The Frari

Why it matters

The Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, always simply the Frari, stands in the Campo dei Frari at the heart of San Polo. It is one of the largest churches in Venice and one of three notable churches that keep most of their Venetian Gothic look. Like many Franciscan churches it is plain outside, all red brick with details in white Istrian stone. Inside it holds more great art than most museums, much of it still in the place it was made for.

Two altarpieces by Titian hang here, the Assumption of the Virgin on the high altar and the Pesaro Madonna in the nave. The church also keeps the only rood screen still in place in any church in Venice, and a crowd of funerary monuments to doges, generals and artists, among them Titian himself, who is buried here, and the composer Claudio Monteverdi.

How the friars built it

In 1231, under Doge Jacopo Tiepolo, the city gave the Franciscan Friars Minor land here for a monastery and church; frari is Venetian for friars. Their first church soon proved too small, and a larger one with three naves was begun in 1250 and finished only in 1338. Work began almost at once on the church you see, which took more than a century and turned the building round so that its front faces the campo and the small canal.

The builder Jacopo Celega started it and his son Pier Paolo finished it. The bell tower, the second tallest in the city after the Campanile of San Marco, was completed in 1396; the facade in 1440; the high altar was consecrated in 1469; and the whole church was consecrated as Santa Maria Gloriosa on 27 May 1492. Chapels were added along the way by the families who paid for them, the Corner, the Pesaro, the Bernardo, and one for the community of merchants from Milan.

What you actually see

Inside, the scale is the surprise. The church is a Latin cross with aisles, the nave carried on great round columns and roofed with a high Gothic rib vault, braced by wooden tie beams, and without a central dome. Walk up the nave and the view is framed by the choir screen of 1475, built so that the friars at prayer in the choir were set apart from everyone else. Through its central arch, far off over the high altar, you see Titian's Assumption: the Virgin rising above the apostles, framed by the screen as you walk toward it.

On the north wall of the nave hangs Titian's Pesaro Madonna, painted for Jacopo Pesaro, bishop and naval commander, whose family paid for a chapel in the church. Near it stands the vast mausoleum of Doge Giovanni Pesaro, and opposite is the monument to Titian himself.

Across the nave from Titian is a white marble pyramid with an open door and mourners walking into it. It was built by the pupils of Antonio Canova as his memorial, following a design Canova had made for an unbuilt tomb for Titian, and only his heart is buried there.

In the chancel, beside the Assumption, stand the tombs of Doge Francesco Foscari and Doge Niccolò Tron. In the sacristy is Giovanni Bellini's triptych of the Madonna and Child with saints, and in a chapel of the south choir is Donatello's Saint John the Baptist, his first documented work in Venice. The carved choir stalls behind the screen are by Marco Cozzi.

The chapels and the monuments

The church is also a pantheon of the Republic. Paolo Savelli, a Roman commander in Venetian service, has the first Venetian monument to include an equestrian statue; Benedetto Pesaro, a sea captain, lies in a tomb by Lorenzo Bregno over the sacristy door; Jacopo Marcello, a general killed at the assault on Gallipoli, and Melchiorre Trevisan are here too. Claudio Monteverdi, one of the great composers of the seventeenth century, is buried in the chapel of the Milanese.

The chapels along the choir and the transepts hold their own altarpieces. In the Corner chapel of San Marco, added in 1420, is Bartolomeo Vivarini's Saint Mark Enthroned; in the chapel in the north transept, Alvise Vivarini's Saint Ambrose and other saints, his last work. In the sacristy, beside the Bellini, hangs Paolo Veneziano's painting of Doge Francesco Dandolo and his wife presented to the Virgin by Saints Francis and Elizabeth. On the facade, the three statues on the cornice are by Lorenzo Bregno, of 1516.

How to visit

The Frari is a working parish church that also charges for visits outside services, and its official site gives the times; guided visits with a Franciscan friar can be requested through it. Groups do not need to book, but everyone should expect the church to close to visitors for services, concerts and special events.

Allow an hour, more if you want to look properly at the Titians. The Assumption is best seen from the nave through the arch of the screen and then again close up from the choir.

The Scuola Grande di San Rocco, with its Tintorettos, is next door, and the two make one of the best mornings in Venice; the homepage walk starts with them. The Rialto market is a short walk away.

Honest notes

The bell tower has needed help. Cracks appeared in it in 1904, after the fall of the Campanile of San Marco alarmed the city, and long investigations from 1990 led to a strengthening campaign in the early 2000s, with a steel cable, grouting of the soil below and a structural joint between tower and church. The Franciscans themselves were expelled in the nineteenth century and the church was returned to the order in 1922.