The church of the Nome di Gesù is a religious building in the city of Venice, located in the Santa Croce district, between the first stretch of the Ponte della Libertà and the church of Sant'Andrea della Zirada.
The church of the Nome di Gesù was built between 1815 and 1834,
during the Austrian domination, on a project by Giannantonio Selva and,
after his death, completed by his pupil Antonio Diedo.
Behind the
small church is the house which served as a convent for the sacramental
Poor Clares.
Since 1806 Don Giuliano Catullo had taken possession
of the area but only in 1815 was he able to start construction thanks to
the subsidies of Count Costanzo Taverna and other wealthy individuals.
The news is sometimes reported that among the materials used during the
construction, there are some remains of the church of San Geminiano in
Piazza San Marco, demolished a few years earlier to build the so-called
Napoleonic wing. However Don Catullo, the promoter of the construction,
clearly expressed the conviction that reused material should not be used
for the construction of the church, it only appears that the bell gable
placed on the adjacent house comes from the church of San Basso which is
closed for worship.
Also in 1806 dates back to the first group of
women who resided there gathered around Sister Maria Vincenza but only
in 1846 the hospice was erected as a monastery according to canon law.
Only three years later, on 25 June 1849, in the last months of
resistance by the Republic of San Marco, the nuns found themselves on
the front line under fire from Austrian artillery and had to take
temporary refuge in San Cassiano and then in San Francesco della Vigna.
In the twentieth century, with the construction of the Ponte della
Libertà and Piazzale Roma, the space of the complex was reduced,
squeezed by the two new infrastructures. Currently the church is granted
to the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic community.
Everything reminds us that originally it was a place of seclusion.
Access to the sacred building is limited by a high wall in which a large
gate opens between two ashlar pillars each surmounted by a stone statue
of an angelic figure.
The small church has a harmonious gabled
façade in the neoclassical style. In the centre, above a short flight of
steps, there is a simple door surmounted beyond the architrave by a
proportionate lunette window. The structure is marked at the ends by two
mirrored pilasters which support the architrave, adorned with the
inscription Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam, and the subsequent indented
pediment.
Even inside we find the reason for the enclosure: the
single nave of the interior is divided between the hall and the
presbytery by two massive, strongly tapered Ionic columns. The hall is
rectangular but with short openings for the two side altars surmounted
by lunette windows and has a typically neoclassical coffered roof. The
presbytery is widened on the sides by two large exedras in the center of
which the accesses to the convent area open; above the central part of
the presbytery we have a barrel vault originally placed orthogonally to
the axis of the church to connect the large openings of the lunettes
above the exedras.
Along the entire perimeter of the church,
alternating with the altars and the openings, the statues of the twelve
apostles are arranged in simple niches. The works were carried out
especially for this church by the sculptors Luigi Zandomeneghi,
Bartolomeo Ferrari and Antonio Bosa. The elegant stuccos of the coffers
are the work of Battista Lucchesi as are perhaps also the four
bas-reliefs above the statues on the sides of the hall. The fresco
decorations in the vaults of the presbytery and the Trinity in the back
lunette were painted by Giuseppe Borsato.
The marble tabernacle
with an open temple, crowned by a small dome and flanked by two adoring
angels, executed by Diedo, is an example of that of the church of San
Maurizio designed years earlier by Selva. Above the severe side altars,
framed by fluted columns and an indented tympanum, are two paintings by
Lattanzio Querena: Saint Francis of Assisi receiving the stigmata and
the Sacred Heart of Jesus.