Scuola Grande di San Marco

Coordinates: 45°26′23″N 12°20′29″E / 45.43972°N 12.34139°E

The Scuola Grande of San Marco.

The Scuola Grande di San Marco is a building in Venice, Italy. It originally was the home to one of the six major sodalities or Scuole Grandi of Venice. It faces the Campo San Giovanni e Paolo, one of the largest squares in the city.

The edifice was built by the Confraternity of San Marco in 1260 to act as its seat. In 1485, however, it was destroyed by a large fire, and rebuilt in the following twenty years under a new design by Pietro Lombardo, with a fund established by the members. The façade, a masterwork with delicately decorated niches and pilasters, and with white or polychrome marble statues, was later completed by Mauro Codussi. While decorated with the polished marble elements of Renaissance classicism, the proliferation of arches and niches adds a retrogressive Byzantine flavor, an architectural feature of many conservative Venetian styles.

Three of the greatest Italian explorers of the fifteenth century: Giosafat Barbaro, Ambrogio Contarini, and Alvise da Mosto were members of the Scuola.^[1]

Jacopo Tintoretto furnished the Scuola with three paintings Miracle of the Slave (also known as The Miracle of St. Mark, 1548), St Mark's Body Brought to Venice, painted between 1562 an 1566, both paintings are currently housed in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, northern Italy, and Finding of the body of St Mark also painted between 1562 an 1566, an now held in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan.

In 1819 it became an Austrian military hospital. It is now a civil hospital.

References

Notes

1. “Venetian narrative painting in the age of Carpaccio”, Patricia Fortini Brown, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988., pg. 74 , ISBN 0-300-04025-3