Discover Chiesa di San Pantalon

The facade is the most honest thing about the building: bare brick, with the anchor points for the marble cladding that was never bought still visible across it. Francesco Comin rebuilt the church between 1668 and 1686 and the money ran out before the front could be faced, which is why a church with a world-famous interior looks from the campo like a warehouse.

Inside, the plan is deliberately unfussy -- a single wide nave, shallow chapels, no dome and no transept crossing to break the ceiling line. Whether or not Comin knew what would eventually go overhead, the room functions as a frame: nothing competes for attention, and the eye has nowhere to go but up.

Gian Antonio Fumiani's ceiling is not a fresco. It is roughly forty separate canvases painted between 1680 and 1704 and fitted together above the nave, covering more than 440 square metres. Painting on canvas rather than into wet plaster let him work at ground level and over decades, and it is why the surface has survived in a building that sits on damp Venetian foundations -- a fresco would have gone long ago.

The architecture painted onto those canvases is designed to continue the real architecture of the walls upward, columns and cornices rising past the actual roofline into open sky. The join between built and painted is placed where the eye least expects to check it.