Abstract
Attempting to assess the spread of golden mosaic decorations in Venice during the middle ages, scholars have thus far focused mainly on the existing, most famous examples: San Marco, Torcello, and Murano. A careful reading of early descriptions and chronicles from the fourteenth into the eighteenth centuries, however, uncovers many more examples. The texts of erudite authors such as Marcantonio Sabellico (1436-1506), Marino Sanudo (1466-1536), and Francesco Sansovino (1521-1586) often mention golden vaults (testudines or cubae aureae) in medieval Venetian churches that were destroyed or modified after the Middle Ages. Examination of literary sources reviewed in this article presents fifteen such cases detected, all dating from the ninth century to the fourteenth. Most have been verified and contextualized from historical evidence.
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