The church of San Bartolomeo or Chiesa di San Bortolomio is a sacred building in Venice, located in the San Marco district, in the homonymous field, between the Rialto bridge and San Salvador.
According to tradition, the church, initially dedicated to St.
Demetrius of Thessalonica, was founded in 840 and had the prerogatives
of a parish right from the start. It would have changed its name in
1170.
From the documents, on the other hand, it emerges that the
parish status was acquired gradually, being able to be said to be fully
acquired towards the middle of the thirteenth century. In the same
period it ran into a long jurisdictional dispute with nearby San
Salvador which, as a reformed rectory, was removed from the authority of
the bishop of Castello. The dispute was temporarily resolved by Pope
Lucius III who granted San Bartolomeo to the same canons of San
Salvador, but just a few years later Pope Innocent III returned it to
the secular clergy. A definitive reconciliation took place only in 1299,
when the two parties agreed on the borders and on the allocation of
tithes (which were to be collected by the Procurators of San Marco who
would then arrange for their division).
In 1342 Pope John XXII
assigned San Bartolomeo to the patriarchate of Grado, affiliating it to
the church of San Silvestro. In 1451 the patriarchate of Grado was
suppressed and its jurisdiction merged into the new patriarchate of
Venice; the patriarch of Venice also inherited the power to appoint the
parish priest. The affiliation to San Silvestro remained, to which the
parish priest owed various obligations and tributes.
In 1810,
after the fall of the Republic of Venice and the arrival of Napoleon,
the parish of San Bartolomeo was suppressed and its territory was
absorbed by San Salvador, while the church was demoted to vicarial as it
is today.
Although its size is not negligible, San Bartolomeo is imperceptible,
if you do not notice the bell tower or the side entrance coming down
from the Rialto bridge: in fact it is set among the buildings that
surround it on all four sides. As for the building, it is a single-nave
church with a dome at the intersection of this with the transept. There
are also two sculptures by Enrico Merengo inside the church.
Inside we recall the paintings by Sante Peranda (Fall of the manna)
Palma il Giovane (Punishment of the snakes) and the eighteenth-century
high altar by Bernardino Maccaruzzi. In the presbytery and in the chapel
on the right there are frescoes by Michelangelo Morlaiter. The organ
doors are an early masterpiece by Sebastiano del Piombo.