Santi Giovanni e Paolo Site Features

Built in Italian Gothic style with a plain brick exterior typical of Venetian mendicant-order churches, the basilica trades external ornament for scale -- its nave is among the largest enclosed spaces in the city. Wooden tie-beams cross the nave at the height of the arcade, a structural solution to the thrust of the tall Gothic arches that also gives the interior its distinctive ribbed silhouette.

The choir is enclosed by tall Gothic windows rather than a solid apse wall, filling the east end with light -- a departure from the heavier masonry favored elsewhere in Venice's Gothic churches of the same period. The west facade was never completed with the marble cladding originally planned, leaving exposed brick that is now considered characteristic of the building rather than an unfinished flaw.

The ducal tombs

Twenty-five doges are buried here, and their monuments read as a chronology of Venetian taste: Gothic canopied tombs of the 14th century along the west end, then Renaissance wall monuments by the Lombardo family, then the vast Baroque compositions of the 17th century. The Mocenigo and Vendramin tombs are the ones usually singled out.

The Rosary Chapel

Built to commemorate the victory at Lepanto in 1571, the chapel burned in 1867, destroying works by Titian and Tintoretto. It was rebuilt over decades and fitted with ceiling canvases by Veronese moved here from elsewhere -- so what visitors see is a reconstruction furnished with rescued work rather than an intact interior.

The Colleoni monument

Andrea del Verrocchio's bronze of the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni, cast after the sculptor's death and unveiled in 1496, stands in the campo outside. Colleoni left his fortune to Venice on condition that a monument be raised to him in front of San Marco; the Republic took the money and put it here instead, in front of the Scuola Grande di San Marco.

The church fills the east side of Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Castello, one of the largest open squares in Venice and one of the few laid out to be seen across rather than merely passed through.

Two grand facades meet at a right angle here: the church's own unfinished brick front, and beside it the marble trompe-l'oeil facade of the Scuola Grande di San Marco, now the city hospital. The Colleoni monument stands between them, positioned so it reads against the Scuola rather than the church.

A canal runs along the church's northern flank to a water door, and the campo opens toward the Fondamente Nove and the northern lagoon -- so this is one of the few major Venetian churches approached across open ground rather than emerging suddenly from a calle.