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.
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 scrolls: supporting a dome with a fantasy
The most famous element of the Salute is the series of enormous spiral scrolls, eight 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.