1. Introduction

“I am aware of no other city in Europe in which its cathedral was not the principal feature…. The patriarchal church, inconsiderable in size and mean in decoration, stands on the outermost islet of the Venetian group, and its name, as well as its site, is probably unknown to the greater number of travellers passing through the city.”Footnote ¹ From John Ruskin’s lament in the Stones of Venice (1851) to Tracy Cooper’s more generous assessment in Palladio’s Venice (2006), it has become commonplace in Venetianist circles to remark upon the marginalization of the church and campo of San Pietro di Castello (fig. 1).Footnote ² Few visitors to Venice learn that San Pietro was the city’s cathedral for nearly one thousand years, until Napoleon (1769–1821) decreed its replacement by the resplendent ducal chapel of San Marco in 1807.Footnote ³ Fewer venture to its site on an island at the outer reaches of the Venetian archipelago (fig. 2). Yet San Pietro and its piazza were not always at the margins of Venetian culture. Both the island and the church featured prominently in accounts of the foundation of the city. Two greatmasters of Venetian architecture, Andrea Palladio (1508–80) and Mauro Codussi (ca. 1440–1504), are associated with the church’s and campanile’s designs.Footnote ⁴ Ships approaching Venice from the Adriatic used San Pietro’s bell tower as a beacon for centuries.Footnote ⁵ And in the eighteenth century, the best-known vedutisti included San Pietro among their representations of the Serenissima’s most distinctive sights (fig. 3).

Figure 1 Campo di San Pietro di Castello, Venice. Author’s photo.

Figure 2 Jacopo de’ Barbari, Venetia, ca. 1500, woodblock print, first state. North is at the top. Venice, Civico Museo Correr. Photo: Osvaldo Böhm. The island of San Pietro di Castello is at the eastern end of the Venetian archipelago.

Figure 3 Studio of Giovanni Antonio Canal (called Canaletto), San Pietro di Castello, ca. 1734–42. London, National Gallery. National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY.

In spite of this interesting history, modern authors seem to agree with Ruskin, as no scholarly monograph on the church, the episcopal complex, or the campo has ever been published.Footnote ⁶ Only Palladio’s never-completed façade project for San Pietro has attracted much attention. In that context, certain scholars have perceptively remarked on its patron’s architectural ambitions, but none has systematically studied the church or the episcopal complex over time.Footnote ⁷ Although those who have analyzed Venice’s unusual urban form mention San Pietro, none has focused on this corner of Castello.Footnote ⁸

This study analyzes the episcopal complex of San Pietro di Castello from its mythologized origins to the Renaissance, paying particular attention to the architectural and political forces that shaped it in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It places the campo of San Pietro di Castello at the center of inquiry, because the site’s special significance is best discerned through diachronic analysis of the urban landscape as a whole, rather than by focusing on isolated buildings or moments. By interweaving the fragmentary historical evidence—written and visual—about the structures, personalities, and circumstances that shaped the Campo di San Pietro with close examination of its surviving physical fabric, this study recaptures this neglected cultural artifact for historical study for the first time, while also demonstrating one method for studying urban spaces over the longue durée.

The account is divided into three parts. First, it asks, What is the Campo di San Pietro? How did it acquire the unusual appearance partly captured by Jacopo de’ Barbari (ca. 1465–1516) in the celebrated printed view of Venice published in 1500? In response, it introduces the Campo di San Pietro as a formal ensemble, establishes its physical promimence and cultural importance in the early history and later historiography of Venice, and reconstructs the lost history of the site and its buildings from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries. It shows that, after distinguished beginnings, the sporadic architectural interventions of its medieval bishops generated a heterogeneous ensemble without a well-defined visual identity. In the late fifteenth century, however, two ecclesiastical patrons exploited the ancient Roman and early Byzantine architectural vocabularies to recall the site’s resonant ancient origins and apostolic prestige, contributing to the city’s burgeoning humanistic discourse in this period. These intermittent campaigns to raise San Pietro’s profile may have been stimulated by the diocese of Venice’s elevation to a patriarchal see in 1451. They did not suffice, however, to endow the site with a coherent, distinctive urban form.

The essay’s second part addresses the circumstances that triggered San Pietro’s physical and political marginalization and conditioned its physical form in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in particular the contentious relationship between church and state in the Most Serene Republic. Finally, the essay’s third part examines the vigorous attempts of two sixteenth-century patriarchs to change San Pietro’s fortunes, and their own, by remaking the square.Footnote ⁹ Although these projects ultimately failed, the patrons nonetheless forged a particularly Venetian architectural and urbanistic ensemble that differs substantially in form and spirit from the better-known state architecture at San Marco and the Rialto. Like the evolution of San Pietro’s campo, this essay marches according to two distinct rhythms. To begin, it follows a winding course through the site’s first seven centuries, allowing spatial factors and the periphrastic nature of the evidence—instead of chronology or orthogenetic assumptions—to dictate the shape and pace of the narrative. Later, it plots a straighter trajectory through the campo’s sixteenth-century transformation, echoing the patrons’ single-minded purpose.

2. San Pietro di Castello and the Origins of Venice

The Campo di San Pietro occupies a small clam-shaped island at the eastern extreme of Venice, just beyond the former industrial complex of the Arsenale (fig. 2). During the nineteenth century, the island was enlarged to the north and the east, but for most of its history, it was dominated by the episcopal complex and campo on its west side (fig. 4).Footnote ¹⁰ The church lends the islet its most common modern name, the isola di San Pietro di Castello, but it previously was identified as Olivolo, Castel Olivolo, Castello, and Quintavalle as well.Footnote ¹¹ The campo’s customary appellation, too, derives from that of the church, but it was also known as the campus castellanus and as Campo di Castello.Footnote ¹²

Figure 4 Detail of the island of San Pietro di Castello, S. Pietro, plate 1 from Giovanni Battista Paganuzzi, Iconografie delle trenta parrocchie di Venezia. Venice, 1821. North is to the left. Photo: Osvaldo Böhm. The island of San Pietro was enlarged to the north and to the southeast in the early nineteenth century.

The Canale di Castello (or di San Pietro) demarcates the large campo’s western edge (fig. 4). A bridge spanning the canal links the campo to the island of San Daniele and the rest of Venice.Footnote ¹³ The sixteenth-century white stone façade of San Pietro (fig. 1) and the expansive wreck of the erstwhile patriarchal palace bound the campo to the east (fig. 5). To the south of the palace, the former Baptistery of San Giovanni projects into the campo (fig. 6); in most representations, Codussi’s elegant bell tower hides the baptistery from view (figs. 3 and 7). Modest brick houses outline the campo’s northern and southern borders (fig. 8). Stone paths traversing a green expanse of grass line the quay and link the bridgehead to the palace and cathedral portals. While the campo’s large scale, regularity, and classicism seem to signal Renaissance origins, in fact the site and its most important buildings originated in the Middle Ages. To elucidate the campo’s development and understand its historic and present form, we must first examine its genesis.

Figure 5 View of west façade, patriarchal palace, Campo di San Pietro di Castello, Venice. Photo: Seth C. Jayson.

Figure 6 View of north and west façades, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Campo di San Pietro di Castello, Venice. Photo: Seth C. Jayson.

Figure 7 Mauro Codussi, campanile, Campo di San Pietro di Castello, Venice, 1482–90. Photo: Seth C. Jayson.

Figure 8 Houses along northern perimeter, Campo di San Pietro di Castello, Venice. Author’s photo.

The island of San Pietro and its cathedral complex feature prominently in accounts of Venice’s early history and the formation of the Venetian church.Footnote ¹⁴ The origins of Venice have a long and rich historiography that extends from the twelfth century until the present; they intertwine with the creation and evolution of the myth of the Serenissima’s exceptionality.Footnote ¹⁵ Because a similar mixture of legend and fact complicates the study of San Pietro di Castello, it is necessary to review the testimonies provided by modern archeology and the oldest extant documents before mining the evocative, but problematic, medieval narrative sources for San Pietro.Footnote ¹⁶

The city of Venice comprises a tightly knit cluster of several dozen small islands on the southern part of the Venetian lagoon. The city originated in late antiquity, with the settlement of a handful of patches of dry land separated by significant expanses of water and marsh. As the population grew, settlers occupied a greater number of marsh islands, expanded them by land reclamation, and eventually connected them by bridges.Footnote ¹⁷ Archeological evidence demonstrates that the island of San Pietro may be one of the oldest settlements in the archipelago that became the city. Excavations of the area to the east of the present Church of San Pietro published by Stefano Tuzzato demonstrate that the island was already inhabited in the fifth century. Byzantine imperial seals dating from the sixth and seventh centuries found on the site suggest its political importance.Footnote ¹⁸ Surviving legal documents indicate that, by the ninth century, the island was called Olivolus as well as Castrum Helibolis, and lent its name to a diocese.Footnote ¹⁹ These appellations are revealing. If the landmass could support olive trees, as the name Olivolus suggests, its stability and fertility must have distinguished it from the transient shoals of the Venetian lagoon. Likewise, the Latin word castrum implies the presence of a castle (castello in Italian) or other fortifications. The earliest documentation of construction on the site is the will of Orso Partecipazio (also called Particiaco, r. 827–53), Bishop of Olivolo, dated 853: it attests that Bishop Orso built the Cathedral of San Pietro from its foundations and provided generously for its decoration.Footnote ²⁰

Medieval chroniclers supplement these sparse particulars, combining utilitarian reports of early events on the lagoon with tales contrived to dignify the city’s obscure beginnings. These narratives exploit the authority of classical and apostolic antecedents. The Origo civitatum Italie seu Venetiarum, the name now given to a palimpsest of accounts compiled in the late eleventh or twelfth centuries, asserts that refugees from Troy settled the Venetian lagoon.Footnote ²¹ Around 1292, another author, the so-called Marco, also insists that the island of Castello, seat of the eponymous bishopric, was the first Trojan settlement in Italy, preceding those in Aquileia and Latium.Footnote ²² The chronicler-doge Andrea Dandolo (1306–54, r. 1343–54) elaborates on these accounts, observing that Antenor and his people built a castle at Olivolo, and that its remains were found by the Paduans and other mainlanders fleeing from Attila (406–53) around 452.Footnote ²³ Other sources emphasize the site’s saintly origins. Thirteenth-century chronicler Martino da Canal writes that Saint Mark paused at Olivolo on his way from Aquileia to Alexandria, prophesying his eventual return.Footnote ²⁴ Yet others attribute the settlement of the southern lagoon and the establishment of a bishopric on Olivolo to Saint Magnus, Bishop of Oderzo (r. ca. 632–70), who founded Heraclea (Civitanova) after he and his flock were chased out of his inland diocese by the Lombard King Rothari (r. 636–52) around 638.Footnote ²⁵ Renaissance writers repeat and embroider these tales, indelibly connecting the island of San Pietro and its episcopal see to Venice’s legendary foundation and, consequently, to the august origins of its modern prestige.Footnote ²⁶

These texts also reveal glimpses of the island’s architectural and urban form, reinforcing its plural identity as a site of military, economic, and religious activity. According to the Origo, the Scucavalli (or Cavotorta) family built the first church on Olivolo-Castello soon after Christians were forced to flee Aquileia in 568. Their church was dedicated to Saints Sergius and Bacchus, Greek military saints with a significant Byzantine cult.Footnote ²⁷ The most reliable of the earliest extant Venetian chronicles, that compiled by John the Deacon (fl. 991–1009) in the early eleventh century, reports that a bishop called Obelerio (or Obelliebatus in other versions, r. 774–802) was established at Olivolo by 775, though it does not mention a cathedral church at that date.Footnote ²⁸ The chronicler attributes the foundation of the cathedral of Saint Peter to Bishop Orso Partecipazio and indicates it was complete by 841, in consonance with the bishop’s testament.Footnote ²⁹ Around that time, according to the Origo, the archipelago’s population gathered in the bishop’s courtyard on Saturdays for a weekly market; market-goers could look across the canal and be reassured by the sight of another fortification, a defensive wall that Deacon John notes extended from the western bank of the Canale di Castello to Santa Maria Zobenigo.Footnote ³⁰ This evidence suggests that by the end of the ninth century the island of Olivolo probably housed two churches, a bishop’s residence with a courtyard large enough to accommodate a market, and the fortification that gave the island its name. Thus, despite the variety of origin myths, a clear picture of the island’s character develops: it was an important religious and commercial center located at a defensive stronghold.

