Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 28, 2025
Between the wonderful, mystic, Eastern glory of San Marco, all shadows and symbolisms and harmonies, and the positive, realistic assertions, aesthetic and spiritual, of the Frari, lay the entire reach of the art and religion of the Most Serene Republic.
"When a senator of the Republic hath such amity for the ambassador of his Most Catholic Majesty, forsooth, that at vespers and at matins, in the Frari, they must use the self-same kneeling stool a tenderness and devotion beautiful to see in men so great; for it is aye one, and aye the other, and never both who tell their beads at once that, verily, some brother of the Frari doth take cognizance of a thing so rare and saintly and bringeth word thereof to the Serenissimo, with matter of much interest found within the prie-dieu."
But now there was no more time for fooling on the quay, for at the great end-window of the library of the convent of the Frari it could be seen that a procession of this body was forming and would presently enter the church, and the fun would begin for those who understood Latin. A round-faced friar was giving obliging information.
The Madonna di Casa Pesaro, which Titian finished in 1526, after having worked upon it for no less than seven years, is perhaps the masterpiece of the painter of Cadore among the extant altar-pieces of exceptional dimensions, if there be excepted its former companion at the Frari, the Assunta.
A slightly earlier work of Bartolommeo alone is a Madonna and Child belonging to Sir Hugh Lane, signed and dated 1448. An altar-piece in the Venice Academy is dated 1464, a Madonna and Four Saints, in the Frari, 1482, and S. Barbara, in the Academy, 1490. Bartolommeo is supposed to have died in 1499.
In the Madonna di S. Niccolò, which was painted or rather finished in the succeeding year, 1523, for the little Church of S. Niccolò de' Frari, and is now in the Pinacoteca of the Vatican, the keynote is suavity, unbroken richness and harmony, virtuosity, but not extravagance of technique.
Among a long list of churches, art galleries, and such things, visited by us in Venice, I shall mention only one the church of Santa Maria dei Frari. It is about five hundred years old, I believe, and stands on twelve hundred thousand piles. In it lie the body of Canova and the heart of Titian, under magnificent monuments. Titian died at the age of almost one hundred years.
All who have visited the church of the Frari at Venice will remember for once seen, they never can forget the ex-voto altar-piece which adorns the chapel of the Pesaro family. The beautiful Virgin is seated on a lofty throne to the right of the picture, and presses to her bosom the Dio Bambinetto, who turns from her to bless the votary presented by St. Peter.
Of the frescoes executed by Titian for Doge Andrea Gritti in the Doge's chapel in 1524 no trace now remains. They consisted of a lunette about the altar, with the Virgin and Child between St. Nicholas and the kneeling Doge, figures of the four Evangelists on either side of the altar, and in the lunette above the entrance St. Mark seated on a lion. Church of S. Maria de' Frari, Venice.
In the west is the Piazza, immediately below, with its myriad tables and chairs; then the backs of the S. Moïse statues; and farther away the Frari and its campanile, the huge telegraph-wire carriers of the harbour; across the water Fusina, and beyond in the far distance the jagged Euganean hills. At sunset the landscape is sharpened and brought nearer. And so it will ever be.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking