The Scuola Grande di San Fantin or Scuola di San Girolamo, seat of the Ateneo Veneto of Sciences, Letters and Arts is a building in Venice, located in the San Marco district, in Campo San Fantin, where the church of the same name and the Theater stand the Phoenix.
The school
The building dates back to the period between 1592 and
1600, a project by Antonio and Tommaso Contin and Alessandro Vittoria to
house a school formed in the fifteenth century from two confraternities:
Santa Maria della Consolazione and San Girolamo. Finding its
headquarters in San Fantin, the school assumed its name, specializing in
the task of giving the last comforts to those sentenced to death:
therefore it was also called the "School of the Good Death" or dei Picai
(Venetian for "of the hanged").
The school was active until the first
decade of the 19th century, when it suffered the Napoleonic repressions,
which decreed its closure; it was then that many works contained in the
chapel of the school (now the Aula Magna) were dispersed or transferred,
such as the statues that are now housed in the Basilica of Santi
Giovanni e Paolo.
The Veneto University
On January 12, 1812,
the Veneto University of Sciences, Letters and Arts was born (by virtue
of the Napoleonic decree of January 25, 1810), from the merger of the
Venetian Society of Medicine, the Filareti Academy and the Venetian
Literary Academy.
Leopoldo Cicognara was the first president;
among the members have followed, over time, equally illustrious names
from the political, cultural and artistic world such as Daniele Manin,
Nicolò Tommaseo, Pietro Paleocapa, Giacinto Gallina, Alessandro Manzoni,
Antonio Fogazzaro, Diego Valeri, Albino Luciani, Mario Rigoni Stern,
Andrea Zanzotto Carlo Rubbia.
Reference center of the Venetian
bourgeoisie since the Risorgimento, at the Ateneo Veneto Niccolò
Tommaseo, on 30 December 1847, delivers the famous speech against the
Austrian censorship that will inflame the minds of the Venetians and
ignite the spark of the 1848 uprisings.
The Ateneo Veneto
continues to carry out its activities in the Scuola di San Fantin, with
events involving history, art history, music, medicine, cinema, theatre,
economics, architecture, l archeology, literature, goldsmithing.
The Ateneo Veneto promotes the "Pietro Torta" award for architectural
restoration; the "Achille and Laura Gorlato" prize on the history of
Venice and Istria; the "Maria Cavallarin" prize on Dalmatia.
Exteriors
The school looks like an elegant two-story building,
with a large gabled façade that is influenced by late
sixteenth-century architecture.
Above, the large pediment with a
broken base intersects with a spacious niche containing the figure
of the crucified Christ in relief and bas-relief. Above, three
sculptures decorate the façade at the corners of the pediment: two
angels on the sides, the Virgin Mary in the centre.
The
opening of the facade is mainly made up of six openings, inserted in
a perfectly symmetrical design: the rectangular portal in the center
and five large round single-lancet windows surmounted by a tympanum
supported by small columns and divided by pairs of semi-columns,
ending in an architrave on the first floor and in string course on
the ground floor.
There are stylistic differences between the two
levels of the facade: the columns on the ground floor are of the
Ionic order, those of the upper floor of the Corinthian order;
moreover the greater decorativeness of the tympanums and the
addition of balustrades distinguish the openings on the first floor
from the others.
Interior
Inside there are numerous rooms
of historical-artistic importance.
Great Hall
The large
canvases in the Aula Magna, the main room of the Ateneo Veneto which
housed the large chapel at the time of the Scuola di San Fantin, are
the site of many treasures.
Works by Baldassarre d'Anna (Ecce
Homo) and Leonardo Corona (The Passion) embellish the back wall with
the Cycle of the Passion, while works by Palma il Giovane (Cycle of
Purgatory, completed in 1600) are set in the coffers of the wooden
ceiling.
In the Hall there are also sculptural works by
Alessandro Vittoria (Busti). Other seventeenth-century pictorial
works are placed above the entrances: The Prodigal Son and The Good
Samaritan, paintings by Antonio Zanchi.
Tommaseo room
The
room, which also houses the busts of Jacopo Bernardi and Daniele
Manin, is dedicated to Nicolò Tommaseo. Here too the works on canvas
worth mentioning are copious: except The two sibyls from 1580 by
Palma il Giovane and the eighteenth-century Supper at the Pharisee's
house by Francesco Fontebasso, all are from the seventeenth century,
works by Antonio Zanchi (Last Judgment, the large canvas of the
ceiling, and Jesus driving the merchants out of the Temple),
Bernardo Strozzi (David and Isaiah), Ermanno Zerest (The Raising of
Lazarus) and Giovanni Segala (The healing of the possessed).
Library
An environment of great value also that of the library,
as well as for the volumes preserved (over 50,000, including rare
ancient editions of medical books), for the artistic heritage: in
fact, in the reading room you can admire San Giovanni Evangelista
and San Marco, Apparizione of the Virgin to St. Jerome and St.
Jerome receiving gifts from the Merchants by Jacopo Tintoretto, as
well as the Transit of the Virgin, Assumption, Visitation, Adoration
of the Magi, Presentation in the Temple, Flight into Egypt, Christ
among the Doctors and Baptism of Christ by Paolo Veronese and of his
school.