Chiesa dei Gesuiti Site Features

Domenico Rossi's facade of 1715-28 is a competent, conventional Baroque front -- a two-tier composition in white Istrian stone, statues of apostles along the crowning balustrade, and nothing about it that prepares a visitor for the interior. The mismatch is not accidental: the Jesuits spent their money inside.

The plan is a Latin cross with a single wide nave and shallow side chapels, the standard Counter-Reformation arrangement that keeps every worshipper in sight of the high altar. What is done with that plain shell is the point. The nave walls and pilasters are faced in verde antico and white marble, inlaid and carved so that the stone reads as hanging damask -- folds, tassels, seams and a fringed pelmet running the length of the nave, all of it cut from stone. The same illusion continues onto the pulpit, where a marble curtain appears to have been thrown back and left to drape.

The high altar carries a baldachin on ten twisted columns of verde antico, modelled on Bernini's at St Peter's and scaled down for a Venetian parish. Overhead, Francesco Fontebasso's ceiling paintings of 1734 open the vault into painted sky, and Palma the Younger's twenty canvases line the sacristy -- a room that survived from the earlier complex and was reused rather than rebuilt.

The marble "damask" walls are the reason most visitors come, and they reward a slow look -- the carved folds and tassels change character with the light throughout the day. Titian's Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence hangs in the first chapel on the left, and Tintoretto's Assumption of Mary is in the left transept.

The church stands on the Campo dei Gesuiti in northern Cannaregio, a large, plain square a couple of minutes from the Fondamente Nove and the open water of the northern lagoon.

This is the edge of the city facing away from everything visitors come for. The Fondamente Nove is a working quay -- boats to Murano, Burano and the cemetery island leave from here, and the hospital is next door -- so the foot traffic passing the church is mostly Venetian and mostly going somewhere else.

The campo itself is unusually open for Cannaregio and almost entirely undecorated, which sharpens the surprise of the interior: a plain square, a plain facade, and then a room upholstered in stone.

The Gesuiti sits at the point where the dense fabric of Cannaregio stops and the lagoon starts. Step past the church to the fondamenta and the view is north across open water to San Michele and Murano, with nothing built between.