San Giorgio Maggiore
— the morning catches the white before St. Mark's.
Not only on a wall.
“This is the church Palladio designed across the basin from Piazza San Marco. The view from the Riva degli Schiavoni is the one Canaletto painted, then Turner, then Monet, who stayed through the autumn of 1908 and painted it in every light. The façade reads white from the water and golden in the late sun. The campanile is the better climb than the one on the other side of the basin; the line is shorter, the view straighter back across to St. Mark's, and the gondoliers below look small enough to forget.
San Giorgio Maggiore, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
San Giorgio Maggiore is a small island in the Venetian Lagoon, across the Bacino di San Marco from the Doge's Palace and Piazza San Marco. The island is part of the city of Venice, in the Veneto region of Italy. Vaporetto line 2 runs from San Zaccaria to the San Giorgio stop in about three minutes. The Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore was designed by Andrea Palladio beginning in 1566, with the façade completed by Vincenzo Scamozzi by 1610. The bell tower, rebuilt in 1791 after the original collapsed in 1774, stands about 75 metres tall and is climbed by elevator. The Fondazione Giorgio Cini, established in 1951, occupies the former Benedictine monastery and runs a research library, two cloisters, and an open-air theatre.
The Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore is one of Andrea Palladio's last great works and a textbook example of Italian Renaissance architecture. Palladio solved an old problem here: how to apply a classical temple front, designed for a single rectangle, to the cross-section of a Christian church with a tall nave and lower side aisles. His solution was two interlocking pediments, a wide low one for the aisles and a tall narrow one for the nave, fronted by four Composite columns on high plinths. The façade is faced in Istrian stone, a pale white limestone quarried from the Istrian peninsula across the Adriatic, the same stone that lines the steps of half of Venice.
The face of the basilica reads differently at every hour, which is why Claude Monet stayed in Venice during the autumn of 1908 and painted a series of canvases on this single view. The white Istrian limestone catches direct morning sun from across the basin and shifts cool blue-grey in the haze of late afternoon. The most-photographed angle is from the Riva degli Schiavoni, the long quay in front of the Doge's Palace, about 400 metres of open water away. From the top of the campanile the light moves the other direction, sweeping across the red roofs of Venice toward the Adriatic.