These Are a Few of My Favorite Churches

Venice’s Cannaregio neighborhood has gem after gem.

T he American pavilion at Venice’s Biennale is so without boom, pow, KO, and thwack, so mild-mannered, so not far from the target — but a miss is still a miss. In Minor Keys, the Biennale’s anchor show, is bloated and tedious, with many missed opportunities. So I went to church. In between Biennale visits I needed to take succor in the Lord. I was a serial church goer, visiting my favorite small churches in Cannaregio, the northernmost of Venice’s six sestieres, or districts, and, with Castello, the least touristical. To finish August on a mystical note, I bring you the places I always try to visit in Venice. I think I might have been a travel agent in some past life.

The Republic of Venice fell in 1797, at 1,100 years old, when French troops under Napoleon’s command forced the last doge, the supreme leader, to abdicate. What a feather in the despot’s tricorn must that have been. I chuckle over most art restitution claims these days, in part because around a third of Venice’s art treasures were looted, many sent to the Louvre, now flush with works by Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. Some slipped through grasping French fingers, among them Titian’s Martyrdom of St. Lawrence from 1558, or Larry on the Grill, as graduate students call it. It’s in the church called the I Gesuiti in Cannaregio, not to be confused with the Gesuati in Dorsoduro on the Giudecca canal. That’s a lovely Rococo church with art by Tiepolo and Piazzetta, but follow the scent of burning flesh to see the splendid Titian. It’s that convincing.

I’m a sucker for nocturnes. Lawrence was a Christian deacon in Rome, tortured and martyred, so we’re told in The Golden Legend, on the flaming gridiron, refusing to renounce his faith. He was in his early 30s, so he might still have been doing chest presses at Gold’s Gym. It’s a scary, chaotic scene illuminated by the flames under the grill, two blazing lanterns on the steps leading to a temple, and the divine light piercing the clouds. I love the light glistening from the Roman soldiers’ armor and the spotlights on evil pagan faces. It’s about 15 feet tall, so it has presence. “If it burns, it earns,” says the old TV news mantra, but it’s timeless.

Santa Maria dei Miracoli, is a church dedicated to Mary, Jesus’s mother, as miracle worker and intercessor. It’s got to be my favorite Venetian church. It’s a feast of marble, mostly planed rather than sculpted so the stone’s polychrome veins star. Three marvels ought to draw discerning visitors there. First, it’s tucked among three small canals on its own tiny, triangular island, so technically it was a challenge. It fits without looking forced and from all sides. The façade is the most abstract and flattest of any in Venice. Carrara, Parian, and Verona marble, gray, blue, black, and yellow, circles, semi-circles, and rectangles made it rich and various but light and simple. It looks like clouds floating on the water. The Italians didn’t do stained glass the way the French did for their churches. Marble played the role of color.

Second, it was designed, built, and decorated by one artist, Pietro Lombardo, with help from his sons, Tullio and Antonio, and the family workshop, more or less at the same time in the 1480s and left alone over the centuries. It’s nearly all marble inside, too, with very little painting. Marble is so soothing when left on its own. And who doesn’t welcome a miracle now and then? Even before the church was built, the small votive picture of the Virgin and Baby Jesus — now the altarpiece — was thought to be a conduit for miracles. It’s an icon-style painting from around 1400 and was displayed on an exterior wall in the neighborhood. The church was built around it.

The Lombardi perfected Classical Revival — Renaissance — sculpture style, which got to Venice a bit on the slow side since the aesthetic there was pulled, of course, to Florence, Siena, and Rome but also to Constantinople, which fell to the Ottomans — Muslims — in 1453. This closed the books on the Roman Empire and curtailed a chunk of Venice’s cultural links to the Byzantine world. Oil painting, a new phenomenon, was made for Venice since glazes and impasto picked up light and sparkled much as rippling water does, so the premium was less on sculpture. I think the family of sculptors responded with a maximum of serenity, figures that seem well on their way to the realm of angels. Of course, being in the business of tombs led them there.

The patterns in hundreds of marble panels from floor to ceiling are a big part of the interior decoration. Think of Rothko or Frankenthaler or Rorschach tests, but they’re dreamy. Rorschach tests are probably best since your emotions and personality will run with them.

The Lombardi did all the considerable carving, but my favorite things are the two little sculptures on the balustrade by the altar. They are tiny — two saints, about a foot and a half each and truly good things coming in small packages. Santa Maria is an intimate church but for a full-blown Lombardi tomb, no holds barred, gloves off, no stone unturned, you have to walk a few tiny canals over the sestieri line to Castello for the forever home of Doge Pietro Mocenigo in San Zanipolo in Castello. Twenty-five doges are buried there. So much history, so much static there, so stick with Santa Maria for contemplation.

Santa Maria was closed from the late ’80s to around 2000 for restoration. Salt water, the tides, and humanity have wrestled over Venice since the beginning. Much of the city stands on tens of thousands of petrified wood pilings driven side by side through as much as 25 feet of mud at the bottom of the water into supportive clay. Waterproof Istrian stone on top, above the high tide line, and then brick made for a base that lasted centuries. Marble cladding was suspended by hooks, leaving a space between bricks and marble in the event that if the bricks got wet, their sea salt moisture and the marble’s natural calcium salts wouldn’t interact and cause erosion.