The island of Olivolo–San Pietro occupied a strategic position in the southern lagoon. At the time of the bishopric’s foundation, Olivolo was the settlement closest to the original ducal seat at Malamocco, on the Lido. A cluster of islands to the west of Olivolo was known as Rivoalto (later Rialto), a name that gradually attached itself to the Venetian archipelago in general and, eventually, also to the specific site that became the famous market.When the Doge Agnello Partecipazio (r. 810–27) moved the ducal seat fromMalamocco to an island closer to his family’s properties near the Church of Santi Apostoli in Rivoalto around 810, Olivolo nonetheless remained a crucial node in the emerging urban structure of Venice. By the middle of the ninth century, the Cathedral of San Pietro presided over one pole of an east-west axis of waterways that connected most of the early island-parishes of the city, from Santi Apostoli to San Pietro. Indeed, Albert Ammerman has identified the Santi Apostoli–San Pietro axis as the most important Venetian thoroughfare prior to the development of settlements along the Grand Canal some centuries later.Footnote ³¹ The waterway lapped against the banks of the islands of San Martino, San Antonino, and Santa Maria Formosa. Its path can be discerned clearly in one of the earliest extant maps of the city (fig. 9), the representation of fourteenth-century Venice attributed to Frater Marcus that was included in a manuscript of the Chronologia magna by Paolino da Venezia (ca. 1270–1344).Footnote ³² This map also shows that, after the abandonment of Malamocco, the island of San Pietro di Castello was the first settled landmass reached by vessels arriving at Rialto from the upper Adriatic, a privileged location in a city that prospered as a result of maritime trade.

Figure 9 Detail of the map of Venice by Frater Marcus, in Paolino da Venezia, Chronologia magna, ca. 1345. North is at the left. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, mss. Lat. Z. 2399 (1610), fol. 7^r. Photo: Osvaldo Böhm.

But San Pietro’s cultural prominence was soon challenged. In 828–29, Doge Agnello Partecipazio’s successor Giustiniano Partecipazio (r. 827–29) oversaw the foundation of a chapel dedicated to Saint Mark, near the Realtine heartland. Gradually, the new ducal chapel usurped the Cathedral of San Pietro’s role as the focal point of state religion. When the most important relics in the lagoon, the remains of Saint Mark, arrived in Venice, they did not go to the bishop but were put in the safekeeping of the doge.Footnote ³³ These events began to shift the economic, political, and religious centers of the Venetian archipelago westward, away from the island of Olivolo-Castello and closer to the intersection of the Santi Apostoli–San Pietro waterway with the deep, natural channel that eventually became the Grand Canal.

Furthermore, from the twelfth to the mid-fifteenth century, the highest-ranking cleric residing in Venice was not its bishop, but rather the Patriarch of Grado, who had been forced to abandon his cathedral city.Footnote ³⁴ Unlike the Bishop of Olivolo in Venice, who was his suffragan, from 1156 onward the Patriarch of Grado lived close to the centers of Venetian power, on the developing Grand Canal near Rialto and the Church of San Silvestro. His residence, unlike that of the bishop, was called a palace as early as 1164, signaling his claim to higher authority. The patriarch’s presence in Venice frequently brought him into jurisdictional conflicts with the bishop and exacerbated San Pietro’s increasing marginalization.Footnote ³⁵ At last, in 1451, the pope resolved the complicated jurisdictional situation by merging the Bishopric of Castello (the name that gradually replaced Olivolo as the Venetian see’s official designation) and the Patriarchate of Grado into a single office, the Patriarchate of Venice. That year, the Bishop of Castello, Lorenzo Giustiniani (1381–1456, r. 1433–56), became the first Patriarch of Venice.Footnote ³⁶

Despite persistent challenges to their authority in the period between the foundation of the ducal chapel of San Marco and the end of the fifteenth century, the bishops of Castello continued to build, and rebuild, on their island seat. Though their architectural enterprises are not well documented, their timing and form suggest the patrons’ desire to use architecture to boost their office’s stature in Venice. The next section examines the architectural evolution of the cathedral, episcopal residence, baptistery, and bell tower, in turn, concluding with an analysis of the campo within its urban context around 1500, a pivotal moment in the crystallization of Venice’s urban image.

3. The Cathedral of San Pietro to 1500

Although Venice became the richest and most populous city on the lagoon between the ninth and the twelfth centuries, its cathedral’s history in this period remains obscure. In 1120, a catastrophic fire destroyed the bishop’s house and the ninth-century cathedral erected by Bishop Orso.Footnote ³⁷ The church that replaced it, begun by 1123, is probably the structure depicted by Jacopo de’ Barbari in the view of Venice published in 1500: a basilica with a high nave and single, lower side aisles terminating in three semicircular apses (fig. 10).Footnote ³⁸ Although its western elevation is not visible in Barbari’s print, it is clear that the church was conventionally oriented, with its principal entrance facing west, toward the Canale di San Pietro and the rest of the Realtine archipelago.Footnote ³⁹

Figure 10 Detail of fig. 2: the island of San Pietro di Castello. Photo: Osvaldo Böhm.

The earliest surviving verbal descriptions of the cathedral, from 1502 and 1581, confirm the church’s basilican plan, brick-and-stone construction, and an interior disposition reminiscent of the basilica of Santa Maria Assunta in Torcello (dating from the eleventh and twelfth centuries) and Santa Maria e Donato in Murano (finished ca. 1141), as Ennio Concina has noted.Footnote ⁴⁰ These accounts disclose little about the medieval church’s exterior appearance, but it seems likely that its facçade was unadorned, like those of its contemporaries at Torcello and Murano. As Barbari’s view indicates, the facçade of the medieval church aligned with that of the patriarchal palace. For some time before 1594, a cluster of canonical houses pressed against San Pietro’s façade, obstructing it from view.Footnote ⁴¹ If the preeminent cathedral of the Venetian patriarchate was hardly visible from the campo, none of its fifteenth-century patriarchs felt compelled to alter the situation.

4. The Episcopal Palace to 1500

The second most important component of the episcopal complex was the residence of the bishops of Olivolo-Castello and, later, the patriarchs of Venice. Surprisingly, it—not the cathedral—attracted the most dramatic architectural interventions up to the sixteenth century. Like the adjoning basilica, the bishop’s house was damaged by fire in 1120.Nothing is known about its fate between the early twelfth and the mid-thirteenth century. However, in 1244, Bishop Pietro Pino (r. 1235–55) and his sister Sidiana Bonzi systematically bought several properties near the cathedral, including at least three wooden houses.Footnote ⁴² They acquired these properties in order to rebuild the episcopal residence on amuch larger scale than its predecessor structure.Footnote ⁴³ A now-lost inscription in the palace commemorated the reconstruction.Footnote ⁴⁴ Although no documents record Pino’s motivations for building, the enterprise coincided with a spate of episcopal palace construction in Northern Italy and followed the erection of a communal palace at San Marco under Doge Pietro Ziani (r. 1205–29), as well as a succession of jurisdictional quarrels with his metropolitan, the Venice-based Patriarch of Grado.Footnote ⁴⁵ Unfortunately, lack of evidence precludes reconstructing the appearance of Bishop Pietro’s residence.Footnote ⁴⁶ The earliest likeness of the episcopal palace is Barbari’s 1500 view, which postdates Pino’s palace by more than 250 years (fig. 10).Footnote ⁴⁷ Barbari depicted an irregular, quadrilateral, two-story structure consisting of four wings arranged around a large courtyard that corresponds closely to the surviving palace.Footnote ⁴⁸ Its western, southern, and eastern ranges had gabled roofs; and the north wing had a shed roof that abutted the cathedral nave, as it still does today. An exterior staircase parallel to the palace’s north range (now lost) led visitors from the courtyard to the upper story, which was illuminated by a pair of round-arched bifore, or two-light, windows. The viewing angle of Barbari’s depiction obscures the courtyard elevation of the palace’s western, southern, and eastern ranges, as well as its western façade. The visible, northern wing had an arcaded, ground-story portico in Barbari’s day; the portico extends around all four sides of the courtyard now.

In Pino’s day, neither Venice’s grandest houses nor many episcopal palaces on the mainland incorporated such large, central courtyards as that shown in Barbari’s view.Footnote ⁴⁹ It is likely that the palazzo with a quadrilateral courtyard shown by Barbari was the work of Patriarch Tommaso Donà (ca. 1440–1504, r. 1492–1504), incorporating earlier structures on the site. In the 1504 entry recording the patriarch’s death, diarist Marino Sanudo (1466–1536) writes that, in addition to improving the patriarchal income and building a baptismal church (discussed below), the patriarch undertook building in the patriarchal palace.Footnote ⁵⁰ Relatively little is known about Patriarch Donà, who had been prior of San Domenico di Castello before his election, but he is an important figure in the development of the episcopal complex. A recent study by Pascal Vuillemin characterizes him as an energetic reformer who insisted that the diocesan clergy fulfill its liturgical duties completely and correctly, and who valued a clearly delineated church hierarchy, particularly in regard to the administration of the sacraments. Clerics who transgressed were fined; Donà allocated many of these fines to the episcopal fabrica, to be spent on embellishing and rebuilding the cathedral complex. Giuseppe Cappelletti elaborates on Sanudo’s terse obituary, portraying the Dominican friar as a passionate builder and accumulator of real estate.Footnote ⁵¹ His renovated palace, which included the addition of a much grander staircase, was supplemented by the acquisition of a palazzo di campagna (country palace) at Mirano, on the terraferma. In addition, Donà underwrote the construction or reconstruction of at least one of the canonical houses north of the campo.Footnote ⁵² Although we have no other details, the agglomeration of circumstantial, documentary, and visual evidence, coupled with Patriarch Donà’s architectural ambition, suggests that the courtyard palace depicted by Barbari was assembled during Donà’s reign. Certainly, by the late fifteenth century, episcopal palaces of this type were the norm elsewhere in Italy. Donà’s patriarchal palace may have been an impressive architectural statement in 1504, but in 1581, when Francesco Sansovino (1521–83) published his guide to Venice, the critic considered the building’s large scale its only virtue and otherwise dismissed the structure as old-fashioned and unprepossessing.Footnote ⁵³ Though later patriarchs made improvements to the palace, they did not alter the exterior footprint of the building as seen from the campo and, therefore, had little impact on the campo’s shape.Footnote ⁵⁴

5. The Baptistery of San Giovanni to 1500

The thirteenth-century campus castellanus also encompassed a baptismal church. Although the baptistery’s foundation date remains uncertain, its location and dedication to Saint John the Baptist, or San Zuane in Venetian, are documented by 1219.Footnote ⁵⁵ In 1303, the baptismal church stood near the archdeacon’s residence, which was one of more than a dozen wooden and stone houses owned by the bishop and chapter on the island.Footnote ⁵⁶ Like its neighbors, the baptistery has been refashioned more than once, so we cannot be certain of its original form.

