The former church of Santa Maria della Carità was a deconsecrated religious building in the city of Venice, located in the Dorsoduro district and forming part of the complex of the convent of Carità. The complex, for which Andrea Palladio drew up a project in about 1560 that remained largely unfinished, has been incorporated into the Gallerie dell'Accademia.
The church was built in the 12th century in place of an older wooden
one, together with the monastery of regular canons to whom it was
entrusted (affiliated with the congregation of Santa Maria di Frigionaia
from 1414 and from 1445 with that of the Lateran). Thanks to the support
of the Venetian Pope Eugene IV, in the mid-fifteenth century the
religious were able to rebuild it on a Gothic-style architecture using
the work of Bartolomeo Bon.
In the 16th century Andrea Palladio
started important works in the convent, but in the following centuries
the complex gradually lost its importance. In 1768 the order of Lateran
canons was suppressed and in 1807 the church and convent, already in
decline, were destined together with the headquarters of the former
Scuola Grande to house the Academy of Fine Arts.
Canaletto's views show an important Gothic-style complex, with the
body of the building parallel to the Grand Canal, the façade facing the
Rio di Santa Maria della Carità and the apses facing the Rio di
Sant'Agnese. Both canals were filled in in the 19th century. The top of
the facade was decorated with spiers, aedicules and pinnacles that have
disappeared. The church was flanked by the imposing Gothic bell tower,
with a high conical spire above the octagonal drum which collapsed in
1744.
The Palladian project for the Convent of Charity
Three
years after the unfortunate debut of San Pietro di Castello and a few
months after the start of the construction site of the refectory of San
Giorgio Maggiore, Palladio had another opportunity to work with a
Venetian ecclesiastical client. In March 1561, in fact, he was paid for
a model for the convent of the Lateran Canons in the area of Santa Maria
della Carità, in Dorsoduro. For the monks Palladio elaborated a
grandiose project, clearly inspired by his studies on the house of the
ancient Romans, with an atrium of monumental composite columns and two
courtyards separated by a refectory. From 1569, however, the ambitious
construction site marked time after the construction of the cloister and
atrium; the latter destroyed by fire in 1630. To understand the splendid
fragment it is necessary to rely, albeit with some caution, on the
illustrations in the Quattro libri dell'architettura (published by
Palladio in Venice in 1570).
The project for the Convent of
Charity - which deeply struck Giorgio Vasari on a visit to Venice in
1566 - had as its points of reference Palladian reflections on the baths
and above all on the house of the ancient Romans, studied and
reconstructed for the 1556 edition of Vitruvius. In the Palladian
conception, the house of the Ancients could in fact be recreated only in
terms of a large organized structure (such as a monastic complex) or, to
a lesser degree, of a private residence such as Palazzo Porto in
Vicenza: something in fact very far from the disorganic reality of
ancient Roman houses. Essentially three architectural episodes of this
extraordinary project have come down to us today: the empty oval
staircase in the middle, the sacristy of the church modeled as a
"tablino" of the ancient house and the large wall of the cloister with
three superimposed orders.
The tablinum is undoubtedly one of the
purest examples of Palladian classicism: the free columns and apse
endings were probably inspired by the remains of similar chambers
located around the frigidarium of the Baths of Caracalla and used by
Palladio in the reconstruction of other baths. The chromatic contrast
between the elements of the order is singular: the red frieze along the
wall is grafted onto a sector of entablature in white stone, in turn
supported by a red marble column.
The same accentuated duotone is
found in the powerful wall of the cloister with superimposed orders
which owes much to the courtyard of Palazzo Farnese in Rome. The wall
texture was made with shaped bricks to be left exposed, protected by a
red paint, while capitals, bases and arch keys were made of white stone.
This unprecedented freedom of expression is one of the characteristics
of the mature Palladio, when the assimilation of ancient Roman
architecture is such as to grant him the freedom to seek unusual
effects, such as superimposing a Corinthian frieze with bucrania and
festoons (on the model of the temple of Vesta in Tivoli) to the Doric
order of the first order of the courtyard.