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.