Its earliest representation is that in Barbari’s view (fig. 10), where it is shown from above, situated to the south of the west wing of the bishop’s palace.Footnote ⁵⁷ Barbari depicts a small building that is topped by a superstructure that incorporates a prominent dome set on a round drum projecting from pitched and hipped roofs arranged perpendicularly. In the print, the baptistery does not project into the campo to its west, but rather aligns with the western façade of the abutting patriarchal palace. Today, the baptistery is incorporated into the southwestern corner of the patriarch’s residence, although the brick masonry of its northern wall is not continuous with the masonry of the palace’s western façade, indicating that they were built in separate campaigns (fig. 11). Neither dome nor drum survives. The deconsecrated structure—currently used for workshops, storage, and housing — has three stories pierced by a motley array of unframed rectangular and stone-framed, round-headed windows. The building has two functional ground-story entrances, to the west and south (fig. 6). A northern entrance has been blinded with brick; it is surmounted by a relief sculpture of a Madonna and Child enclosed within a Gothic tabernacle. Three small statues of standing male saints (possibly Saints Peter, Paul, and John the Baptist) ornament the second story of the building’s west façade. All the sculptures appear to be spoils installed on the façade at a later date.Footnote ⁵⁸ The baptistery’s three portals are framed with Renaissance-style, rectangular, marble doorframes that seem coeval with the building’s stone cornice.

As mentioned above, nearby buildings block the view of the baptistery in most representations of the campo. The earliest view of San Giovanni’s campo elevation is that by the vedutista Gabriel Bella (1730–99), dated between 1779 and 1792 (fig. 12).Footnote ⁵⁹ In Bella’s painting of the installation of the patriarch at San Pietro, the baptistery has lost its distinctive dome, although at that time it still had a hipped roof above Venetian-red plaster walls.Footnote ⁶⁰ Indeed, in this view San Giovanni no longer looks much like a church, and little in its external appearance discloses its former role as baptistery of the Cathedral of Venice. However, an 1833 plan of the baptistery prepared by Venetian engineer Giovanni Casoni (1783–1857) after an earlier drawing reveals the church within: a small basilica with a square nave, a slightly projecting transept, and three apses (fig. 13). The layout of the little church recalls local, domed examples, such as San Giacomo di Rialto, although Casoni provides no indication of the building’s ceiling or roof type.Footnote ⁶¹

Figure 11 View of north façade, Baptistery of San Giovanni, Campo di San Pietro di Castello, Venice. Author’s photo.

Figure 12 Gabriel Bella, L’ingresso del patriarca a San Pietro di Castello, ca. 1779–92. Venice, Fondazione Querini Stampalia.

Figure 13 Giovanni Casoni, Piano rilevato l’anno 1810 della antica Chiesetta Battesimale intitolata a San Giovanni Battista…, 1833. North is at the left. Venice, Civico Museo Correr, Venice, Gab. Disegni III, n. 5160. Photo: Osvaldo Böhm.

If Patriarch Tommaso Donà rebuilt the baptistery from the ground up, as Sanudo implies and Cappelletti asserts, then the prominent dome in Barbari’s plan must date from his reign. Donà would have had six or seven years to build before Barbari and his assistants recorded the campo’s appearance in the late 1490s. He planned to be buried in an “archa” in the baptismal church, but died before either was finished.Footnote ⁶² The decoration of San Zuane was completed only in 1511 by Antonio Contarini (three patriarchs after Donà), as payment registers demonstrate. Both Donà and Contarini are commemorated on the ancient sarcophagus that served as the baptismal font, also depicted by Casoni (fig. 13).Footnote ⁶³

Significantly, Donà’s reconstruction of the baptistery responds to a moment in Venetian cultural history in which humanistic interests and antiquarian attention to Venice’s origins and its earliest Christian past intertwined. As Concina has shown, one outcome of this phenomenon was the renewal of interest in basilican churches surmounted by one or more domes, along the lines of San Giacomo di Rialto. The reconstruction of the Baptistery of San Giovanni to such a plan may reflect the contours of an earlier structure on the site but, in either case, it was part of a trend to restore or renew venerable early foundations in order to emphasize their connections to Venice’s glorious past. At approximately the same time, San Salvatore (or Salvador) and Santa Maria Formosa were also rebuilt as domed basilican structures.Footnote ⁶⁴ San Giovanni’s external form, like its interior disposition around the Roman sarcophagus-font, reasserted Olivolo’s distinguished role in Venice’s formation and consequently in the city’s antiquarian contemporary culture, in keeping with Patriarch Donà’s strong regard for dignity and decorum. It was also consonant with the humanistic impulse that drove the transformation of San Pietro’s bell tower by Donà’s predecessor as patriarch, the Camaldolese monk Maffeo Girardi (1405–92, r. 1466/68–92), and that was to metamorphose Venetian architecture in the coming century.

6. The Campanile to 1500

The first known reference to a campanile at San Pietro di Castello dates from 1226, when it is mentioned in deliberations by the Maggior Consiglio of Venice.Footnote ⁶⁵ That bell tower does not survive and nothing is known of its form or precise location. Its successors include a tower purportedly rebuilt in 1442 under Bishop Lorenzo Giustiniani, and another dating to the early years of the dogado of Cristoforo Moro (1390–1471, r. 1462–71).Footnote ⁶⁶

Mauro Codussi designed the campanile that now stands askew on the southern side of the campo (fig. 7). It incorporates the remains of an earlier brick tower that had been damaged by lightning.Footnote ⁶⁷ Codussi was hired in 1482 by Patriarch Maffeo Girardi, who had previously commissioned from Codussi a new bell tower at the Camaldolese monastery of San Michele in Isola while abbot there (fig. 14).Footnote ⁶⁸ San Pietro’s tower was complete by 1490. Like most of the freestanding bell towers extant in Venice, San Pietro’s tower has a square plan. Projecting moldings separate the structure into five parts, from bottom to top: a pedestal pierced by a single door; two tall stories articulated by lesenes and blind arches; a belfry with round-arched trifore, or three-light, windows on each side; and an octagonal drum sheathed by sixteen elegant, scallop-shelled blind arches supported by coupled colonnettes.Footnote ⁶⁹ As the Barbari view indicates, Codussi’s tower was originally surmounted by a slightly stilted dome similar to the one topping San Michele’s tower (fig. 10).Footnote ⁷⁰ Although the tower’s overall composition — square plan, main shaft articulated by lesenes and blind arches, and galleried belfry — is characteristic of the medieval campanile type throughout the lagoon (e.g., the towers of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice and of Santa Maria Assunta in Torcello), its stone exterior and classicizing ornament set it apart from its peers and expressed a distinct, multilayered message to a cultured, Venetian, late-Quattrocento audience.

Figure 14 Mauro Codussi, Church of San Michele in Isola, Venice, by 1477. Photo: Robert G. La France.

Codussi’s use of bright white limestone for the tower’s entire exterior elevation was unprecedented in Venice. Deborah Howard has interpreted the choice of white stone as a reference to the Pharos of Alexandria, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.Footnote ⁷¹ The Pharos, no longer extant in the fifteenth century, was known through numismatic and textual evidence. In the Geography, Strabo (ca. 63 BCE–ca. 23 CE) remarks that the Alexandrian lighthouse was “admirably constructed of white marble,” a description familiar to educated Venetians.Footnote ⁷² In complementary fashion, the bell tower’s whiteness was in keeping with Leon Battista Alberti’s (1404–72) preference for white churches, which emerged from Plato and Cicero’s recommendations for the decoration of temples. Girardi and Codussi may have conferred on these issues; it is also possible that they consulted the copy of Alberti’s architectural treatise in San Michele’s library.Footnote ⁷³

Codussi had already used white stone to dress the façade of the abbey church of San Michele, where it may also have alluded to the color associated with the church’s dedicatee, the Archangel Michael, as well as the Camaldolese monks’ white robes, as Daniel Savoy has proposed (fig. 14).Footnote ⁷⁴ It is significant that the Istrian stone specified by Codussi’s contract was expensive: most Venetian bell towers, like most Venetian buildings, were made of brick and merely highlighted by stone detailing. In Venice, the typical medieval campanile used attenuated stone string courses, or marcapiani, to differentiate one story from another coloristically (white stone against red brick).Codussi transformed these elements into prominent, miniature all’antica cornices complete with egg-and-dart and dentilated moldings between the pedestal, first, and second stories, and into the better part of a Corinthian entablature between the upper story of the shaft and the belfry (fig. 15).He thickened the shallow, unmodulated lesenes that articulated the shaft of the medieval prototype, emphasizing their greater projection by using fleshy cyma moldings to mark the transition between their exterior surface and the inner wall beneath them. The abundance of classicizing detail throughout the bell tower and Codussi’s monumentalizing handling of its articulation indicate an unmistakable desire to reference antiquity.

Figure 15 Mauro Codussi, campanile, Campo di San Pietro di Castello, Venice, 1482–90. Photo: Robert G. La France. The campanile’s classicizing ornament is discernible in this view of it upper stories.

Although the city of Venice did not have a Roman past, Venetians nonetheless exploited the cultural prestige of the Roman heritage in commemorating and celebrating their own, as Patricia Fortini Brown has demonstrated.Footnote ⁷⁵ During the last decades of the fifteenth century and the first years of the sixteenth, Venetian humanists and antiquarians turned their attention not only to Latin and Greek literature, sculpture, and numismatics, but also to the city’s own early history, as Concina has shown. This antiquarian interest resulted in the revival of the cults of Saints Theodore and Magnus, and increased attention to the material traces of the origins of the Venetian church. Since, according to legend, Saint Magnus had founded the eight earliest churches in the city—San Pietro di Castello, San Raffaele, San Salvatore, Santa Maria Formosa, San Giovanni in Bragora, San Zaccaria, Santa Giustina, and Santi Apostoli — these buildings attracted special attention, and many were renovated, reconstructed, or imitated in this period.Footnote ⁷⁶ In the Venetian imagination, these churches and their fabrics shared the prestige of Rome and Constantinople. Although it seems ahistorical to the modern mind, fifteenth-century Venetians did not insist on a distinction between the Roman, the Byzantine, and their own early medieval structures. Elements of all three architectures were revived or preserved, in combination or singly, to exalt the city’s historical sense of itself.Footnote ⁷⁷ Like its Alexandrian references, the classicizing details of Codussi’s tower can be interpreted as an allusion to the Venetian episcopacy’s ancient heritage.

