Chiesa di San Zaccaria, Venice

San Zaccaria is a large church whose stone façade brings together late Gothic forms and early Renaissance design. Its story reaches back to the early 9th century, when Venice built an earlier church here to receive the remains of Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, presented by the Byzantine emperor Leo V the Armenian. The present building rose between 1458 and 1515.

Antonio Gambello began it, and Mauro Codussi later completed the upper façade and interior in the Renaissance manner. Look at the entrance surround: carved ornament and slender twisted columns give the stonework a finely worked surface. The church still contains Zechariah’s remains beneath the altar on the right side, while the crypt holds the burials of various doges.

Inside, a passage encircles the apse and is lit by tall Gothic windows, an arrangement unusual in Venice. Nearly every wall carries paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries, including Giovanni Bellini’s celebrated San Zaccaria Altarpiece. The former Benedictine nunnery attached to the church was destroyed by fire in 1105; chronicles report that about 100 nuns died from smoke in the cellars. This place therefore joins Venetian power, monastic history, and some of the city’s most important painting in a single complex.