Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore Audio Guide

Welcome to San Giorgio Maggiore, the abbey church of a Benedictine monastery on its own island in the Venice lagoon. Across the water rises the Piazzetta di San Marco, and this brilliant white front was placed to face it. Andrea Palladio designed the church, and the foundation stone was laid in 1566 in the presence of the Pope. The façade itself was not finished until 1610. Its gleam above the blue water makes it the focal point of the view from the Riva degli Schiavoni. The front also solves a problem that had troubled church builders for centuries. A classical temple face is low and wide, but a Christian church has a high nave over low side aisles. Palladio's answer was to superimpose two temple fronts. A wide pediment with its architrave spans the nave and both aisles, apparently held up by a single order of pilasters. Above it sits a narrower pediment, the width of the nave alone, carried by giant columns on tall pedestals. Beside the central portal stand statues of Saint George and of Saint Stephen, the church's two dedicatees.

Luke N. Vargas. Dontexpect · Public domain

Inside, the church is very bright, with massive engaged columns and pilasters rising against undecorated white walls. A long basilican nave is crossed by a cruciform plan with transepts, and a dome marks the meeting of the two axes. The Benedictines wanted light and classical clarity here rather than the coloured ornament of many Venetian churches. The model was approved in 1566. By 1575 the perimeter walls and the drum of the dome already stood. The dome itself was completed in 1576. Palladio died in 1580, before the choir behind the altar and the façade were done. The choir was finished in the years after his death, and the decoration of the interior followed afterwards.

Photo: Misha2101 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Girolamo Campagna · 1590s · bronze

At the head of the nave stands the high altar, its design attributed to Antonio Vasillacchi, called l'Aliense. Crowning it is a bronze group by Gerolamo Campagna from the 1590s. Four dark figures of the Evangelists lift a globe on their shoulders. Above the globe rises Christ, together with the Trinity. The deep bronze stands out sharply against the pale columns of Palladio's architecture behind it. It is the liturgical heart of the whole church, framed by the columns of the sanctuary.

José Luiz · CC BY-SA 4.0

Jacopo Tintoretto · 1563 · canvas, oil paint

Flanking the presbytery hang two very large canvases by Jacopo Tintoretto, both painted on the institution of the Eucharist. They were placed to be seen from the altar rail. The Last Supper is the darker of the two. A lamp blazes from the ceiling, and beneath it the halo around Christ glows. The table runs diagonally deep into the picture, so the eye travels with the apostles along it. Around the sacred meal move ordinary servants, animals and scattered dishes. That is Tintoretto's late manner at its most dramatic, setting the holy moment inside everyday life rather than apart from it.

Jacopo Tintoretto · Public domain

Jacopo Tintoretto · 1590s · canvas, oil paint

Across the sanctuary hangs the companion canvas, The Jews in the Desert. It shows the Israelites collecting the manna, the food God sent them in the desert after their escape from Egypt. A whole people gathers, kneels and eats across the crowded, earthy scene. At the right a radiant figure watches over them. In Christian reading the manna foretold the Eucharist, the bread from heaven. That is why the two paintings were hung as a pair in this sanctuary. The Last Supper, its twin, faces it at matching scale, the promise and its fulfilment on either side of the altar.

Jacopo Tintoretto · Public domain

Gaspare Gatti · 1590s · walnut wood

Behind the altar, past a screen of columns, lies the reason the whole complex exists: the monks' choir. Palladio designed it in essentials before his death, and it was built between 1580 and 1589. The semicircular room is lined with dark wooden stalls. Bas-reliefs by Albert Van der Brulle run along them. For a Benedictine community the choir is the heart of the day. The monks gather here through the hours to sing the prayers that structure monastic life. Everything else in this church, its nave, its altars and its paintings, stands in service of that rhythm of prayer.

Photo: Andraszy · CC BY-SA 4.0

Jacopo Tintoretto · 1594 · canvas, oil paint

In the Chapel of the Dead hangs Tintoretto's Entombment of Christ, painted in 1594. Christ's body lies on the stone slab, wrapped in white cloth. The Virgin swoons in blue at the upper left, held up by mourning figures. Angels hover in the darkness above the scene. The picture is lit as if by torchlight, mourner pressed close against mourner. It shows a very different Tintoretto from the great sanctuary canvases, intimate and sombre. The painting has been conserved, and its deep colours carry the grief of the scene still.

Jacopo Tintoretto · Public domain

Sebastiano Ricci · 1708 · canvas, oil paint

The chapel to the right of the high altar belonged to the Bollani family. Domenico Bollani had been ambassador to Edward the Sixth of England in 1547, and later became a bishop. In many Venetian churches families bought chapels and decorated them as they pleased. The Benedictines had income from property and were in a stronger position, so they kept control of the chapels and dictated their decoration. After Domenico's death work slowed, and the chapel was still unfinished in 1619, with a poor painting as its altarpiece. A substitute went up in 1693. Only in 1708 did the chapel receive the important work seen there now, the Virgin and Child with Saints by Sebastiano Ricci. It is a lively late-Baroque scene, with the Madonna enthroned among saints and putti tumbling through the sky. At the bottom a little angel strums a lute.

Photo: Sailko · CC BY 3.0

This island has belonged to the Benedictines for a very long time. In 982 the Doge Tribuno Memmo gave it to the order, and a monk named Giovanni Morosini founded the monastery here as its first abbot. An earthquake in 1223 destroyed every building on the island, and the community rebuilt. Andrea Palladio's first work here was the monastery refectory, rebuilt from 1560. For its back wall Paolo Veronese painted The Wedding at Cana, completed in little more than a year. In 1797 Napoleonic troops looted the picture, cut the canvas up for transport, and carried it to Paris; it hangs in the Louvre today. The monastery's most extraordinary moment came soon after. With Rome occupied and the papacy vacant, the cardinals met in conclave on this isolated island in 1799. They elected Pius VII, who was crowned in this church in March 1800.

Photo: Orlando Paride · CC BY-SA 4.0

The bell tower first rose in 1467. In 1774 it collapsed, destroying parts of the monastic buildings around it. The tower standing now was finished by 1791, designed in the neoclassical style by the architect Benedetto Buratti. Its square shaft carries a bell chamber of white Istrian stone, crowned by a conical spire. The copper of the spire has weathered to green. The tower rises about seventy-five metres over the lagoon. Ramps make the climb an easy one, and there is a lift as well. From the top there is a fine view across Venice.

José Luiz · CC BY-SA 4.0