Madonna dell'Orto Site Features

The brick facade of 1460-64 is one of the best-preserved pieces of Venetian Gothic church building, and it is worth reading from left to right rather than as a whole. Pilaster strips divide it into three, matching the three aisles behind; niches along the upper edge hold statues of the twelve apostles, and a large rose window sits at the centre of the middle bay.

The main portal is the anomaly. Carved in the 1460s and attributed to Bartolomeo Bon, it mixes a Gothic ogee arch with classical Renaissance detailing in the same doorway -- the two vocabularies overlapping at the exact moment Venice was changing from one to the other, in a building whose facade above it is uncompromisingly Gothic.

The campanile, completed in 1503, ends not in the usual Venetian pyramid but in an onion dome ringed with statues, a form that reads as Eastern rather than Italian and is unlike any other bell tower in the city.

Inside, the church is a three-aisled Gothic hall on Greek marble columns, wide and high and -- crucially for what hangs in it -- lit from clear windows rather than stained glass. The apse was built deep enough to take Tintoretto's two enormous canvases facing each other, which is the arrangement the whole east end now exists to serve.

The Gothic brick facade, completed between 1460 and 1464, is divided into three sections by pilaster strips, with quadruple mullioned windows and a large central rose window. The bell tower, finished in 1503, carries an onion-shaped dome with visibly Eastern influence, unusual among Venice's church towers. Inside, Tintoretto's Adoration of the Golden Calf and Last Judgement dominate the apse, with further works by him and his son Domenico throughout the church.

Madonna dell'Orto stands on its own fondamenta in northern Cannaregio, facing a canal that runs out almost immediately into the open lagoon at the Sacca della Misericordia.

This is as far from the tourist city as central Venice gets. The campo in front is brick-paved, quiet and residential, washing hangs across the calli behind it, and the nearest thing to a crowd is the queue at the vaporetto pontoon.

Tintoretto lived a few doors away on the Fondamenta dei Mori, and his house still carries a plaque. The distance between his front door and the apse holding his two largest canvases is about a minute's walk, which is the single most useful fact about the church: this was local work, made for the building at the end of his own street.

North of the church the city simply stops. The fondamenta gives onto the lagoon with San Michele and Murano across the water, and the light here -- open, reflected off a wide surface, coming from the north -- is noticeably different from the enclosed light of the interior sestieri.