Between 1630 and 1631 the plague killed about 46,000 people in Venice, almost a third of the population. On 22 October 1630 the Senate made a vow: if the city were freed from the contagion, a church would be erected dedicated to the Madonna della Salute (health in the old sense, salvation), and every year, on 21 November, the doge would visit it in procession. The competition for the design was called at once. Eleven architects submitted proposals, and in 1631 the winner was Baldassare Longhena (1598–1682), aged thirty-two, who had built little. His project is an octagonal building crowned by a great dome, rising on the point of the Dogana, at the mouth of the Grand Canal.
Longhena describes the project as a crown: to Mary, queen of the city, is offered a church in the form of a crown. It is a symbolic explanation, and like all symbolic explanations it has a practical function: to justify an unusual plan. The octagon is not a new form, but it is rare in the Venetian tradition, which favours nave churches and modest domes. Longhena chooses it for two reasons: it makes it possible to wrap a single central space, with a uniform view from every side, and it allows the great theme of the vow, the Virgin, to be placed at the centre.
The plague of 1630 reached Venice by an almost diplomatic route. According to the chronicles, the contagion was brought by an ambassador of the Duke of Mantua, quarantined with his retinue on the island of San Clemente; from there the disease reached the city through contact with those who attended him. Yet Venice was at the time the European city best equipped against epidemics. As early as 1423 it had established the Lazzaretto Vecchio, on an island in the lagoon, one of the first permanent hospitals for isolating plague victims, and later the Lazzaretto Nuovo, where suspect goods and people were held for forty days: this is where the word quarantine comes from. The plague of 1630 showed that even that system was not enough, and the votive church also arose from this awareness of helplessness.
An architect from the building site
Longhena came to architecture not from the academy but from the building site. The son of a stonecutter of Ticinese origin working in Venice, he trained alongside Vincenzo Scamozzi, Palladio's most direct heir, and learned above all the craft of stone: cutting, shaping, assembling. When he won the competition he had built mainly minor works, but he knew thoroughly the materials and technical problems of building in the lagoon. The Salute would occupy him all his life, but alongside it he built many of Venice's most recognisable buildings: the great staircase of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, the Pesaro and Rezzonico palaces on the Grand Canal, now museums, and the Patriarchal Seminary next to the Salute itself. He died in 1682, five years before the consecration of his most important church.
The Salute was also born in dialogue with a precise precedent. Half a century earlier, after the plague of 1575–1577, the Republic had made a similar vow, and Andrea Palladio had built on the island of the Giudecca the church of the Redentore, reached every July by a procession over a bridge of boats. Longhena knew that model well, and his church takes up its idea: a large white building on the water, designed to be seen from afar and reached in procession. But whereas the Redentore is a longitudinal church, with a classical façade facing Venice, the Salute is a centralised building that shows itself on every side. The two votive churches still face each other across the Giudecca canal.
A million piles in the lagoon
The problem is, as always in Venice, the ground. The Dogana point is mud and brackish water, and so heavy a building demands enormous foundations. Work began in 1631 with the laying of over a million piles of oak, alder and larch, driven into the seabed at different depths and covered by a platform of beams and Istrian stone slabs. On this base, the first visible material is white Istrian stone, with which Longhena clads all the external surfaces, for an effect of pale light reflected by the canal.
The choice of site was no accident. The Punta della Dogana is the point where the Grand Canal opens onto the Basin of St Mark, opposite the Doge's Palace: those arriving in Venice from the sea see it first, and those travelling along the Grand Canal find it as a backdrop. The church was therefore conceived as an element of the urban landscape, on a par with the campanile of St Mark's or the church of San Giorgio Maggiore on the island opposite. In later years the Dogana da Mar, the customs house, rose on the very tip, completed at the end of the 17th century and turned in 2009 into a space for contemporary art through a restoration by Tadao Ando.
As at St Mark's, the dome seen from outside does not coincide with the one seen from inside. The inner shell is masonry, while the outer one, taller, is a timber structure clad in lead sheets, which gives the building the soaring silhouette visible from all over the basin. It is a common solution in Venice, where the yielding ground advises making the upper parts of buildings as light as possible: a dome entirely of masonry, of that size, would have loaded the foundations far more heavily.
The scrolls: supporting a dome with a fantasy
The most famous element of the Salute is the series of enormous spiral scrolls, twelve in all, that surround the drum of the dome. They are often called “orecchioni” (large ears) and serve two purposes. Structurally, they contain the outward thrust of the dome, transferring it to the walls below. Visually, they create a soft transition between the octagonal volume of the church and the round cap of the dome, as if the church were a flower opening. They are a masterpiece of Baroque engineering: the decorative and the structural coincide, and neither could be removed.
The interior is sober: a vast octagonal space in white and grey stone, with six radial chapels and a great presbytery behind an arched opening, covered by a second, smaller dome and flanked by two bell towers. The building site continued for a long time, beyond Longhena's death in 1682, and the church was consecrated only in 1687. In the sacristy are kept paintings by Titian, and by Tintoretto, the Wedding at Cana.
On entering, look first at the floor. At the centre of the octagon a large disc of coloured marbles is surrounded by concentric circles with rose motifs and bears the Latin inscription Unde origo inde salus, "from where the origin, from there salvation": a reference to the tradition that Venice was founded in 421 on the day of the Annunciation, under the protection of the Virgin. From that point the space reads as Longhena conceived it: a ring of chapels around the centre, with three large altarpieces by Luca Giordano devoted to the life of the Virgin, and at the far end, beyond the presbytery arch, the high altar.
The Madonna of Candia
The symbolic centre of the church is the high altar, in the presbytery. The large marble sculptural group, made by the Flemish sculptor Josse de Corte around 1670, shows Venice kneeling before the Virgin while the plague, depicted as an old woman, flees, driven off by an angel. At the centre of the altar stands a Byzantine icon of the Virgin, the Mesopanditissa, brought to Venice in 1670 from Candia, today's Heraklion, after the island of Crete, Venetian for centuries, had fallen to the Ottomans at the end of a very long war. The church born of a vow against the plague thus also became the place where the Republic kept the memory of a lost possession.
The sacristy holds one of the most important collections of painting in Venice. Besides Tintoretto's Marriage at Cana, there are several works by Titian, including St Mark Enthroned and the ceiling canvases with Old Testament episodes such as Cain and Abel and the Sacrifice of Isaac, largely brought from the church of Santo Spirito in Isola, suppressed in the 17th century. Many visitors enter the church without knowing that the sacristy, visited separately, contains works of this calibre.
The Festa della Salute
The vow of 1630 is still kept. Every 21 November a temporary bridge on boats and pontoons is laid across the Grand Canal near Santa Maria del Giglio, and thousands of Venetians cross it to reach the basilica, light a candle and give thanks for their health. Candles and sweets are sold along the quayside, and in homes and trattorias people eat castradina, a soup of cabbage and smoked mutton recalling Venice's ties with Dalmatia. It is one of the few festivals in which a Baroque building still performs exactly the function for which it was built almost four centuries ago: welcoming an entire city that crosses the water to keep a promise.
The Salute is also one of the most painted buildings in the history of art. Canaletto and Francesco Guardi portrayed it dozens of times, from the water and from the quays, making it one of the favourite subjects of the views sold to Grand Tour travellers; in the 19th century William Turner painted it dissolved in the light and mist of the lagoon. These images helped fix the very idea of Venice in the minds of millions of people. It is perhaps the most lasting result of Longhena's project: a church conceived as a signal on the water has become, for the whole world, the face of the city.