The church of the Abbazia della Misericordia is a former religious
building in the city of Venice, located in the Cannaregio district,
overlooking the homonymous square.
Deconsecrated in 1973, the
building is used to host the art exhibitions of the Venice Biennale.
The first name of the church was Santa Maria di Val Verde, from the
original name of the island on which it was built. The history of the
church is linked to the Scuola Grande di Santa Maria della Misericordia,
which from the 14th century erected two of its own offices, a hospital
and houses nearby.
Traces of a church in this area can already be
found in 936, the foundation of which, according to Francesco Sansovino,
can be attributed to Cesare de Giuli, also called Andreardi, or jointly
to the de Giuli and Moro families. In the XIII century it was completely
rebuilt, abandoning the Byzantine structure and acquiring a Gothic
style.
It was initially granted to an order of hermits, then
probably to the Augustinians. In 1348 the monks were exterminated by the
plague, the abbot, the only survivor, died in 1369 leaving the perpetual
patronage of the church to Luca Moro and his descendants: since then the
church has been linked to the history of the patrician Moro family who
acquired the patronage , with the perpetual right to appoint the prior
of the church (they retained this right until the fall of the Venetian
Republic in 1797).
On June 9, 1611, the prior Girolamo Savina,
author of a chronicle of Venice called Cronaca Savina, died poisoned by
a monk, drinking communion wine while celebrating mass.
In 1659
the Bolognese architect Clemente Molli (already assistant to Baldassare
Longhena in Venice) remade the facade in Baroque style, at the expense
of the patrician and philosopher Gasparo Moro, whose bust sculpted by
Moli appears above the door. Moli also sculpted the allegorical figures
on the sides of the door. At the time, the church contained a canvas by
Paolo Veronese and a cycle by Tintoretto.
In 1806, during the
Napoleonic era, the Scuola della Misericordia was suppressed and the
church was completely stripped and transformed into a military
warehouse, while the monastery, which was already in a state of abandon
and half collapsed, was definitively demolished.
Saved from
demolition, the church was enriched again between 1825 and 1864 with
many works from other demolished or suppressed churches, which the abbot
Pietro Pianton (born Angelo Pasquale) managed to recover. In 1864, when
Pianton died, Abbot Millin took his place, but on his death the church
was acquired following legal proceedings by the Moro-Lin family, who
sold all the works of art between 1868 and 1882 (which were not strictly
part of the patronage claimed by the family itself).
In 1890 it
was used as a hospital.
In 1891, to prevent it from becoming an
evangelical church, it was personally purchased by the patriarch
Domenico Agostini, who however was unable to complete the donation to
the Venetian curia: it was thus inherited by the relatives of the
patriarch, who sold it again.
Subsequently, the church was used
occasionally by the friars of the order of the Servants of Mary, with
the last mass celebrated on August 17, 1967 and definitively abandoned
in 1973.
On 28 March 1973 the church was officially
deconsecrated, with a decree signed by the then patriarch Albino Luciani
(future Pope John Paul I). and sold to Nani Sartorio, who in 1980 resold
it to Roberto Benedetti, who set up a warehouse and a souvenir shop
there. The fourteenth-century bell tower was instead rented for
"meteorological and astronomical observations", while other rooms on the
side of the church were restructured as apartments for tourist use.
The church was used in 1979 for the filming of two Moonraker films,
part of the James Bond series. In 1988 the building was used for the
filming of Nosferatu in Venice, in which Count Dracula (played by actor
Klaus Kinski) kills one of his victims inside the former church.
The interior of the deconsecrated church consists of a single nave,
with a gabled roof. The high altar and the marble stalls come from the
demolished monastic church of San Mattia in Murano.
The external
stone façade is structured around a giant central order dominated by an
arched tympanum and surrounded by two trabeated wings. The top of the
pediment is crowned by the statue of the Virgin, while the edges of the
wings by pinecone acroteria. On the high protruding bases of the giant
order there are two allegorical statues (Charity and Fortitude); above
the portal, in front of the rose window, the bust of Gasparo Moro
accompanied by a scroll and mourning cherubs seated on books. All the
sculptures are the work of Clemente Molli, who probably also designed
the façade.
The Veneto-Byzantine style bell tower, which can be
glimpsed on the back, and the bas-relief depicting the Madonna and Child
from the fourteenth-century school on the annex to the right of the
facade, remain the last memories of the original structure.
Exhibition venue
For the LVI International Art Exhibition, the church
hosted the national pavilion of Iceland from 9 to 22 May 2015, with a
performance by the Swiss artist Christoph Büchel. The work, open to the
public, was entitled The Mosque: The First Mosque in the Historic City
of Venice (The Mosque: the first mosque in the historic center of
Venice), constituted by a real place of worship for the Muslim faithful
complete with miḥrāb facing Mecca, ablutions room created in the
presbytery, large carpet and Koranic verses on the walls. Following a
complaint filed by the local exponent of Forza Nuova Alessandro
Tamborini, the municipal police of Venice ordered the closure of the
pavilion due to administrative violations found in the execution of the
artistic installation shortly after the opening of the Exhibition.
In 2017 it hosted a solo exhibition by Omar Hassan, Do Ut Des,
organized in the same period as the LVII Biennale.