This message is amplified in two ways that go beyond the campanile’s Romanizing ornamentation. First, the tower also refers explicitly to the authority of Saint Peter. On each side of the uppermost story of the shaft, below the belfry, stone roundels depicting Saint Peter and his keys announce the cathedral’s dedication to the first apostle (fig. 15). Originally, these medallions had been installed on the previous campanile (the one replaced by Girardi’s tower).Footnote ⁷⁸ Although they are not as conspicuous against white stone as they would have been against the older tower’s brick or stucco background, they nonetheless identify the tower and the episcopal complex as Saint Peter’s church. Closer to eye level, four escutcheons quartered with the crossed keys of Saint Peter and a castle representing Castello reinforce that identification. Second, in a city built of brick, the stone tower reminds the viewer of Saint Peter and of the pope’s role as leader of the Roman Church. At Matthew 16:18, Christ changes the apostle Simon’s name to Peter and then invokes the new name’s double meaning, saying “Thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church.”Footnote ⁷⁹

The tower’s white stone also served a practical purpose. The light-reflective material may have been chosen to enhance its visibility and, therefore, its usefulness as a beacon, as had been the case with the Pharos. Sailors used Venice’s bell towers as navigational aids to guide their passage through the lagoon’s shallow waters. Handbooks specifically instructed navigators to use San Pietro’s tower, one of the city’s tallest, to orient their vessel’s entry into the harbor.Footnote ⁸⁰ While Girardi’s commission was merely the last in a series of projects to replace the original tower, the new campanile’s exceptional height and luminous surface made it conspicuous to ships arriving in Venice from the porto di Venezia. Indeed, toward the end of his life, Bernardo Giustiniani (1408–89) noted that mariners entering the port had no more certain a sign than San Pietro’s tower.Footnote ⁸¹ The campanile must have looked even more imposing than it does today in the fifteenth century, when it stood against the contrasting brick backdrop of the patriarchal buildings. In sum, Girardi’s white Istrian-stone campanile astutely reaffirmed the Campo di San Pietro’s status as hallowed ground, rendering the site’s prestigious and ancient Venetian pedigree visible again and reestablishing it as an important landmark in the panorama of the city. In addition, it simultaneously asserted the cultural sophistication of its patron, the patriarch.

7. The Campo Around 1500 and Venice’S Urban Morphology

Notwithstanding Girardi and Donà’s determined, though piecemeal, attempts to harness a classicizing visual language to evoke San Pietro’s venerable past and assert its present importance, in 1500 the campo of San Pietro di Castello remained a heterogeneous assemblage (fig. 10). To the north, a cluster of houses occupied by the members of the patriarchal famiglia (including members of the cathedral chapter and the patriarchal household) extended from the canal to the cathedral, blocking about a third of its façade.Footnote ⁸² The medieval basilica, the renovated patriarchal palace, and the rebuilt baptistery formed its western perimeter, the latter projecting westward into the campo, toward the tower.Footnote ⁸³ Burials and tomb monuments occupied the unenclosed, grassy sagrato (parvis) extending in front of the cathedral between the northern houses and San Giovanni.Footnote ⁸⁴ A street separated the campanile and baptistery from another group of houses owned by the bishop and chapter, which along with a cavana (boathouse) framed the southern border of the campo.Footnote ⁸⁵ Gardens and a vineyard extended eastward behind the cathedral complex and took up most of the island’s remaining surface. To complete the ensemble, a wooden bridge led from the campo to the island of San Daniele.Footnote ⁸⁶ From the west, the campo presented a compact urban nucleus on an island occupied principally by orchards and gardens. The campo was not visible from the east, although the tall, bright tower of San Pietro continued to guide sailors to the city from the mouth of the inner lagoon at Lido.

To interpret the form of the Campo di San Pietro at the turn of the sixteenth century, it is useful to review the urban morphology of Venice at the time. In contrast to the impression of unified urban agglomeration given by Barbari’s view of Venice, the contemporary treatise Del sito di Venezia (1502) by Marco Antonio Coccio, called Sabellico (ca. 1476–1506) emphasizes the fragmentation of the city into a multitude of islands. Sabellico organizes his text according to the administrative division of the city into six sestieri (districts), introducing each by recording the number of islands it comprised: Castello (named after San Pietro di Castello) is made up of twenty islands, San Polo of thirteen, and so on. Sabellico leads the reader on a tortuous journey by foot from island to island, traversing campi, wide and narrow streets, wharves, marshy fields, canal banks, and a multitude of bridges. From time to time, he proposes making a crossing by boat as well as bridge. Throughout, the watery confines of each island force Sabellico to turn, retrace his steps, and find a way across a span of water before he can continue his narrative tour.Footnote ⁸⁷

Repeatedly, Sabellico reminds the reader that each sestiere has at least as many churches as islands, a conceit later reiterated by Sansovino.Footnote ⁸⁸ Indeed, until the modern era, the parish island was the most common morphological unit of Venice’s urban landscape. Though many of these islands have since been connected by paved infill, canals (rii), still demarcate several of these boundaries, as can be discerned in Gian Battista Arzenti’s (fl. 1590–1625) early seventeenth-century painted view of the city (fig. 16). With the exception of a small number of monastic islands, each island of Venice’s urban archipelago typically functioned as an independent parish, and had a parish church, a campo, and a small market of its own (fig. 17).Footnote ⁸⁹

Figure 16 Gian Battista Arzenti, Veduta di Venezia, ca. 1620–30. North is at the top. Venice, Civico Museo Correr, on loan from Trent, Museo Storico.

Figure 17 Detail, S. Giacomo dall’Orio, plate 21 from Giovanni Battista Paganuzzi, Iconografie delle trenta parrocchie di Venezia. Venice, 1821. North is at the top. Photo: Osvaldo Böhm. The canals marking the original boundaries of the parish of San Giacomo dall’Orio are clearly visible in this map. The small campo to the north of San Giacomo, near the Grand Canal, belongs to the Oratory of San Giovanni Decollato.

The Campo di San Pietro’s configuration around 1500 is typical of Venetian parish campi both in terms of its general disposition and its irregularity. The campi of Venice’s parish islands are, as a rule, open spaces organized on one, two, or three sides of a church. Before the nineteenth century, they were not always paved. Venetian church campi in this period did not achieve geometric regularity, despite Sansovino’s assertion that they were “square,” and they do not necessarily have their greatest expanse in front of their church’s west façade.Footnote ⁹⁰ For example, the portions of the campo of San Giacomo dell’Orio located to the east and south of the church exceed the size of the spaces in front of its principal entrance façade, to the west (figs. 17–18). A Venetian campo often pivots around one corner of the church. The church itself is frequently viewed at an oblique angle, as at Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari (figs. 18–19).Footnote ⁹¹ Whenever possible, a campo extends to a nearby canal, and a bridge connects it to the next parish island. Like the Campo di San Pietro, the perimeter buildings of the typical parish campo did not have grand façades before the sixteenth century, though at San Pietro the prominent stone campanile introduced an atypical element of monumentality.

From the Middle Ages into the sixteenth century, most Venetian campi served a multitude of purposes, functioning as quays, markets, churchyards, cemeteries, and ritual spaces.Footnote ⁹² Over time, however, two of Venice’s urban squares became increasingly specialized: Piazza San Marco became the city’s political and ritual center, and the campo of San Giacomo di Rialto became its quintessential center of economic exchange, although both retained some ancillary functions. By the mid-sixteenth century these two principal squares differed from the standard parish-island campo in three significant ways (figs. 20–21). First, they evinced greater geometric idealization—both had straighter, more orthogonal sides than the average parish campo. Second, they were bounded by monumental arcaded structures. And third, they both showcased an entire church façade along one edge of the site. At San Marco and San Giacomo di Rialto, these urbanistic effects were the product of deliberate, state-sponsored architectural interventions during the course of the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁹³

Seizing upon architectural enhancement as a method to distinguish themselves and their families in the tightly controlled social environment of Venice, some private patrons through the fifteenth and, especially, the mid-and late sixteenth century began to make improvements to the façades of their parish churches and family houses, and to the campi adjacent to them, as Martin Gaier has shown. Several campi were enriched by grander residential and church façades, as their patrons competed with each other and with the growing monumentality of Rialto, the ducal piazza, and the emerging state-sponsored projects to upgrade the city’s infrastructure.Footnote ⁹⁴ Compared to these, San Pietro’s campo lacked grandeur at the turn of the sixteenth century, despite its elegant campanile and vast patriarchal residence. The unassuming façades that bounded it, including the obstructed and unadorned face of the cathedral, made it appear more like an ordinary parish-island campo than the seat of a prince of the church or an important civic space.

Figure 18 Venetian parish campi often are irregular in shape. In many cases, the church’s principal or eastern façade faces away from the campo’s greatest expanse, as at San Giacomo dall’Orio (no. 21), Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari (no. 24), and San Polo. Detail, Pianta della città di Venezia con li nuovi regolamenti fatti nel 1828. [Venice?], 1828.

Figure 19 Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Campo di Santa Maria dei Frari, Venice. Photo: Robert G. La France.

Nor was the prominence of the patriarchal see enhanced by its increasingly peripheral situation. Throughout the Middle Ages, Venice’s parish islands became more densely populated and expanded in size, narrowing the boundary waters between them and emphasizing their collective identity as part of the city, while San Pietro, which had been one of the largest islands, remained sparsely inhabited and set apart from the rest by a wide canal, as Barbari’s view shows (fig. 2).Footnote ⁹⁵ Furthermore, because the development of Venetian shipbuilding demanded ever larger facilities, the Arsenale gradually engulfed the islets and canals between the island of San Pietro and the rest of the city. This obliterated the eastern portion of the medieval waterway connecting it to the islands of San Marco, Rialto, and Santi Apostoli, and further disconnected San Pietro from the city’s economic and political centers.Footnote ⁹⁶

Figure 20 Piazza San Marco, Venice. Alinari / Art Resource, NY.

In fact, because of its relative separation from the main cluster of islands around Rialto and the Grand Canal, the island of San Pietro had begun to resemble a different Venetian settlement type—the monastery island.Footnote ⁹⁷ The Venetian heartland had always included monastic communities, but over time monasteries such as San Zaccaria and Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari were engulfed by the expanding city, their proximity to neighboring parish islands disguising their insular nature.Footnote ⁹⁸ Since the early Middle Ages, however, the Realtine archipelago had also been prominently ringed by a network of separate monastery islands, each dedicated to a particular holy figure, as a woodcut map from the 1528 Libro di Benedetto Bordone nel qual si ragiona de tutte l’isole del mondo vividly illustrates (fig. 22).Footnote ⁹⁹ Together, the island monasteries formed a spiritual defensive system, its beneficent saints protecting Venice from enemies beyond the lagoon, as Sansovino emphasized in his description of the city.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Like the monastic islands of Sant’Elena to the east (fig. 23), SanMichele to the north (fig. 14), San Francesco delDeserto to the northeast (fig. 24), San Giorgio in Alga to the southeast, San Giorgio Maggiore to the south, and San Lazzaro to the southwest, among many others, the island of San Pietro di Castello was dominated by a church, bell tower, and clerical residences. Like the monastery islands, San Pietro encompassed extensive gardens and most of its inhabitants constituted or served the religious community, with few outsiders or tradesmen present. These features differentiated it from the densely built parish islands with their heterogeneous population. By 1500, when viewed from afar, the ensemble resembled one of the monastery islands that ringed Venice more than it did the densely urbanized islands of the Realtine archipelago. Only the presence of the large campo oriented toward the city, and the bridge leading to it, affirmed San Pietro’s kinship to the cluster of islands that composed Venice.

Figure 21 Veduta della Piazza di Rialto, plate 58 from Luca Carlevarijs, Le fabriche e vedute di Venezia. Venice, 1703. Rome, American Academy in Rome.

Figure 22 Vinegia (View of Venice), fols. xxix^v–xxx^r from Benedetto Bordone, Libro di Benedetto Bordone nel qual si ragiona de tutte l’isole del mondo…, Venice, 1528. Venice, Civico Museo Correr, col. Venezia, E 564.

Figure 23 Isola di S. Elena de’ Padri Olivetani, bottom half of plate 40 in Francesco Zucchi, Teatro delle fabbriche più cospicue in prospettiva, sì pubbliche, che private della città di Venezia. [Venice], 1740.

Figure 24 Fratelli Alinari, Veduta generale dell’Isola di San Francesco del Deserto (General View of the Island of San Francesco del Deserto), ca. 1920–30. Alinari / Art Resource, NY.

