Baldassarre Longhena

Longhena gave Venice its baroque, and one silhouette that the city cannot be pictured without. Born in Venice in 1596 or 1597, the son of a stonemason, he trained under Vincenzo Scamozzi and so inherited the Palladian tradition directly — then spent his career pulling it toward drama.

He was under thirty when he won the competition for Santa Maria della Salute, the plague church at the entrance to the Grand Canal, begun in 1631 and not consecrated until 1687, five years after his death. Its octagonal plan, vast dome and the great scrolled buttresses that ring it were unlike anything in Venice, and the building works from every angle because it was sited to be seen from the water on all sides.

His palaces took the Venetian façade — already more window than wall — and deepened it. At Ca' Pesaro and Ca' Rezzonico he cut the openings back behind heavy columns, so the fronts read as layers of light and shadow rather than as a flat screen of tracery. It is the clearest difference between a Longhena palace and the Gothic ones beside it.

He worked almost entirely in Venice and its lagoon, and remained the Republic's leading architect for half a century until his death in 1682. Several of his buildings were finished by others, Giorgio Massari and Antonio Gaspari among them.