Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari Site Features

The Frari is built of brick rather than stone, in the Italian Gothic style shared by only two other churches in Venice. Its scale is substantial for the city -- one of the largest church interiors in Venice, with a nave and two side aisles separated by tall columns rising to wooden tie-beams rather than full stone vaulting, a practical adaptation to Venice's soft, unstable ground.

The rood screen dividing the nave from the choir is the only one to survive intact in any Venetian church -- elsewhere, these dividers were typically removed after the Counter-Reformation favored an unobstructed view of the altar.

Beyond the paintings already found throughout the nave and sacristy, the Frari is known for its funerary monuments. Several doges are buried within the church, including Doge Francesco Foscari, whose Gothic tomb is one of the most elaborate ducal monuments in Venice.

The most visually striking is the pyramid-shaped monument to Antonio Canova, built by his students after his death using a design the sculptor had originally created for a different memorial. A procession of mourning figures files through an open doorway into the pyramid's dark interior -- one of the more unusual tomb designs in the city.

The Frari fills most of Campo dei Frari in San Polo, a square that exists largely because the church needed one -- the surrounding calli are narrow, and the campo is the only point from which the brick west front can be seen whole.

The scale is easier to judge from further off than from the square itself. The campanile, still the second tallest in Venice after St Mark's, is visible above the rooftops from much of San Polo and Santa Croce, and functions as the district's orientation point in a quarter where sightlines are otherwise short.

The Scuola Grande di San Rocco stands immediately behind the apse, close enough that the two are effectively one visit. A side canal runs along the church's flank to a water entrance, the route by which building stone originally arrived.