A link to the Churches of Venice
Certainly one of my favorite cites in the world, I decided to concentrate on seeing Tintoretto's. Tintoretto is the father of Venetian Renaissance painting. He lived here his whole life and painted an enormous number of works, most hanging in churched throughout Venice. This brought me to my pilgrimage to the Churches of Venice. Unfortunately all of the churches that I visited had a "no photographs" policy. So I searched the Internet to give some idea of his body of work. What I cannot reproduce is the scale of some of these pieces. Mary are 16 feet high, but a couple of works in the Church of Modonna dell' Orto are as high as 36 feet, towering works. Here is a very small photo of one of these paintings.
The Scuola Grande di San Rocco was a charitable institution set up in the early 1500's to help pay for care to the sick. San Rocco (or Saint Roch) is the patrol saint of contagious diseases. His life is portrayed in many of the huge paintings hung in the Scuola. In 1564 Tintoretto was commissioned to decorated the walls and the ceiling of the Scuola. Again- no photos and one of the most important rooms was closed- some "professionals" were taking photos with big flashed no less. Fortunately the doors were wide open and I could see the Crucifixion, an enormous canvas by Tintoretto. 1565
Oil on canvas, 18 feet high and 40 feet long
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