Saint Sinibald

A saint from Nuremberg is an odd thing to find in a Venetian church, and he tells you who prayed here. San Bartolomeo at Rialto was the church of the German merchant community, whose great warehouse and lodgings stood right beside it. So when Sebastiano painted the inner faces of the organ shutters around 1509, he gave those Germans their own protector, Sinibald, a medieval hermit and pilgrim honoured as the patron of Nuremberg. He set him in a shallow niche crowned by a gold mosaic half-dome, the glinting Byzantine gold Venice still loved. This face pointed inward, so the congregation saw Sinibald only when the organ stood open and playing. Taken off the instrument in the 18th century, it now hangs as a single standing figure with no doors left to swing shut over it.