Chiesa di Santa Maria dei Miracoli

Santa Maria dei Miracoli is a marble-clad Renaissance church built in the 1480s by Pietro Lombardo to house a venerated image of the Virgin. Designed and decorated in a single campaign by one workshop, it survives largely intact.

Why it matters

The story begins with a street image. A Madonna and Child, attributed by the church operator to Zanino di Pietro, stood in a niche in the Amadi family's neighbourhood and gained a reputation for miracles. By 1480 the city resolved to build it a church. UNESCO's restoration record describes a competition won by Pietro Lombardo, with construction begun in February 1481 under Pope Sixtus IV and completed by 1489. The result is clad in polychrome marble and has a semicircular front, rosettes, two tiers of porticos and a cylindrical roof. The operator describes it as a rare Venetian church produced by one artist and workshop in a single campaign. Its unified design links the façade to the coffered vault; later conservation addressed pollution, salts and corrosion affecting the marble.

What to notice

The façade combines pale marble sculpture and flat surfaces with medallions and crosses of red and green porphyry; blind arcades shape the side elevations. UNESCO notes the use of water-resistant Istrian stone on the canal flank. Inside, a monumental stair rises to the richly marbled presbytery. The barrel vault contains fifty painted coffers of prophets and patriarchs by Pier Maria Pennacchi and his workshop, framed in gilt against polychrome marble. The pierced marble screen across the presbytery and the Evangelists in the pendentives are attributed to Pietro Lombardo. Above the entrance is the nuns' wooden choir, or barco, from which the neighbouring convent's sisters once heard Mass unseen. The venerated image remains on the altar. Giovanni Bellini's original organ shutters are now in the Gallerie dell'Accademia; the church organ dates to 1919.

Context and history

Humidity from the adjacent canal, airborne pollution and nineteenth-century repairs—in which marble panels were refixed in cement—left the building blackened and at structural risk by the postwar decades. A German-funded restoration in 1970 slowed but did not stop the deterioration. Save Venice later led a conservation campaign under architect Mario Piana, appointed by the superintendency. The work dismantled and desalinated marble panels, cleaned them with distilled water, replaced iron fixings with steel and rebuilt lost portions using traditional techniques and matching materials. The campaign also addressed the vault coffers and stucco, cost about three million dollars and concluded in 1997. The church then joined the Chorus circuit.