The church of San Zulian (Venetian dialect for "San Giuliano") is a religious building in the city of Venice, located in the square of the same name in the San Marco district, not far from the square of the same name.
The church is dedicated to the martyr Saint Julian, who suffered
martyrdom with his wife Basilissa in the years between 302 and 304 in
the Thebaid.
At the beginning of the 12th century the church was
subject to the special jurisdiction of the basilica of San Marco and its
primocerio: it was therefore separated from the diocese of Castello and,
after 1451, from the Patriarchate of Venice. Only in 1804, with the
suppression of the Marciana jurisdiction and the union of the canonical
chapters of San Marco and San Pietro di Castello, did the church of San
Zulian come under patriarchal authority.
The Chronicle of Doge
Andrea Dandolo, written in the mid-1300s, places the foundation of the
church of San Giuliano in 832. The first certain document on the
existence of the church dates back to 1061.
In 1205 a fire
devastated the city and the church of San Giuliano, which was rebuilt.
In the mid-1500s, the thirteenth-century church was by then in danger
and the reconstruction was intertwined with the extraordinary figure of
physician and scholar Tommaso Rangone da Ravenna (1493-1577). In 1553
Rangone obtained from the Senate of the Republic that his offer to
rebuild the facade of the church of San Giuliano be accepted: in
exchange he could place his own statue there. During construction, the
roof of the old church collapses. Rangone contributes to the expense,
obtaining in exchange that his tomb is placed in the center of the
presbytery.
The facade of this church was built by Jacopo
Sansovino, but after his death in 1570 Alessandro Vittoria took over. On
both sides of the main portal there are two inscriptions, one in Greek
and the other in Hebrew, which celebrate the Ravenna doctor and
philosopher Tommaso Rangone, who financed the renovation of the facade
in exchange for its transformation into a monument to his own
exaltation. In particular, the inscription in Latin provides
biographical data and information of a legal nature, the one in Greek
boasts the cultural merits of man and the one in Hebrew recalls the
possibility of realizing the divine plan on earth to live up to 120
years. In the lunette of the pediment Rangone stands on a funeral urn,
clad in a doctoral gown while delivering to posterity the synthesis of
his knowledge wrapped in a complex symbology. In his right hand, instead
of a pen, he holds the New World remedies: the thin long root with the
tendril of sarsaparilla and the branch with the lanceolate leaves of the
guaiac. We recall that Rangone owed its economic fortune to the cure of
syphilis in the century of its first virulent diffusion.
The interior of the building has a single nave, almost square, with a
rectangular presbytery covered by a cross vault, flanked by two small
chapels.
Inside San Giuliano, the fundamental tone of the
decoration that covers the walls and ceiling is given by works from the
decade following the consecration, which took place in 1580.
Three main paths can be identified:
Christological cycle that
surrounds the hall in its upper register.
eight allegorical figures
around the ceiling mark the reflection on the Passion of Christ and
surround the triumph of San Giuliano, placed in the center of the
ceiling at the end of the cycle of San Giuliano
to these two cycles
must be added the testimonies of the community, of the various Arts, of
the Confraternities and Schools of devotion which are expressed in the
side altars.
There are seven altars in all: the altarpiece of the
monumental high altar (by Giuseppe Sardi) is remarkable, with a
Coronation of the Virgin and saints signed by Gerolamo Santacroce.
The organ
The organ in a choir loft on the counter-façade was
built by Gaetano Callido. It dates from the 1764 Op.12.