As this diachronic analysis of the Campo di San Pietro’s development demonstrates, the sporadic building works on the island throughout the Middle Ages and early Renaissance did not endow the campo with a distinct and coherent architectural identity. This contrasts markedly with the attentiveness with which mainland cities such as Parma and Florence redeveloped their cathedral squares in the later Middle Ages.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In the Venetian context, while Pietro Pino’s new, mid-thirteenth-century episcopal residence competed with the new communal palace at San Marco, its construction does not seem to have been accompanied by efforts to enhance the overall site in response to the increasing monumentalization of Piazza San Marco. During the fifteenth century some patriarchs exploited Venice’s new antiquarianism to position San Pietro and the patriarchate at the center of the city’s sophisticated, humanist architectural discourse. Maffeo Girardi’s new bell tower literally raised the profile of the Campo di San Pietro in the city’s cultural and physical landscape and Tommaso Donà’s renovated palace and new baptismal church asserted the patriarch’s princely and sacramental roles, but neither of these addressed the patriarchal ensemble as a whole, allowing the cathedral’s façade, for example, to remain obstructed.

Despite Girardi and Donà’s efforts, when Barbari memorialized the image of the city of Venice at the end of the fifteenth century in his highly influential printed view, the campo and island of San Pietro retained an ambiguous urban form, partway between an ordinary parish island and an isolated monastery island or religious community. Neither type expressed the prestige of the patriarchate of Venice, nor identified the site as an important civic node. This defect was not lost on the sixteenth-century patriarchs, who made several attempts to remedy the situation, as will be shown below. Before doing so, however, let us first consider how and why San Pietro remained removed from the center of Venetian public life, despite its illustrious beginnings and recent elevation to a metropolitan see.

8. The Problem of Saint Peter: Venice, The Venetian Church, and Papal Authority

The Venetian republic’s persistent distrust of papal authority complicated its relationship to the shepherd of its see.Footnote ¹⁰² Republic and pope were frequently at odds over the right to select ecclesiastics in Venetian territory.Footnote ¹⁰³ Long after lay investiture had been abandoned elsewhere in Europe, the Venetian state retained the privilege of electing the Bishop of Olivolo-Castello, the Patriarch of Grado, the Patriarch of Venice (after the merger of the two sees), and the Patriarch of Aquileia.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ As a result, religious concerns entangled with secular ones. The Serenissima aspired to an empire that extended up to and beyond the territorial limits of the patriarchate; by blurring the boundaries between the political and religious authority of that office, civic leaders saw an opportunity to expand the Venetian dominion. In turn, Venice’s prelates could use their positions to enrich family members with church titles and property more effectively than government officials could, because they were immune against the potent antinepotism safeguards that constrained holders of the republic’s secular offices.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The pontiffs, too, “wielded two swords,” using the papacy’s spiritual clout as a political instrument to enlarge the Holy See’s earthly domain and influence the balance of power in Europe and the Mediterranean.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In order to oppose Venice’s imperial interests, Pope Julius II (1443–1513, r. 1503–13) joined forces with King Louis XII of France (1462–1515, r. 1498–1515), Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (1459–1519, r. 1493–1519), and King Fernando I of Spain (1452–1516, r. 1479–1516) to form the League of Cambrai around 1508. The league devastated the Serenissima’s army at the battle of Agnadello the following year.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Given this conflict, Venice’s ruling oligarchs were naturally concerned that their patriarch hold the city’s interests above those of the Holy See, despite the patriarch’s vow of obedience to the pope. Weary from a particularly combative relationship with the ascetic and reform-minded Patriarch Girolamo Querini (1468–1554, r. 1524–54), the Venetians shifted their policy on patriarchal elections by allowing lay persons to be nominated for the office.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Five of the six patriarchs of Venice who succeeded Querini were laymen. Unsurprisingly, their political credentials often outstripped their spiritual gifts. In the tempestuous political climate of the sixteenth century, the patriarchs were frequently trapped between their dual vows of obedience to state and church.

Moreover, divisions within the Venetian patriciate exacerbated tensions between Venice and Rome. Two principal factions struggled to direct the republic during the political and economic crises of the sixteenth century. One faction, the giovani, opposed the papacy’s expansionist agenda, emphasized Venice’s traditional independence, and favored a maritime-based economic policy. Its opponent, the vecchi, is usually characterized as favoring moderation, diplomacy, a balanced economic policy, and tolerance toward the Roman Church’s political program. Although the customary identification of the giovani with antipapalism and the vecchi with propapal views has been called into question, it is certainly true that patricians without clerical affiliations were suspicious of Venetian prelates and their families, a group known as the papalisti, whom they perceived to have divided loyalties.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

One consequence of Venice’s contentious relationship with Rome was that, with very few exceptions, the elaborate state ceremonials used to assert Venetian power assiduously avoided the Cathedral of San Pietro, and therefore any submission to the Holy See implied by dogal visits to that church.Footnote ¹¹⁰ No official civic procession visited San Pietro for the feast of Saint Peter on 29 June.Footnote ¹¹¹ Instead, the patriarch was summoned to San Marco to officiate at important events, both religious and civic, ranging from the celebration of the Christian feasts to political rituals.Footnote ¹¹² State ceremonies trumped religious obligations. For example, in 1524 the republic insisted that Patriarch Antonio Contarini abandon his cathedral on the feast of its patron Saint Peter to swear in Francesco Maria I della Rovere (1490–1538), Duke of Urbino, as the new capitano general da mar, Venice’s supreme military office. It seems that the duke’s astrologer found that date more auspicious than the one originally scheduled, three days later.Footnote ¹¹³ On another occasion, the elaborate state procession to commemorate the invention of the relics of Saint Mark, normally celebrated on 25 June, was rescheduled to 29 June to accommodate a group of Japanese ambassadors, state interests again overriding the patriarch’s religious duties.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Moreover, neither the bishops nor the patriarchs of Venice had any involvement with the ceremonial investiture of the Venetian doges.Footnote ¹¹⁵ As a result of these tensions, San Pietro lacked the official civic patronage that benefited episcopal churches on the Italian mainland. Notably, the state funds that supported the increasingly grand reconstruction of the Rialto market after the fire of 1514, despite the financial drain of the Cambrai war, as well as the transformation of Piazza SanMarco into amajestic, limestone precinct from the 1520s to the ’90s, did not extend to the embellishment of the patriarchal seat.Footnote ¹¹⁶

San Pietro’s modest spiritual attractions did not help its cause. None of the relics that flooded Venice in the aftermath of the fourth Crusade made it to the episcopal church.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In Sanudo’s day, its only notable relics were the remains of Saints Sergius and Bacchus and the throne from which Saint Peter had purportedly presided in Antioch (fig. 25).Footnote ¹¹⁸ The cult of these Byzantine saints, popular throughout the eastern Mediterranean, did not take root in Venice. Their feast was not celebrated with particular pomp and their relics attracted few international pilgrims.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Until 1591, Saint Peter’s cathedra remained in the church’s choir, beyond the reach of the majority of visitors.Footnote ¹²⁰ San Pietro’s limited treasures were eventually augmented in 1456 by the remains of the Blessed Lorenzo Giustinani and the handful of relics given by Patriarch Antonio Contarini to endow two chapels in 1524.Footnote ¹²¹ These undistinguished and inaccessible memorials could not overshadow the fame of the miracle-working images housed in Santa Maria dei Miracoli and Santa Maria della Consolazione, called della Fava, nor could they match the prestige of Saint Mark’s lavishly displayed relics in the ducal chapel. A pilgrim wrote of Venice in 1494: “The patriarchal Church or Cathedral is called the church of San Pietro. It has not many ornaments. I think that Saint Mark, who was the disciple, must have stolen them.”Footnote ¹²² The pilgrim’s disappointment strongly attests to San Marco’s usurpation of San Pietro’s religious authority.

Figure 25 Throne of Saint Peter, after 635, Church of San Pietro di Castello, Venice. Author’s photo.

The prelates who conducted Venice’s first post-Tridentine apostolic inspection criticized San Pietro’s isolated location in 1581. Lorenzo Campeggi (1547–85) of Bologna, papal nuncio to Venice, and Agostino Valier, the Venetian-born Bishop of Verona (1531–1606, r. 1565–1606), took considerable pains to render the politically unpopular visit palatable to the Venetian state and the patriarch, but did not refrain from proposing that the cathedral be moved to a more suitable — and central — part of the city.Footnote ¹²³ Predictably, the senate ignored their recommendation. The distance between the patriarchal church and the city center epitomized Venice’s desire to relegate the Roman Church to an unthreatening, secondary role in the republic’s political, economic, and religious life.

By the sixteenth century, parish churches, new foundations dedicated to miracle-working images, and the ducal chapel of San Marco all had greater spiritual claim on the local population. Although the Church of San Pietro was regarded as a venerable institution and its campanile remained a prominent landmark, the ceremonial of state that shaped Venetians’ perceptions of their own identity bypassed San Pietro, and the doge, the human symbol who incarnated the republic, did not set foot on its campo for years on end.

9. Transforming San Pietro: Patriarch Vincenzo Diedo’s new Cathedral Façade

In the sixteenth century, two patriarchs with scant experience of humility and poverty attempted to reverse San Pietro’s marginalization by architectural means. Patriarchs Vincenzo Diedo, elected in 1556, and Lorenzo Priuli, elected in 1590, were lay patricians who had distinguished political careers before their election to the patriarchy necessitated the taking of religious vows. During their short reigns, both were energetic in their efforts to remake San Pietro into a monumental complex worthy of its role as the seat of the Venetian patriarchate.

Up to his election as patriarch, Vincenzo Diedo had proven himself a competent administrator and held many government offices, including terms as podestà of Bergamo and Verona, capitano of Padua, and savio di terraferma. On the assembly floor, he was considered a moderate. Diedo’s ambition, however, sometimes brought him into conflict with the Serenissima. As a young man, he had allowed himself to be elected savio alle Ordini, even though he knew he did not meet the statutory age requirement for the post, and then tried to bribe his way into retaining the office when the problem came to light.Footnote ¹²⁴ Ambition may have propelled Patriarch Diedo to launch a costly building campaign at San Pietro di Castello despite a shortage of funds. He believed that the patriarch had a responsibility to, in his words, “live honorably, for the honor and reputation of the status which had been granted himby the doge and Senate.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Finding the episcopal buildings unworthy of his aspirations, in 1558 he commissioned an up-and-coming architect with papalista connections to design a new façade for the Petrine basilica: Andrea Palladio. As the first Venetian church façade planned by the celebrated architect, Palladio’s project is the best-studied aspect of the Campo di San Pietro.Footnote ¹²⁶

Cooper and Manfredo Tafuri, among others, have explored the relationship between Diedo’s patronage and his political connections, demonstrating that he was affiliated with the papalisti — those families who had, or favored, closer relations with the Roman see. Indeed, the patriarch was advised by a branch of the papalisti who, according to Tafuri, saw in Palladio’s architectural idiom a means to express their ideological differences from their anti-ecclesiastical, anti-Roman political rivals for power in the city. There is no doubt that Patriarch Diedo’s ambitious plans provoked the senate after his election. Two and a half years later, he found himself back in the council hall answering charges of tax evasion amid accusations of hypocrisy and highhandedness. The indictment came on the heels of the January 1559 contract between the patriarch and a family of stonemasons to execute Palladio’s façade project in expensive white limestone from the Istrian quarries near Rovinj.Diedo pursued the building commission despite being unable or unwilling to pay 2,000 ducats in back taxes to the Venetian Republic, but died six months after the showdown in the ducal palace, before much work on the facçade was completed.Footnote ¹²⁷

The surviving contract with the stonemasons reveals that the new church façade would have spoken an architectural language new to the lagoon. Although many details are open to interpretation, it is clear that the design implied by the contract is for a façade in which a major Corinthian order composed of six massive engaged columns intersects with a minor order composed of six shorter, narrower pilasters, probably in the form of interlocking temple fronts, similar to the schemes Palladio adopted later at San Francesco della Vigna (1564–65) and the Redentore (1576–92). Although the contract refers to drawings, none by Palladio has been definitively identified as a project for the San Pietro di Castello façade. As a result, scholars have long debated the precise form of what would have been Palladio’s first Venetian church exterior.Footnote ¹²⁸

San Pietro’s medieval façade was only replaced thirty-five years later by Francesco Smeraldi (ca. 1540–1614), called il Fracà (fig. 26). Although Smeraldi’s church front has much in common with Palladio’s façade for San Francesco della Vigna (fig. 27), there is little agreement among specialists as to how closely Smeraldi followed Palladio’s original conception. Leaving aside the details of that lengthy and interesting debate, it suffices to reiterate here that Palladio’s project for Patriarch Diedo would have been the first Venetian church façade so explicitly inspired by the Roman temple front motif, and among the earliest to be entirely faced in white limestone.Footnote ¹²⁹

Figure 26 Francesco Smeraldi (called il Fracà), façade of San Pietro di Castello, Venice, 1621–30. Author’s photo.