This worked until the chemical industry developed in Mestre on the mainland, leading companies to pump massive amounts of water from new wells to cool machines. In the ’50s and ’60s, parts of Venice sank eight inches. Pumping stopped and water was pumped back into the wells but the erosion to brick and marble was swift and contagious. The 1966 flood, nearly as severe in Venice as in Florence, didn’t help. The American and British support group Save Venice did the restoration.

The church of Madonna dell’Orto — Our Lady in the Vegetable Garden — was Tintoretto’s parish church deep in Cannaregio, but lots of patrician families lived in the hood, so it’s packed with art. He’s buried there. Tintoretto is Veronese’s and Titian’s peer, and his Presentation of the Virgin from the mid-1550s is very grand. Titian painted a big version of the same subject in the late 1530s, but Tintoretto’s is dynamically diagonal and something that would have inspired Cecil B. DeMille.

His Last Judgment, Worship of the Golden Calf, and Moses Receiving the Tables of the Law, narrow but each soaring nearly 20 feet tall, are there, too. They’re frenetic doozies. Tintoretto didn’t exactly paint these for his grave, though he did the pictures in the late 1550s and early 1560s for the price of his materials only.

Sant’Alvise is a tiny church with a plain brick exterior and looking so nunnish that tourists miss it or fear going near it. Its facade has a single oculus, so we imagine a medieval flock camera. It is in what has to be the quietest part of Venice, and it is the equivalent of the projects in small American cities. In this little box, though, is a frescoed ceiling depicting Heavenly Jerusalem in a very blue palette with lots of putti.

Giambattista Tiepolo’s giant triptych is there, mature work from the late 1730s by Venice’s most international artist since Titian. The church owns relics related to the flagellation of Jesus, the Crown of Thorns, and the march to Calvary, and the nuns at the time wanted paintings as grand, visual elaborations. I saw them for the first time in the ’80s and was astounded they were in so modest a place. He’d go on to work for Bavarian princes and the king of Spain. Tiepolo is high Rococo, fizzy and fluffy, with a cool palette, and elevates the soul.

If I’m in Venice on a Sunday I usually go to St. George, the Anglican church in Dorsoduro since the sermons are in English and always good. I saw there were no services in August — can’t blame that on a shortage of gin — so I went where, I suspect, no Vermont Methodist had ever gone before me. I went to San Pietro di Castello, for centuries Venice’s cathedral and the seat of its Roman Catholic Patriarch. It’s on the edge of Castello, on its own tiny island, and it’s not only small but, for a basilica with a Palladio facade, undistinguished, even inconspicuous. Why? Venice, though infinitely Catholic from the get-go in the eighth century, kept a watchful, suspicious distance from the popes. Venice was in the business of Venice, its political, economic, and imperial aggrandizement.

Until 1807 the church dedicated to San Marco, Venice’s patron saint, grand, at the head of Venice’s main square, facing the procurator offices and steps from the Mint, was officially and merely the Doge’s chapel. Then, back under Napoleon’s thumb after a few years of Austrian rule, San Marco was made Venice’s cathedral.

Sunday’s service was in Italian, so it was easy for me to follow, generally. The priest seemed friendly and benign, from the Order of St. Francis of Sales so very much engaged in the education of delinquents so they’re better Catholics and good citizens. Even if his sermon was in English I think my mind would have wandered to parts cioccolato fondente gelato. There’s a nice Madonna and Child with Souls in Purgatory from around 1650, painted by Luca Giordano.

The pols and moguls running Venice often feuded with the popes, who ran a religion but also chunks of Italy. Clashes, interdictions, and reconciliations came and went, but one element in their bouts of friction was their different governments, one a republic and the other an absolute monarchy. Venice was very much an oligarchy, but it did indeed have elections with upset winners and losers but what a crazy system. It suited them well, though, for hundreds of years, mostly unchanged from 1268 when it was first developed to 1797.

The Doge was the head of state, chief oligarch, commander in chief, and the republic’s CEO, elected for life and though over time the patrician families diluted his power, he was always more than ceremonial. The Doge also led the kinds of official processions Canaletto and Guardi painted, things like the republic’s annual marriage to the sea.

How to get one? On the death of the old Doge, the Great Council met, a congress of patricians, notables, and nouveau riches numbering in the hundreds, sometimes close to 2,000. The quorum to do business in 1797 was 600. A consigliere from the Great Council was first sent to St. Mark’s Square to grab a random boy and drag him if needed to the Council chambers. Then and there he drew the names of 30 councilors from a box. Then he picked nine of the 30 by lot. The nine nominated 40 candidates, each needing at least seven votes. The 40 were cut by lot to twelve. The twelve nominated 25, each needing at least nine votes.

The nine picked an electoral college of 45, each needing at least seven votes. The 45 were cut by lot to eleven and the eleven chose the 41 who elected the Doge. Each member could propose one candidate. All were discussed and, if deemed worth the trouble, interviewed. Each elector cast a vote for each candidate he found acceptable. The candidate with the most “acceptable” votes won, provided he mustered 25 votes, and after that, received a horn-shaped hat. Old men were the best material since they wouldn’t last long enough to accumulate too much power.

There were 120 doges from 697 to 1797, though pedants differ on when the count should begin so one more is sometimes added. Of course, the selection’s so convoluted to thwart campaigns driven by bribes and concentrations of power in this family or that. Now doesn’t the electoral college seem easy? Yes, it does, but in the case of Venice, it worked. Its system combined democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy, ditched the ancient divine rights of kings and popes, and delivered a thousand years of stability and prosperity.