Church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli
Churches in Venice - Cannaregio
The Church of "dei Miracoli", masterpiece of Pietro Lombardo, is one of the greatest Early Renaissance structures in Venice.
Known within the city simply as "dei Miracoli", the church was built between 1481 and 1489 upon commission of Angelo Amadi, who intended it to hold an image of the Virgin and Child and Two Saints in his possession - an image which, after Pope Sextus IV's declaration of the Cult of the Immaculate Conception, had been declared miraculous.
The volume of the building is enclosed within a cylindrical vault behind a façade with two orders of sculpted bas-relief porticoes beneath a semicircular pediment decorated with rose-windows. The geometry of the space is emphasised by the use of pilaster-strips and different coloured panels and cornices - a design in which the architecture of the Florentine Renaissance is wed to a taste for colour that is typically Venetian.
The interior, a single nave with a raised presbytery, is decorated even more sumptuously with sculpted marble. On the altar stands Niccolò di Pietro's supposedly miraculous image of the Virgin and Child (14th-15th century).
Above the entrance you can still see the old wooden choirstalls (barco) of the nuns from the nearby convent, who used to gain access to the church by means of a raised passageway that has since been demolished.
Official website: www.chorusvenezia.org
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