Figure 27 Andrea Palladio, façade of San Francesco della Vigna, Venice, 1565. Photo: Robert G. La France.

The colossal engaged columns and substantial pilasters specified by the contract would have rendered San Pietro’s façade more monumental and plastic than predecessors such as San Michele (completed by 1477) and San Zaccaria (by ca. 1490). The muscular Roman idioms that Palladio borrowed from the Markets of Trajan (the split pediment motif), the Arch of Trajan at Ancona (paired engaged columns flanking a more widely spaced central opening), and the Arch of the Gavi at Verona (an attic story rising behind a prominent triangular pediment) (fig. 28), coupled with the choice of Istrian stone, would have given the proposed façade amonumentality and triumphal appearance in keeping with the patriarch’s sense of his own importance, as Tafuri and Andrea Guerra have shown. In addition to the resonances discussed above, in the mid-sixteenth century, explicit use of the Roman architectural vocabulary, rationalized according to Palladio’s vision, unmistakably denoted Patriarch Diedo’s papalista affiliations and defiant attitude toward the giovani’s vision of the Venetian state.Footnote ¹³⁰

Figure 28 Lucio Vitruvio Cerdone (architect), Arch of the Gavi, Verona, first century CE. Photo: Seth C. Jayson.

Indeed, as Tafuri has argued, Diedo may have been deliberately participating in the greater cultural project launched by two Palladian patrons, Daniele Barbaro (1514–70) — architectural theorist and Patriarch-elect of Aquileia (1550–70) — and his brother, the Venetian senator Marc’Antonio Barbaro (1518–95). The papalista Barbaro clan actively promoted the use of public architecture to express their Rome-oriented ideology; they saw in Palladio’s style the incarnation of the moral and scientific principles to which Venice should adhere. It seems likely that the Barbaro brothers recommended Palladio to Diedo: their service as witnesses to the contract between the patriarch and the masons attests to their close involvement with the commission.Footnote ¹³¹

More instrumentally, Diedo may have been fashioning himself after wealthier, more sophisticated papalisti patrons such as the Barbaro and the Grimani. Daniele Barbaro’s uncle Zuane (ca. 1490–after 1578), a Franciscan, directed the classizicing transformation of San Francesco della Vigna by architect Jacopo Sansovino (1534–54), while his older brother, Francesco (1484–1549), commissioned the first Barbaro family chapel in the church. Marino Grimani (1489–1545), Patriarch of Aquileia (r. 1517–29 and 1538 –45), and his brother Vettor (ca. 1495 –1558) were early supporters of the San Francesco project, commissioning their own burial chapel there ca. 1537. Along with their other brother Giovanni (1501–93), who succeeded Marino as Patriarch (r. 1545–93), they also carried out lavish interior and exterior renovations of their family palace on Campo Santa Maria Formosa in several campaigns dating from 1537 to 1556. In fact, it was Giovanni Grimani who later hired Palladio to remake the façade of San Francesco della Vigna.Footnote ¹³²

Patriarch Diedo’s architectural enterprises were not limited to San Pietro’s façade. He also undertook renovations inside the cathedral and the patriarchal palace, although their extent is unclear.Footnote ¹³³ Cooper has suggested that Diedo’s stalled building campaigns were sufficiently sumptuous for his successor, Patriarch Giovanni Trevisan (1503–90, r. 1560–90), to donate columns originally intended for Diedo’s episcopal complex for use in the renovation of the Doge’s Palace in 1574.Footnote ¹³⁴ Patriarch Trevisan did not resume Diedo’s projects and little changed on the campo until the election of Lorenzo Priuli to the patriarchate in 1590.Footnote ¹³⁵

10. Transforming San Pietro: Patriarch Lorenzo Priuli’s “Piazza Spaciosa”

At the time of his election, Lorenzo Priuli’s distinguished curriculum included diplomatic missions to the Spanish, French, and papal courts, serving as podestà of Brescia, and terms as savio grande, savio di terraferma, and member of the Council of Ten. As Venetian ambassador, he had witnessed the use of architecture as a tool of state in Madrid, Paris, and Rome, as well as the extensive building projects undertaken in Venice in the 1580s, which included the completion of the Library of St. Mark’s, the first campaigns for the Procuratie Nuove, and the new Rialto bridge.Footnote ¹³⁶ The undistinguished appearance of the Cathedral of San Pietro and the austere patriarchal residence must have seemed beneath his personal dignity, as well as that of his office.Footnote ¹³⁷ Indeed, a few years earlier, Francesco Sansovino had been hard pressed to come up with words of praise for the patriarchal palace, managing only to describe it as “old” and “much more commodious than beautiful or elegant.”Footnote ¹³⁸

Priuli had several incentives to revive Patriarch Diedo’s church façade project and transform the palace and campo. During the thirty years since the Council of Trent, the church formulated new artistic, architectural, and urbanistic standards that prelates were expected to uphold. Although the Tridentine decrees published in 1564 did not specify the form of church exteriors, the reformer and Archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo (1538–84, r. 1563–84), composed detailed practical instructions regarding the configuration and decoration of churches in the Instructionum fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae, first printed in 1577.Footnote ¹³⁹ Although these prescriptions were originally intended for the Milanese archdiocese, they were adopted by churchmen throughout Italy. In keeping with the importance of the Church, Borromeo recommended that places of worship be erected on a high spot or raised a few steps above their surrounding area. Furthermore, their façades should not be obstructed in any way and must be free of superfluous ornament while retaining a “suitable and imposing” aspect.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ At San Pietro di Castello, however, the house of the primicerio of the cathedral chapter leaned against the cathedral façade, blocking one third of it from view.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Borromeo’s instructions also forbid burials in front of churches for reasons of decorum. However, tombs filled the sagrato that extended in front of the Cathedral of San Pietro, between the primicerio’s house and the baptistery. Neither the sagrato nor the cemetery proper, located to the north of the church, were kept free of “activities that are unbecoming to a sacred place,” as Borromeo prescribed. Furthermore, San Pietro’s sagrato lacked an enclosure demarcating its consecrated boundaries, and several female servants of the patriarchate and their children were living inside the campanile — all were offenses against Borromean standards of decorum.Footnote ¹⁴² Thus, to prove himself an obedient servant of Rome, Patriarch Priuli needed to correct some of these problems. The politician in Priuli seized the opportunity to impress his new masters with his dedication and purposeful action.

Moreover, the disorderly state of the Campo di San Pietro was incompatible with the changing Venetian expectations of public propriety. Throughout the Renaissance, the trend in elite circles had been to rationalize the irregular, modest, medieval campi and monumentalize the palace and church façades facing them, as noted above. Endowing churches with stone façades and elaborate decoration was one of the few means available to individual Venetians to commemorate and aggrandize themselves in the public sphere.Footnote ¹⁴³

Furthermore, Patriarch Priuli may have felt a family responsibility to complete the façade project because Diedo’s mother had been a Priuli, as Cooper has proposed. In the first place, Cooper remarks that members of the larger Priuli clan as well as closer relations, such as Priuli’s sister, had connections to either Palladio or his patronage network.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Priuli also had a pressing social concern: upon becoming patriarch he had entered a rarified segment of Venetian society, the small group of patricians who owed their advancement to the Holy See, including members of the Grimani and Barbaro families.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Despite his political distinction, Priuli lacked the wealth and deep learning to compete effectively in artistic and architectural patronage with the Patriarch of Aquileia, Giovanni Grimani, but he could do his best to keep up appearances, emphasizing his own orthodoxy in the face of suspicions about Grimani’s heretical leanings.

Within a year of taking office, Patriarch Priuli set out to transform the patriarchal complex. In accordance with the recommendations of the Council of Trent, he conducted a formal inspection of his see in 1591.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The record of that inspection shows that, in addition to improving the church and baptistery interiors and their fittings, Priuli immediately ordered the removal of above-ground burials and tomb monuments from the sagrato, church façade, and church interior, in keeping with Pope Pius V’s (1504–72, r. 1566–72) mandates in the bull “Cum primum apostolatus” and Borromeo’s instructions. The patriarch commanded that the sagrato be delimited by an enclosure, and that the bell tower’s residents be moved to new lodgings near the boathouse contiguous to the canal.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

The most dramatic changes to the campo, however, did not occur until 1593–94. Determined to rebuild and decorate the cathedral façade worthily, the patriarch bought the canonical house encumbering the church, its two neighbors, plus their gardens and outbuildings. All three houses were demolished at his command. Priuli’s goal — clearly stated in a notarial document from 1593 that records his acquisitions—was the transformation of the campo of San Pietro into a “spacious piazza.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The demolition of the three canonical houses had two immediate effects: it freed the façade from obstructions in accordance with Counter-Reformation standards; and it expanded the campo by about 25 percent in area and ten-and-a-half meters (approximately thirty Venetian piedi) in width, regularizing its contours. The end result was a wide, shallow rectangle measuring about fifty-two by ninety meters, running parallel to the canal (fig. 4). Consequently, the Campo di San Pietro’s eastern edge was bounded from north to south by the full cathedral façade, the patriarchal palace, and the Baptistery of San Giovanni.

After the clearing and expansion of the campo, Priuli turned his attention to the buildings framing it. At the patriarchal palace, he focused his attention on the rooms facing the campo and its campo façade. The ornament and organization of the long, two-story, nearly symmetrical façade the palace now presents can be attributed to Patriarch Priuli’s building campaign (fig. 5).Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Its top story is pierced by a row of eleven windows—five windows on either side of the central portal, with an additional window centered above the doorway. The right side of the bottom-story façade has five windows aligned below their upper-story counterparts, but the lower left façade includes two additional windows inserted between the two leftmost bays. Since some eighteenth-century views represent this uneven fenestration (fig. 3), one may presume that other artists regularized the palace’s irregular façade (fig. 29). The upper story of the building’s elevation protrudes slightly over the lower story; a classical compound molding makes up the marcapiano or stringcourse dividing the façade in two. The lower story windows are surrounded by plain, flat, Istrian limestone jambs and sills and surmounted by thin cyma recta cornices. The upper story windows are taller and more elaborately framed, with cyma reversa moldings at the sill and strongly projecting compound cornices at the top. The doorframe of the central portal, also in white Istrian limestone, is crowned by an entablature consisting of a compound cornice supported by consoles, a plain frieze, and a two-fascia antepagment (or architrave) that extends vertically along the doorjambs. The patriarch capped the ensemble with a large, pedimented panel of Istrian stone, inscribed with his name and sculpted with his coat of arms, projecting above the building’s upper cornice (fig. 30).

