The church of Santa Maria della Visitazione (also called degli Artigianelli or San Gerolamo dei Gesuati) is a religious building in the city of Venice, located in the Dorsoduro district.
This religious building is the first example of a Renaissance church
in Venice. With a façade on the foundations of the Zattere ai Gesuati,
it was built starting in 1494 by a small group of friars originally from
Tuscany, called Gesuati, who made use of workers from Como. Francesco
Mandello, of Lombard origin, was appointed architect. The cladding of
the facade was entrusted to Francesco Lurano da Castiglione, who
completed it in 1504.
In 1669 it passed to the Dominican friars
already present in Venice who, having built the new church of Santa
Maria del Rosario by Giorgio Massari, welcoming the precious collection
of books donated by Apostolo Zeno, in 1750 transformed it into a library
open to the public. The cabinets of the library, designed by Massari
himself, are currently kept in the premises of the Academy of Fine Arts.
In 1810 Napoleon Bonaparte dismissed the friars. The church, robbed of
his books, remained abandoned for several years during which the small
dome collapsed and its frescoes were irretrievably lost. Around the
mid-nineteenth century it returned to function as a church for the
orphans gathered in the nearby former convent. Following various changes
of ownership, it was taken in 1923 by San Luigi Orione who continued to
use it still for the religious worship of his orphans, called
"Artigianelli". An important restoration of the sacred building was made
possible in the years 1994-1995 by funding provided by the Venice Water
Authority, the Veneto Region and the International Committees through
the I.R.E. (Institution of Hospitalization and Education, Venetian
public body of assistance and charity).
In 2008 the religious
community of San Luigi Orione moved to the mainland and, since that
date, the sacred building is no longer used for religious functions. The
church is privately owned and is open to the public for art exhibitions
or concerts.
Beside the church is the small fifteenth-century
monastery of the Gesuati, with a cloister that offers a lateral
perspective of the nearby Church of the Madonna del Rosario, also called
dei Gesuati, an eighteenth-century work by Massari. By the same author
is also the large Dominican convent, consisting of two buildings with
two internal cloisters, one of which remained unfinished due to the
architect's death on 20 December 1766. The two buildings communicate
with the old convent from an eighteenth-century oval staircase, also the
work of Massari, restored at the beginning of 2011. In 1996 this
complex, while rigorously maintaining the monastic structure, was
transformed into a Cultural Center and Religious House of Hospitality.
The entrance to the entire structure is located in Rio Terà Foscarini,
Dorsoduro 909/A, (in front of the Church of Sant'Agnese, in Campo
Sant'Agnese, Dorsoduro).
The church, whose facade was inaugurated in 1504 and then, the whole
building, consecrated on December 21, 1524 by Giovanni, titular bishop
of Tiberias (as reported on the plaque placed inside the cloister
adjacent to the church), is unadorned, especially indoors. Many
pictorial works contained in it (so much so that the historian Francesco
Sansovino, son of Jacopo Sansovino, said that there was no empty space
in it), were removed after 1750 and transferred to the Galleries of the
Academy of Fine Arts in Venice ( altarpiece by Francesco Rizzo) or in
other churches, as in the case of the Crucifixion altarpiece by
Tintoretto which was taken to the adjacent church of the Gesuati (third
altar on the left), or the organ doors by Titian finished in New York,
at a private collector, and of which traces have now been lost. However,
the church of the Visitation still preserves some works of fine
workmanship, such as the Pentecost by Padovanino, visible behind the
high altar, and the Crucifixion attributed to Nicolò Renieri (whose real
name is Nicolas Régnier, a Flemish painter) placed on the altar of left.
Other works are the two sixteenth-century monochrome paintings by an
unknown artist, portraying two bishops (located above the two
hand-crafted sixteenth-century briar-root doors, placed on the sides of
the central altar); the four frescoes in the tondos at the foot of the
dome, restored, dating back to the beginning of the sixteenth century,
which reproduce the four evangelists. On the right side altar there is a
canvas by Alessandro Revera (about 1850) where the Venetian saint
Girolamo Emiliani (or Miani) is represented entrusting her orphans to
the Blessed Virgin.
In the former sacristy, behind the main
altar, there is a marble icon from the beginning of the sixteenth
century (attributable to the Lombardo school) with the image of God the
Father supporting his Son Jesus dying on the cross; a sixteenth-century
washbasin in red Verona marble and two seventeenth-century panels
depicting Our Lady of Sorrows and the scourged Christ.
The most
significant and valuable part of the church is the ceiling which
contains 58 panels (a very rare example in Venice) each measuring 1.30
meters on each side, with portraits of Saints from the Old and New
Testaments and a central tondo (with a diameter of 2.50 meters)
depicting the meeting between the young Virgin Mary and her cousin
Elizabeth. The paintings date back to the early sixteenth century and
are the work of Pietro Paolo Agabiti (or Agapiti, circa 1470-1539) and
his workshop which operated between the Marches and Tuscany. Some tables
reveal influences from the schools of Leonardo da Vinci and Luca
Signorelli.
Since October 2008, the church has been enriched with
two paintings with a religious subject, painted on canvas: the
Resurrection of Christ, by Maurizio Favaretto (descendant of the famous
painter Paolo Veronese, and teacher in a Venetian art high school);
Maria Assunta, by the painter Raffaela Rubbini; and a new Via Crucis,
whose authors, students of prof. Favaretto, were inspired by
Giambattista Tiepolo's Via Crucis, preserved in the sacristy of the
church of San Polo, Sestiere di San Polo, Venice).
From September
2009 to January 2013, the 58 paintings on the wooden ceiling underwent
rigorous restoration.