The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

Restoration work in the 1860s made 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 damage 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 Madonna 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 images on each 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 early 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
made off with it in 1993. Finally, in the second chapel of the left aisle you’ll
find a small Tobias and the Angel by Titian.
To the Scuole della Misericordia
Looking across the canal to the southeast of the church stands the Palazzo
Mastelli, former home of the mercantile family of the same name. The facade
of the much-altered palazzo is a sort of architectural scrap-album, featuring
a Gothic top-floor balcony, thirteenth-century Byzantine fragments set into
sixteenth-century work below, a bit of a Roman altar set into a column by
the corner, and a quaint little relief of a man leading a laden camel – hence its
alternative title, Palazzo del Cammello.
On the canal’s north side stand the seventeenth-century Palazzo Minelli
Spada and the sixteenth-century Palazzo Contarini dal Zaffo, one of the
many palaces owned by the vast Contarini clan. Numerous though they once
were, the last male of the Contarini line died in 1836, thus adding their name
to the roll call of patrician dynasties that vanished in the nineteenth century.
Lack of money almost certainly accounts for their extinction – already impoverished
by loans made to the dying Republic and by the endless round of parties,
many of the Venetian aristocracy were bankrupted during the Napoleonic
and Austrian occupations, and so, no longer having money for dowries and
other related expenses, they simply chose not to marry. The Casino degli
Cannaregio Northern Cannaregio
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