Chiesa di San Pietro Martire

Rebuilt after a catastrophic fire, Murano's second parish church guards a Renaissance treasury: two canvases Paolo Veronese painted for a neighbouring convent and Giovanni Bellini's Barbarigo altarpiece, inside a quiet brick hall founded by the Dominicans.

Why it matters

This is the church that keeps Murano's paintings. Paolo Veronese's Saint Jerome in the Wilderness and Saint Agatha Visited in Prison by Saint Peter hang here, transferred from the suppressed convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli by 1815 and restored by Venetian Heritage ahead of their exhibition at the Frick Collection in New York. Giovanni Bellini's altarpiece of Doge Agostino Barbarigo at the Virgin's throne, painted in 1488 as a votive picture for the Doge's Palace, completes the pairing. Beyond the pictures, the sacristy preserves a carved wooden reredos by Pietro Morando, made between 1664 and 1672, whose thirty-three telamones count among the strangest sculptures in the lagoon.

What to notice

The interior is a single sober hall rebuilt in 1511 after a fire had razed the medieval church, and the paintings do the talking. Veronese's Saint Jerome shows the hermit in a rocky wilderness; the companion panel finds Saint Agatha in prison receiving Saint Peter. The pair were painted in the 1560s for a funerary chapel near Santa Maria degli Angeli, with Jerome over the altar and Agatha above the chapel door. Bellini's altarpiece depicts the Virgin and Child with two music-making angels, Saint Augustine and Saint Mark presenting the kneeling doge. In the sacristy, Morando's telamones — allegorical and mythological figures drawn from antiquity — carry columns framing scenes from the life of John the Baptist, the church's original dedication. A small parish museum nearby displays reliquaries and liturgical objects made entirely of Murano glass.

Context and history

Marco Michiel founded the church in 1348 together with a convent of Dominican friars, under the title of Saint John the Baptist; it was consecrated on 17 September 1417. A severe fire destroyed the building in 1474, and reconstruction in its present form followed only in 1511. Under Napoleon the monastery was suppressed and the church closed in 1806; it reopened for worship in 1813 and now serves as one of Murano's two parishes. The suppressed convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli supplied its finest pictures. Veronese's two canvases, which the nuns had moved into their own church in 1667 fearing damage and theft, arrived by 1815, and Bellini's Barbarigo altarpiece, bequeathed by the doge to that convent, reached the church the same way after the suppression.