Chiesa di San Zaccaria Site Features

The facade is the clearest architectural lesson in Venice, because the change of mind is visible from the campo. Antonio Gambello began it in Gothic around 1458 and got as far as the lower storeys, with their pointed niches and Gothic proportions; after his death in 1481 Mauro Codussi finished the upper half in the Renaissance manner he had brought back from Lombardy -- paired round-headed windows, classical pilasters, and a great semicircular crowning gable. The seam runs across the front at roughly the height of the first cornice, and nothing was done to disguise it.

Inside, the plan is unlike any other church in the city. San Zaccaria has a proper ambulatory -- an aisle curving behind the high altar with radiating chapels off it -- which belongs to French and northern Gothic cathedral building and appears nowhere else in Venice. It gives the east end a depth and a walkable circuit that a standard Venetian apse does not have.

The nave is unusually tall and narrow for its width, with vaulting that pushes the height further, and the whole interior is hung with paintings almost floor to ceiling in the 17th-century manner -- a picture gallery arrangement layered over 15th-century architecture.

Beneath it all survives the crypt of the 10th-century church, a low forest of squat columns and groin vaults that predates everything above by five hundred years and now stands permanently in water.

The flooded crypt, a colonnaded 10th-century Romanesque space beneath the current church, holds the tombs of eight doges buried here between the mid-9th and late-12th centuries -- the water underfoot rises and falls with the surrounding canals, and duckboards are sometimes needed to cross it. Upstairs, Giovanni Bellini's San Zaccaria Altarpiece is considered one of his finest late works, and the sacristy holds paintings by Tintoretto, Palma Vecchio, and Anthony van Dyck.

San Zaccaria stands on its own enclosed campo in Castello, reached through a single archway off the Riva degli Schiavoni, less than two minutes' walk from St Mark's Square.

The enclosure is the striking part. Campo San Zaccaria has one narrow entrance and is otherwise walled in by the church and the former convent buildings, so it functions as a courtyard rather than a square -- the noise of the waterfront stops at the arch, and the campo is often silent while thousands of people pass forty metres away.

Those convent buildings are still in use, now occupied by the Carabinieri, which is why the campo has the swept, controlled feel of a private forecourt rather than the improvised look of most Venetian squares.

The proximity to San Marco is the whole paradox of the place. A church holding a Bellini altarpiece and a flooded ducal crypt sits within sight of the most congested square in Europe and takes a fraction of its visitors, because the arch that leads to it does not look like a way through to anything.