Pocket Rough Guide Venice by Rough Guides

Author:Rough Guides
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Italy
Publisher: Apa Publications
Published: 2024-04-06T10:10:15+00:00

Santi Giovanni e Paolo

MAP

Campo SS Giovanni e Paolo santigiovanniepaolo.it. Charge.

Like the Frari, the massive Gothic brick edifice of Santi Giovanni e Paolo – slurred by the Venetian dialect into San Zanipolo – was built for one of the mendicant orders, whose social mission (preaching to and tending the sick and the poor) required a lot of space for their congregation. The first church built on this site was begun in 1246 after Doge Giacomo Tiepolo (d.1249) was inspired by a dream to donate the land to the Dominicans. Tiepolo’s simple sarcophagus is outside, on the left of the door, next to that of his son Doge Lorenzo Tiepolo (d.1275); the cavernous interior – approximately 90m long, 38m wide at the transepts, 33m high in the centre – houses the tombs of some 25 other doges.

Most of the entrance wall is given over to the glorification of the Mocenigo family, with three monuments to fifteenth-century doges from this dynasty. But the finest funerary monuments are in the chancel, where Doge Michele Morosini, who ruled for just four months before dying of plague in 1382, is buried in the tomb at the front on the right, a work which to Ruskin’s eyes showed “the exactly intermediate condition of feeling between the pure calmness of early Christianity, and the boastful pomp of the Renaissance faithlessness”. Full-blown Renaissance pomp is represented by the tomb of Doge Andrea Vendramin (d.1478), diagonally opposite, while one of the earliest examples of Renaissance style in Venice – Pietro Lombardo’s tomb for Doge Pasquale Malipiero (d.1462) – is in the left aisle, to the left of the sacristy. (The sacristy itself contains an excellent painting, Alvise Vivarini’s Christ Carrying the Cross.) The Lombardo family were also responsible for the tombs of Doge Giovanni Mocenigo and Doge Pietro Mocenigo, to the right and left of the main door. Close by, the second altar of the right aisle is adorned by one of Zanipolo’s finest paintings, Giovanni Bellini’s SS Vincent Ferrer, Christopher and Sebastian.

At the top of the right aisle, Giambattista Piazzetta’s St Dominic in Glory covers the vault of the Cappella di San Domenico, alongside which is a tiny shrine containing a relic of St Catherine of Siena. She died in 1380 and her body promptly entered the relic market – most of it is in Rome, but her head is in Siena, one foot is here, and lesser relics are scattered about Italy. Round the corner, in the south transept, two other superb paintings hang close together: a Coronation of the Virgin attributed to Cima da Conegliano and Giovanni Martini da Udine, and Lorenzo Lotto’s St Antonine (1542).

And don’t miss the Cappella del Rosario, at the end of the north transept. In 1867 a fire destroyed its paintings by Tintoretto, as well as Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna and Titian’s Martyrdom of St Peter, San Zanipolo’s two most celebrated paintings. A lengthy restoration made use of surviving fragments and installed other pieces such as Veronese’s ceiling panels and an Adoration on the left of the door.

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