The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

The marble-lined interior contains some of the most intricate decorative sculpture
to be seen in Venice. The Annunciation and half-length figures of two saints on
the balustrade at the altar end are thought to be by Tullio; nobody is sure which
members of the family created the rest of the carvings in this part of the church,
though it’s likely that Antonio was responsible for the children’s heads at the base
of the chancel arch (which Ruskin hated: “the man who could carve a child’s head
so perfectly must have been wanting in all human feeling, to cut it off, and tie it by
the hair to a vine leaf ”) and the adjacent siren figures (which Ezra Pound declared
to be incomparably beautiful). At the opposite end of the church, the columns
below the nuns’ choir are covered with extraordinary filigree stonework, featuring
tiny birds with legs as thin as cocktail sticks. The miracle-working Madonna by
Nicolò di Pietro still occupies the altar, while overhead a sequence of fifty saints
and prophets, painted in 1528 by Pier Pennacchi, is set into the Miracoli’s unusual
panelled ceiling.
Take Calle Castelli from the front end of the church and you’ll come to the
Palazzo Soranzo-van Axel, whose fine Gothic entrance, at the end of the fondamenta,
retains its original wooden door – a unique feature in Venice.
The Gesuiti district
The major monument in the northeastern corner of Cannaregio is Santa Maria
Assunta, commonly known simply as the Gesuiti (daily 10am–noon & 4–6pm).
Built for the Jesuits in 1714–29, six decades after the foundation here of their first
monastery in Venice, the church was clearly planned to make an impression on a city
that was habitually mistrustful of the order’s close relationship with the papacy.
Although the disproportionately huge facade clearly wasn’t the work of a weekend,
most of the effort went into the stupefying interior, where green and white
marble covers every wall and stone is carved to resemble swags of damask. The result
is jaw-dropping, and also very heavy – a factor in the subsidence which is a constant
problem with the Gesuiti. Unless you’re a devotee of Palma il Giovane (in which
case make for the sacristy, where the walls and ceiling are covered with paintings by
him), the only painting to seek out is the Martyrdom of St Lawrence (first altar on the
left), a broodingly intense night-scene painted by Titian in 1558.
Almost opposite the church is the Oratorio dei Crociferi (Fri & Sat: April–June,
Sept & Oct 3–6pm; July & Aug 3.30–6.30pm; e2), the remnant of a convent
complex founded in the twelfth century by the crusading religious order known as
the Crociferi or The Bearers of the Cross. A part of the complex was given over to
a hostel that was originally for pilgrims but by the fifteenth century had become a
hospice solely for poor women. (By the late sixteenth century Venice had around
one hundred such institutions for the penniless.) In return for free meals and accommodation,
these women were required to help in the maintenance of the convent
and to pray each morning in the oratory, which in the 1580s was decorated by
Palma il Giovane with a cycle of Scenes from the History of the Order of the Crociferi.
Restored in the 1980s, the paintings show Palma’s technique at its subtlest, and the
richness of the colours is a good advertisement for modern cleaning techniques.
There’s not much else to look at in the immediate vicinity. Titian used to live in
Calle Larga dei Botteri (no. 5179–83), across the Rio dei Gesuiti – but the house
has been rebuilt and the construction of the Fondamente Nove (see p.156) did away
with the waterside garden where he entertained such exalted clients as Henry III of
France. A short distance to the west, past the huge sixteenth-century Palazzi Zen,
the church of Santa Caterina comes into view. The fourteenth-century ship’s-keel
ceiling, destroyed by fire in 1978, has now been rebuilt, but the building belongs to
a school and is thus out of bounds.
Cannaregio Southern and eastern Cannaregio
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