The church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli is a religious building located in Venice, in the Cannaregio district.
In the second half of the fifteenth century there was a painting,
placed in a corner of the house of the Lombard merchant Angelo Amadi.
Considered miraculous by the inhabitants of the area, the inhabitants
relied on this painting to ask for numerous graces. Hence the need to
pay homage to the painting of the Virgin with a construction worthy of
her miracles. The project was entrusted to the architect Pietro Lombardo
who, with the help of his sons Tullio and Antonio, designed and built
this small temple within 8 years (1481-1489).
It is one of the
very first Renaissance-style buildings built in Venice. During the 16th
century some interventions were carried out on the interior.
In
1997 it underwent a careful restoration, which allowed Venetians and
tourists to fully enjoy its artistic beauties.
The church is part
of the Chorus Venezia association.
The temple has a rectangular structure: the facade and the apse
overlook two small fields, the right side on a calle, while the left
side is wet by the water of a canal.
The five-part facade by
pilasters is divided into two orders, inverted with respect to the
classic Vitruvian canons: the lower order, with Corinthian capitals, has
an architrave, while the upper, Ionic, is made up of 5 blind arches. The
facade is dominated by a large semicircular pediment, decorated with a
rose window, 3 oculi and 2 marble circles.
The entire façade
«dressed up, jeweled with marble coverings encrusting with squares,
crosses, stars, wheels» is covered with polychrome marble (veined Tuscan
pavonazzetto, Istrian stone, serpentine, yellow and red); above the
portal there is a curvilinear tympanum, decorated with a bust depicting
the Madonna and Child, by the sculptor Giovanni Giorgio Lascaris, dated
1480.
In the spandrels between the arches throughout the building
are placed busts of prophets which give way to full-length angels in the
corner spandrels.
Bas-reliefs with figures of saints, scenes from
the life of Jesus and the Assumption of the Virgin are carved into the
roundels of the door jambs. The sculptures in the higher levels were
carved by various stonemasons of various talents, perhaps not belonging
to the workshop of Pietro Lombardo.
From the main door one enters the low space still dominated by the
"barco", the tribune which contained the choir of the Poor Clares.
Worth noting is the singular decoration of the nearby square column
that supports the boat, carved by a hand apparently extraneous to the
workshop of Pietro Lombardo.
The ceiling inserted between the
beams can instead be dated to the end of the sixteenth century; Vincenzo
Dai Destri from Treviso took part in these works. The canvases in the
compartments are paintings of a later period.
The interior has a
single nave with a barrel vault decorated with gilded coffers, inside
the fifty panels you can see small paintings on wood depicting prophets
and patriarchs.
The presbytery begins with a steep staircase
leading to the mezzanine floor, elegantly decorated with four statues:
Sant'Antonio di Padova and Santa Chiara, the Archangel Gabriel and the
Annunciata and two polygonal pulpits, all in polychrome marble, the work
of Pietro Lombardo with the collaboration of his sons Tullio and
Antonio.
The lecterns of the ambos are supported by eagles.
The large cross of porphyry discs on the back wall draws the eye
upwards, where the tondos meet with the perspective reliefs of the
Evangelists in the pendentives and the surviving stained glass window in
the drum. The stained glass window depicts an imago Pietatis, Christ in
the tomb.
On the main altar there are two statues by Cesare
Groppo: St. Peter and St. Anthony the Abbot which frame the small
"miraculous" painting on wood depicting the Madonna standing on a
flowery meadow against a red background with the Child Jesus in her
arms.
Worthy of note, perhaps one of the most evocative and
mysterious aspects of the church, is the sculptural apparatus that
affects the plinths on which the large columns of the triumphal arch are
placed, sculptures attributed to Tullio and Antonio Lombardo. Newts and
female counterparts have elegant and harmonious features and are
characterized by long fish tails, phytomorphic front legs and wings. On
their tails are putti and eroti, some of which are holding fruit.
This sculptural complex can be framed in the perspective of a
passage to the otherworldly world conceived as a sea crossing.
Observing the different representations on the two plinths, asymmetrical
and dramatic on the left, devoid of movement and symmetrical on the
right (here almost all marine creatures have wings) the evocation of the
end of the idyllic ancient and pagan world emerges in the first and its
reliving in the Christian one in the second.