Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari

Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari Review

This immense Gothic church of russet-color brick was completed in the 1400s after more than a century of work. I Frari (as it's known locally) contains some of the most brilliant paintings in any Venetian church. Visit the sacristy first, to see Giovanni Bellini's 1488 triptych Madonna and Child with Saints in all its mellow luminosity, painted for precisely this spot. The Corner Chapel on the other side of the chancel is graced by Bartolomeo Vivarini's (1415-84) 1474 altarpiece St. Mark Enthroned and Saints John the Baptist, Jerome, Peter, and Nicholas, which is much more conservative, displaying attention to detail generally associated with late medieval painting. In the first south chapel of the chorus, there is a fine sculpture of Saint John the Baptist by Donatello, done in the 1450s and displaying a psychological intensity rare for early Renaissance sculpture. You can see the rapid development of Venetian Renaissance painting by contrasting Bellini with the heroic energy of Titian's Assumption, over the main altar, painted only 30 years later. Unveiled in 1518, it was the artist's first public commission and did much to establish his reputation.

Titian's beautiful Madonna di Ca' Pesaro is in the left aisle. The painting took almost 10 years to complete, and in it Titian disregarded the conventions of his time by moving the Virgin out of center and making the saints active participants. The composition, built on diagonals, anticipates structural principals of the baroque painting of the following century.