From the Myth to the Margins: The Patriarch’s Piazza at San Pietro di Castello in Venice*

Abstract

AbstractThis study analyzes thecampoof San Pietro di Castello from its mythologized origins to the Renaissance, paying particular attention to the architectural and political forces that shaped it. Although San Pietro was Venice’s cathedral from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, civic leaders marginalized the site, which incarnated the contentious relationship between the Roman Church and the Venetian republic. The essay places thecampoat the center of inquiry because the episcopal complex’s significance is best discerned through diachronic analysis of the urban landscape. The building activities of its medieval and Quattrocento patrons generated a heterogeneouscampothat incorporated morphological elements from two Venetian urbanistic types: the parishcampoand the monastic island. Its sixteenth-century patriarchs created a new architectural vision of thecampo, contesting its slippage from the center of Venetian life and forging a distinctive ensemble that differs markedly from the better-known piazzas at San Marco and Rialto.