The Scoletta dei Calegheri is a building in Venice, which was the historic headquarters of the Arte dei Calegheri (the cobblers in Venetian). It is located in the San Polo district, in Campo San Tomà, in front of the church of San Tomà and a few steps from the basilica of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. La Scoletta houses the Library of San Tomà.
The Scuola dei Calegheri was founded in 1383 under the patronage of
Saint Aniano, the cobbler healed and converted by Saint Mark. The art
brought together the calegheri, who made shoes and boots, and the
zavatieri, who instead made slippers and clogs. The first activities of
the school were at the convent church of Santa Maria della Carità where,
in fact, the body of Sant'Aniano was venerated. In 1446 the Scuola
decided to purchase a building at San Tomà and, after the renovation
works, they moved there entirely in 1478.
The Scuola could use a
portion of the ancient portico of the church of San Tomà for the burial
of its deceased. It also had an altar, the second on the left of the
hall in the seventeenth-century renovation of the church, decorated with
the altarpiece by Giovanni Fazioli San Marco heals the shoemaker Aniano
(1789 or before), placed in place of a painting by Palma il Giovane. In
the same altar, with the permission of the Provveditori sopra Monasteri
of 1793, the body of Saint Aniano, protector of the School, was
transferred from Charity.
Shortly before the fall of the
Republic, around 1200 people gathered in the art, distributed in 350
workshops. In the confiscation reports following the Napoleonic
suppressions, the school contained 12 paintings, considered by the
executor to be of «no value and in bad condition».
After the
suppression, the building passed into private hands and was a furniture
store for a long time; at the end of the twentieth century it was
purchased by the municipality of Venice and used as a neighborhood
library.
On the simple brick gabled facade stands out the large portal with
the typical Venetian inflected arch, culminating in a fiorone. In the
ogival lunette there is a bas-relief attributed to Antonio Rizzo (1478)
– made particular by the substantial remains of polychrome paint on the
clothes, the trees and the background – which represents San Marco
healing Sant'Aniano. On the entablature under the lunette, three
depictions of footwear surround some commemorative inscriptions.
Above, in the center of the facade, between two arched windows, there is
another bas-relief depicting the Madonna della Misericordia adored by
the brothers. Work considered to be from the second half of the
fourteenth century, as it is close to the methods of Filippo Calendar
and Andriolo de Santi, it was taken by Michelangelo Guggenheim from the
remains of the demolished church of the Servi and then donated to the
Academy. It was finally relocated here in 1928, however deprived of the
original framing documented by Grevembroch.
Inside the school, in
the main hall, some traces of the anonymous frescoes, dated to the 15th
century, remain, among which an Annunciation and some Saints can be
recognized.
On the first floor of the scoletta is the library of
San Tomà which develops in a single space equipped with tables and sofas
to allow both study and reading. Thanks to the free interlibrary loan
service, it is possible to request the books that are part of the
patrimony of about 400,000 volumes of the Venice Library Network.
Directly from home, online, it is possible to request any book, film,
music CD from the Venice Library Network and have it delivered to the
library.