: Venice and Venetia, 1911, pp. 49-50.

Venice: S. Zaccaria Altarpiece

 The church of S. Zaccaria in Venice is situated not far behind S. Marco and the Doge's Palace. As Edward Hutton noted it is gloomy inside but when you drop a coin in a box, Giovanni Bellini's masterpiece lights up in dazzling splendor. It is wonderful to see a painting where it was originally meant to be. Notice how Bellini's faux columns match the real columns. Here is Hutton's description.

The present church, with its beautiful façade, dates from the fifteenth century, and is a spacious though rather gloomy building. Eight Doges lie therin, but its great treasure is the famous altarpiece by Giovanni Bellini of the Madonna and Child enthroned with four saints. It is one of the finest of his works. Completed in 1505, it is in the new manner which came to Bellini in his age as a new vision of the world, caught perhaps from the enthusiasm of his young disciples, who were to revolutionize painting. Our Lady and the Holy Child are still enthroned in that niche with which we are so familiar, but there is something new in the picture which assures us, as it did Vasari, that it is a work in the “modern” manner. Perhaps we find it in the figure of S. Lucia, who stands on the right of the throne, her fair hair lying all gold across her shoulders, the lighted lamp in her hand, the curved palm branch, too, the sign of her martyrdom. Beside her is S. Jerome, his Bible open before him, the father of monasticism. To the left stand S. Catherine of Alexandria and S. Peter. *

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*Edward Hutton: Venice and Venetia, New York, 1911, p. 96.