San Giorgio Maggiore

The Benedictines of San Giorgio Maggiore had occupied their lagoon island since 982, and by the 1560s their medieval church was old enough to warrant replacement; they commissioned Palladio, already established on the mainland but new to Venice, to rebuild it from 1566. His solution to a problem that had troubled church facades since antiquity — a nave taller than its flanking aisles, needing one coherent front — was to overlay two temple pediments of different heights and let them interlock, the tall order reading as a continuous colonnade behind which the lower one is legible in turn. Palladio died in 1580 with the facade unfinished; Vincenzo Scamozzi completed it to a close approximation of the design by around 1610. Seen from across the Bacino di San Marco, white against the water and the red brick of the monastery buildings and campanile beside it, it is arguably the most reproduced image in Venetian painting, appearing in canvases from Canaletto to Monet.