Santa Maria della Salute
— a vow the city kept in white stone.
Not only on a wall.
“At the mouth of the Grand Canal, where the water opens into the basin, the white dome closes the view from San Marco. The Senate vowed the church in 1630, the year a plague took roughly a third of Venice. Longhena drew the design in his thirties; the city spent fifty years building it on more than a million wooden piles driven into the lagoon mud. Every November 21st a pontoon bridge is laid across the Grand Canal and Venetians walk to it to light a candle. The white burns particularly hard against a winter sky.
Santa Maria della Salute, 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.
Santa Maria della Salute stands at the eastern tip of Dorsoduro, one of Venice's six historic sestieri, where the Grand Canal opens into the Bacino di San Marco. The basilica is the visual close of every photograph taken from Piazza San Marco across the water. It sits on a foundation of more than 1,100,000 wooden piles driven into the soft lagoon mud. Venice has solved this engineering problem at every site since the city was founded on the lagoon. Vaporetto Line 1 stops at Salute, directly at the basilica's steps. The Punta della Dogana, the old customs house at the very tip, sits a hundred metres east.
Baldassare Longhena won the 1631 design competition in his early thirties and spent the next fifty years bringing his drawing into stone. The plan is octagonal: eight walls supporting a vast central dome of white Istrian limestone, the same dense, weather-resistant stone Venice has used for waterline construction since the medieval period. The dome reads white against the lagoon sky, brighter than the church behind it. Massive scroll-shaped buttresses anchor the dome to the octagonal walls and give Salute its silhouette. Inside, the sacristy holds three Titian ceiling paintings and Tintoretto's Wedding at Cana. Longhena died in 1682, a year after the church was finished, and did not live to see the 1687 consecration.
The Festa della Madonna della Salute falls on November 21st, the anniversary of Venice's votive promise. The Senate made the vow on October 22nd, 1630, when plague had taken roughly a third of the city, about 46,000 people. The promise was that if Venice survived, the city would build a church to the Virgin and process to it every year on this date. Venetians have kept the appointment for nearly four centuries. A temporary pontoon bridge is laid across the Grand Canal from Campo Santa Maria del Giglio, and people cross on foot, carrying candles. Families light a candle for someone they love. The pastry shops sell castradina, a salted-mutton soup eaten only this week, in remembrance of the food convoys that reached the city during the plague.