Figure 29 Giovanni Battista Brustolon, Nocturna populi exultatio in pervigilio Sancti Petri Apostoli prope limina Patriarchalis Ecclesiae, vulgo Sancti Petro de Castello (Nocturnal view of the vigil of the feast of Saint Peter Apostle at San Pietro di Castello), from Prospectuum aedium, viarumque insigniorum urbis Venetiarum…. Venice, after 1763. Rome, American Academy in Rome.

Figure 30 Frontispiece on west façade, patriarchal palace, Campo di San Pietro di Castello, Venice. Photo: Seth C. Jayson.

Although records precisely dating the façade’s modernization and confirming Martinioni’s assertion of Priuli’s patronage have not emerged from the archives, the renovation postdates Sansovino’s 1581 guide, and the style of the window and doorframes is consonant with a mid- to late-sixteenth-century date.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The façade’s monumental scale and classicizing, though austere ornamentation recall a distinctive group of Venetian Renaissance palaces: the Palazzo Gritti at Campo di San Francesco della Vigna (begun ca. 1525) for Doge Andrea Gritti (1455–1538, r. 1523–38), the Palazzo Zen at Rio Santa Caterina and Campo dei Gesuiti (1533–53) begun by Francesco Zen (d. 1538), the Ca’ Loredan at Campo Santo Stefano (begun 1536) and, later, the Palazzo Donà on the Fondamenta Nuove (begun in 1610) for Doge Leonardo Donà (1536–1612, r. 1606–12). Brown, Tafuri, and Cooper, among others, have related the form of these façades to a deliberate desire on the part of their patrons to evoke the principle of mediocritas, aligning them on the side of moral and political virtue and against the perceived excesses of other patricians.Footnote ¹⁵¹ However, the architecture of mediocritas was deployed by persons of all political affiliations, as is demonstrated by the imposing, sober rio façade of the Palazzo Grimani at Santa Maria Formosa, dating from the mid-sixteenth century. Perhaps at San Pietro di Castello, too, the austerity of the patriarchal palace may be understood as a statement regarding moral virtue.

Notably, although Priuli knew that official Venetian state architecture had adopted the monumental arcade and the classicizing loggia as its principal motifs, he nonetheless rejected these forms for his transformation of the patriarchal complex. Neither of them suited San Pietro’s programmatic needs. The arcades that sheltered negotium elsewhere were inappropriate at the patriarchal piazza, as business activity would mar the site’s religious decorum. The loggias were expendable on both symbolic and practical grounds. First, the patriarch was a participant, not a spectator, in civic ceremonial; San Pietro and its ancillary buildings were not part of the topography of state rituals, and thus abjured the loggias that provided ideal vantage points from which to view them. Second, their utilitarian function of admitting light and air into densely built environments was redundant in a palace that opened onto a broad piazza in the front and a vast garden in the back.Footnote ¹⁵² Venetian sensitivity to the significance of urban and architectural choices in this period is demonstrated by the heated public discussions about the proposed form of the Procuratie Nuove at Piazza San Marco.Footnote ¹⁵³ In avoiding the leitmotifs of the new aesthetic of Piazza San Marco and Rialto, respectively Venice’s political and economic centers, Priuli’s program for the campo would also reject their political and commercial implications, freeing the site to hark back to older and more iconographically consonant models that emphasized the ultimate sources of his religious authority.

Patriarch Priuli’s most dramatic alteration to the campo was the reconstruction of the cathedral’s medieval façade.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Despite the patriarch’s multifaceted agenda, scholars have mostly restricted their analyses to debating whether Francesco Smeraldi, the proto (master of works) commissioned to rebuild the facçade in 1594, faithfully executed Palladio’s 1558 project or introduced changes to the design (fig. 26).Footnote ¹⁵⁵ This limited viewpoint obscures the most intriguing aspect of the patriarch’s plan: the new façade unmistakably identified the cathedral as the episcopal complex’s foremost building, its bold iconography serving as the key to the greater metamorphosis of the campo.

Priuli’s new church façade asserts two principal messages. First, in adopting the architectural language of Palladio’s façade designs for Patriarch Grimani at San Francesco della Vigna (fig. 27) and for the Republic of Venice at the votive church of the Redentore (fig. 31), Priuli equated himself in patronage — and, implicitly, in devotion, wealth, and prestige — to the republic itself, and to its most sophisticated cultural advocates. The assertive Romanizing style of Smeraldi’s San Pietro façade is similar in conception, if not in the sophistication of its execution, to those of San Francesco and the Redentore. They share the underlying conceit of two interlocking orders of different sizes surmounted by a triangular pediment — the major order, intact, corresponding to the nave of the church; and the fractured, minor one, corresponding to the side aisles. In all three façades, a tetrastyle temple front constitutes the central motif. At San Pietro and San Francesco, its four colossal columns rest on a high podium. At San Pietro, six smaller, shallower

Figure 31 Andrea Palladio, Church of the Redentore, Venice, 1576–92. Photo: Robert G. La France.

Corinthian pilasters rest on pedestals that correspond to the bases of the colossal order’s podiums. On either side of the central temple front, two of the pilasters support segments of a triangular pediment. Pilasters of the same order and scale frame the central doorway, in turn supporting the pediment that surmounts the door. At San Francesco, the minor order consists of six engaged colums, plus two pilasters emphasizing the outer corners of the composition, but the whole ensemble rests on a single podium. As already noted, Guerra persuasively interprets the composition of the two patriarchal façades of San Pietro and San Francesco — specifically the use of the strongly projecting pediment found at two Roman monuments near Venice, the Arch of Augustus in Rimini and the Gavi Arch in Verona, in combination with massive pairs of engaged columns flanking a wider central bay — as a deliberate evocation of Roman triumphal iconography.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The state-sponsored Redentore is less lavish: the pilasters used in place of the outer columns flatten its overall effect. By contrast, the luscious garlands and angelic masks that decorate San Pietro’s three portals assert the greater opulence of Venice’s patriarchal church.

Second, Priuli’s façade explicitly connects the office of the patriarchate of Venice with its ultimate sources of authority: Saint Peter, the papacy, and God. The decorative program of the façade establishes a hierarchy of sovereignty that clearly exalts the Church and patriarch, while relegating Venice and the doge to last place. The frieze below the upper pediment is inscribed DEO OPTIMO MAXIMO (To God, the best and the greatest) establishing the apex of the hierarchy (figs. 26 and 32).Footnote ¹⁵⁷ In the pediment above, fluttering ribbons bind the crossed keys emblematic of Saint Peter to the vertical trunk of the patriarchal cross. On either side of the central doorway, two niches were intended to house sculptures of Saints Peter and Paul, patron saints of the city of Rome, though these were never completed.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Two additional, dedicatory inscriptions complement the pictorial program: they are placed inside rectangular panels set on either side of the central portal between the entablatures of the major and minor orders. The inscription on the left reads: “The house of God built on firm rock unto the length of days. The year of salvation 1596. Clement VIII, pope.” The one on the right reads: “His reverend excellency Lorenzo, Cardinal Priuli, Patriarch of Venice, [built] this pious monument in the sixth year of his patriarchate. Marino Grimani, doge of the Venetians.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹

The left inscription begins by alluding to Matthew 16:18, the passage of the gospel in which Christ identifies Saint Peter as the head of the Christian church. It unmistakably invokes the apostle’s privileged role as Christ’s vicar on earth.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Contemporary viewers could not have missed the implied rebuke to the Venetian state and Protestant pretensions, for the evangelist’s text goes on to refer to the legislative and judicial authority conferred on Peter by Christ.Footnote ¹⁶¹ As ambassador to the Holy See, Priuli had defended the Venetian state’s claims of greater jurisdiction in its dominion against the papacy. Now, Priuli’s new façade asserts the primacy of the pontiff and the Catholic Church over other religious and secular authorities, as demanded by the Tridentine edicts.Footnote ¹⁶² The inscription also recalls a passage in the Gospel of Matthew invoked in the consecration ritual for churches; it asserts the importance of obedience to the Church and the Church’s enduring nature in the face of attacks: “Every one therefore that heareth these my words, and doth them, shall be likened to a wise man that built his house upon a rock [petram]. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and they beat upon that house, and it fell not, for it was founded on a rock [petram].”Footnote ¹⁶³ The epigraph goes on to provide the date of the church façade and to identify the reigning pope, Clement VIII (1536–1605, r. 1592–1605). The inscription on the right exalts and commemorates the patriarch, with the doge a mere formulaic afterthought. Casting Priuli in Saint Peter’s role as church builder and wise man, the text trumpets Priuli’s importance as Christ’s representative in Venice.

Figure 32 Joseph Heintz the Younger, Ingresso del patriarca Federico Corner a S. Pietro di Castello (Entrance of Patriarch Federico Correr to San Pietro di Castello), 1649. Venice, Civico Museo Correr. The frieze inscription is represented in gold lettering in this view of San Pietro.

Weaving together the inscriptions and the sculptural program, the clear message is that God, in the form of Christ, passes on his authority to Saint Peter, as in the Gospel’s passage. Saint Peter is represented by the crossed Petrine keys in the pediment, the sculpture of the saint in the niche below, and the allusion in the inscription. In turn, Saint Peter’s authority over spiritual and secular matters is transferred to Pope Clement VIII. From Pope Clement, authority passes to Patriarch Priuli, who is also represented by the patriarchal cross enfolded by the papal emblem in the pediment. The pedimental sculpture reminds the viewer that in Venice it is Patriarch Priuli, serving for Saint Peter and the pope, who controls access to the kingdom of heaven. Doge Marino Grimano (1532–1605, r. 1595–1605) comes last. Though his mention satisfies the convention of including rulers as part of dating formulas, Grimani’s last place underscores that he was not an active agent in the construction of the church and is consequently not a mediator in the implied promise of eternal salvation. Not least, the façade’s stone medium, with its integral reference to Peter, increased the program’s overall resonance, as had been true of the campanile a century earlier.

The medal cast to commemorate the foundation of San Pietro’s new façade reiterates these messages. Its reverse cites exactly the biblical passage conferring authority upon Saint Peter: “That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church” (fig. 33).Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The medal’s obverse portrays Saints Peter and Paul standing on a podium emblazoned with the Priuli coat of arms. The doge is relegated to a peripheral inscription. By contrast, the 1583 foundation medal for another patriarch-sponsored reconstruction, that of the now-destroyed Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme (also known as Santa Croce in Luprio, or della Croce), handles this relationship differently, featuring the portrait of reigning doge Nicolò da Ponte (1491–1585, r. 1578 –85) on its obverse side and omitting any mention of the commissioning patriarch Giovanni Trevisan.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Evidently, Priuli’s explicit references to Saint Peter demonstrate his desire to align himself, politically and spiritually, with the rock of the Christian church rather than the evanescent authority of the Venetian state, built on sand.

By comparison, Patriarch Grimani’s tympanum at San Francesco — occupied by an eagle (aquila in Italian) encased in a roundel — celebrates the see of Aquileia and the Grimani claims to that office, instead of papal allegiances (fig. 27). The church’s façade inscriptions refer to the patron’s desire to restore “his ecclesiastical reputation and family honor” following accusations of heresy by invoking spiritual renewal, as Cooper confirms.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Nothing in the Grimani façade program for San Francesco explicitly invokes the authority of the papacy or Roman Church.

