Santa Maria dei Miracoli

The most interesting and finished example in Venice of the Byzantine Renaissance, and one of the most important in italy of the Cinquecento style John Ruskin, Stones of Venice

A jewel in Venice’s Renaissance crown, this church was built around a popular wonder-working painting of the Madonna and Bambino that once had a shrine in the neighbourhood. It received enough donations to afford a proper, if small, church to shelter it, and one was designed by Pietro Lombardo and his sons, Tullio and Antonio, in 1481–9.

But the real miracle is the church itself – the perfect expression of Venice’s half-archaic brand of Renaissance, bending the classical laws to its own decorative ends. With a façade topped by a Mauro Codussi-style semi-circle crowning, the church is covered inside and out with a pearly sheath of rich marbles like St Mark’s – one tradition says that it got all the leftovers. The Lombardi embellished it with their trademark discs and geometric designs in porphyry or green serpentine marble, not to mention some of the most masterful stonecutting in Venice, beginning with the angels on the façade, believed to be by Pietro Lombardo himself.