Figure 33 Venetian church foundation medals. The commemorative medal for San Pietro di Castello is no. 6. The medal cast for Santa Croce in Gerusalemme (no. 5) features a portrait of the reigning doge, although he was not the church’s patron. Unnumbered plate before p. 1 in Flaminio Corner (Flaminio Cornelio), Ecclesiae venetae antiquis monumentis, 13:pt. 16.2. Venice, 1749.

Despite the evidence to the contrary provided by the architectural and iconographic language of the San Pietro façade and foundation medal, Guerra has claimed that Patriarch Priuli belonged to the giovani, the faction of the republic’s ruling elite that tended to champion Venetian interests against those of the Holy See.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Factional divisions in Cinquecento Venice were more fluid and complex than the simple bipartite separation into giovani and vecchi implies. Family loyalties were not monolithic, and individuals could lean first in one direction and then in another throughout their careers as they negotiated the city’s roiling political waters.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The Romanizing program of the San Pietro façade and the renewal of the campo demonstrate that upon becoming patriarch, Priuli used all the architectural means at this disposal to exalt his personal status, that of his office, and that of the Roman Church in the Serene Republic. After his election to the patriarchate, he also manifested his pro-Roman stance in other ways, such as actively promoting religious reform (convoking two synods), zealously overseeing monastic communities, and siding with the pope and against the Venetian state on the implementation of the Clementine Index, which the city’s printing interests resisted.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

It is important to emphasize that, despite the uncertain local success of Priuli’s campaign, there is no question it was well received in Church circles. In 1596, Pope Clement VIII elevated Patriarch Priuli to the cardinalate, with Santa Maria in Transpontina as his titular church in Rome.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ The cardinalate, unlike all but one Venetian state office, was a permanent honor. Priuli would wear his red hat “unto the length of days,” surpassing in dignity all other Venetians except for the doge. Indeed, a prelate’s hat dominates the Istrian-stone coat of arms he installed above the principal portal of the patriarchal palace, which was inscribed with his new title of cardinal (fig. 30).Footnote ¹⁷¹ The large relief commemorates Priuli’s promotion and proclaims his personal and official authority over the entire complex. Because Istrian stone highlights each of the most important buildings on the campo — the patriarchal church, the palace, the baptistery, and the bell tower — the site came to manifest a formal unity it had previously lacked. In addition to asserting new standards of urban decorum, responding to new Counter-Reformation guidelines for Church architecture and Christian burial, and asserting the patriarch’s propapal outlook, the renovated church façade and newly enlarged campo also displayed a distinctly Venetian identity, exploiting certain physical manifestations of the republic’s own religious history.

When the official cortège disembarked at the campo of San Pietro to install Lorenzo Priuli as patriarch in 1590, the island’s relative isolation, dearth of monumental buildings, and sparse habitation caused it to resemble one of the lagoon’s scattering of island monasteries more than an integral part of the city. Patriarch Priuli’s redevelopment of the cathedral, palace, and campo made a virtue of this shortcoming. While the use of Istrian limestone for a church front specified in the 1559 contract was by no means unprecedented by the 1590s, it was associated with certain revered Venetian monastic institutions, notably the convent of San Zaccaria, which was comparable in age to San Pietro. By 1596, the frontal alignment of San Pietro’s newly radiant facçade displayed it prominently to visitors to the island as well as to maritime traffic on the canal (figs. 3, 29, 32); its white surface, monumentality, classicizing mien, and extroverted disposition must have recalled certain typically Venetian precedents, such as the monastic churches of San Michele and the Redentore (figs. 14 and 31).Footnote ¹⁷² These allusions to Venice’s protective girdle of monastic foundations, both ancient and modern, reminded the Venetian public of the church’s intercessory powers, and the authority of Rome and of Priuli.Footnote ¹⁷³

Patriarch Priuli’s holy island, however, differed in one significant way from the traditional monastery-island type discussed above. Its religious complex overlooked a large, publicly accessible, and highly visible piazza. (Monastic islands abounded in unbuilt spaces, but they were typically bounded by fences [fig. 23]. They did not require the porous campi that fulfilled the urban needs of their parish-island counterparts.) After Priuli’s transformations, the rectangular campo of San Pietro became, like the campo of San Giacomo di Rialto and Piazza San Marco, both larger and more regular than the average Venetian square. Few campi exceeded the 4,680 square-meter area or approached the geometric idealization and nearly orthogonal contours that San Pietro’s attained under Patriarch Priuli.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Like the important civic squares at Rialto and San Marco, San Pietro’s campo now showcased all of its principal church façade along one edge of the site (fig. 3), ennobled by a new stone facing and classicizing sculpted ornament. Freed from medieval encumbrances and bounded by decorous structures, San Pietro’s heterogeneous campo had finally become the spatious civic piazza envisioned by Patriarch Lorenzo Priuli in 1594 (fig. 12). While this type of environment is now a standard part of modern conceptions of Venice, it is worthwhile to note that Priuli’s piazza and façade at San Pietro di Castello preceded by fourteen years the completion of the façade of San Giorgio Maggiore and the clearing of the monastic buildings between it and the Bacino di San Marco to create a small piazza. When the anti-papalista Doge Leonardo Donà ordered the buildings in front of San Giorgio demolished to enhance the view from the Palazzo Ducale, he was merely obtaining for himself something the patriarch already had.Footnote ¹⁷⁵

In conclusion, by emphasizing San Pietro di Castello’s allegiance to the monastery-island type, Priuli reminded viewers of the role of saintly intervention and protection in ensuring Venice’s prosperity and safety, as well as its spiritual wellbeing. By clearing the campo and tying its buildings together as part of a coherent architectural and urbanistic program to create a proper piazza, he fulfilled both his pastoral duty to improve the church and his civic duty to present a face worthy of Venice’s exalted self-image. Finally, by alluding to the prince of apostles and his own role as representative of the Church’s authority, he reiterated his own prestige within the turbulent waters of the republic’s social order. In combining elements of two of Venice’s great urban spatial types — the monastery island and the civic square — Priuli sought to naturalize his foreign message, rendering it palatable to his Venetian audience. San Pietro may not have been an important stop on the busy calendar of state pageantry, but on the few ritual occasions that led processions to the site, its church, palace, and bell tower were seen to gaze self-assuredly westward across Patriarch Priuli’s piazza, broadcasting the site’s spiritual importance toward the audiences coming from the economic and political heart of the city (fig. 32).

11. Beyond Patriarch Priuli

Patriarch Lorenzo Priuli died in 1600, his vision for the patriarchal complex incomplete. The statues of Saints Peter and Paul were never installed on the church façade; the sagrato never received its stone boundary markers; his planned seminary building was never realized.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ In the seventeenth century, a series of urbanistically unambitious patriarchs focused on the church’s and palace’s interiors and did not significantly alter Priuli’s piazza program. Patriarch Giovanni Tiepolo commissioned Giovanni Girolamo Grapiglia to rebuild the nave of the church in 1621, but did not modify the church façade.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ During the reign of Patriarch Gianfrancesco Morosini (1604–78, r. 1644–78), Baldassare Longhena (1596–1682) designed a new high altar chapel to house the relics of the Bishop-Patriarch of San Pietro, the Blessed Lorenzo Giustiniani; its massive sculptural ensemble was contracted in 1648 and completed along with various assistants only in 1665.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ The only notable improvement on the campo was the new lead roof Patriarch Morosini ordered for the campanile’s cupola by 1654.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ This minor alteration did not last long: lightning destroyed the cupola in 1670.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

The scenographic success of Priuli’s program, however, is documented by San Pietro di Castello’s prominence in the eighteenth-century iconography of the city. The campo features in the oeuvre of the most important vedutisti, whether in its own right (fig. 3) or as the prominent backdrop to relatively unimportant or infrequent feasts (fig. 12).Footnote ¹⁸¹ In one example, a nocturne by the Canaletto workshop dated 1758–62, popularized in an engraved version by Giambattista Brustolon (1712–96), commemorates the site’s imposing moonlit appearance during the vigil of the feast day of Saint Peter (fig. 29).Footnote ¹⁸² Albums and guidebooks produced for collectors and Grand Tourists included views of San Pietro as part of the expanding iconography of the Most Serene Republic (fig. 34).Footnote ¹⁸³

Figure 34 Chiesa Patriarcale di S. Pietro di Castello, plate 2 from Luca Carlevarijs, Le fabriche e vedute di Venezia. Venice, 1703. Rome, American Academy in Rome.

Despite its prominence as a pictorial subject, San Pietro’s refurbished piazza could not arrest the tide of its sociopolitical marginalization and general decline. Napoleon’s transfer of the patriarchal seat to the ducal chapel of San Marco in 1807, twenty years after the fall of the republic, and the ensuing translation of the patriarchal residence and cathedral chapter to the new cathedral’s vicinity completed San Pietro di Castello’s alienation in the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ French and, later, Italian troops took over San Pietro’s patriarchal palace and baptistery, and Ruskin offered his doleful observations in 1851. The situation deteriorated further after incendiary bombs damaged the church’s dome on 9–10 April 1916.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ When the military finally moved out of the palace and baptistery soon after World War II, squatters moved in. The campo’s single wellhead was removed in the 1970s and, despite efforts to preserve the church and its decoration, the site retains the solitary atmosphere Ruskin decried.Footnote ¹⁸⁶

12. Conclusion

San Pietro’s vicissitudes in the last two centuries have not been accidental. They are the byproducts of the sporadic but persistent campaigns waged by the Venetian state for nearly a millennium to isolate San Pietro, notwithstanding the site’s important role in the city’s early history. From time to time, energetic bishops such as Pietro Pino in the thirteenth century, and determined patriarchs such as Tommaso Donà in the fifteenth, intervened on the Campo di San Pietro, briefly elevating its profile and reminding Venetians of their religious authority. In the end, however, the most enduring, resonant features were those imposed on it by Maffeo Girardi’s bold tower and Lorenzo Priuli’s monumental church and palace façades. Their assertive Roman vocabulary and gleaming stone surfaces activate the space of Priuli’s newly regular “spacious piazza” and have defined the image of the Campo di San Pietro for more than four centuries.

The Venetian republic’s anticlerical, antipapal attitudes have not only resulted in the persistent marginalization of San Pietro and its campo, but also in diverting modern scholarly attention away from them. Even as formerly neglected subjects such as the poor, women, foreigners, monastic communities, religious minorities, and confraternities have been fully integrated into the discourse of Venetian studies in the last thirty years, the artistic patronage of the bishops and patriarchs of the city has languished unexamined, victim to the success of the Venetian myth of complete independence from alien authorities.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Although the city’s picturesque waterways; monumental, palace-lined Grand Canal; and grand civic spaces at Piazza San Marco and Rialto often overshadow subtler aspects of its urban form, the final configuration of the Campo di San Pietro di Castello demonstrates that Venetian patrons and builders could also derive inspiration from alternate, and no less characteristically Venetian, urbanistic and architectural models, such as the monastery and parish islands. As the history of the Campo di San Pietro shows, Venice’s Renaissance patriarchs deployed these venerable types in combination with the grandeur of the new classical style to assert the importance of the patriarchal see by architectural means. Joining Venice’s enterprising eighteenth-century vedutisti by admitting these lesser-known, hybrid monuments and places into art-historical discourse enriches our understanding of Venice’s distinctive and varied material culture.