The story
Madonna dell'Orto is primarily a working Gothic church in Cannaregio, the northern district of Venice, and it was Jacopo Tintoretto's parish. He lived close by and he is buried here, in the chapel to the right of the choir, together with two of his children. That closeness shows on the walls, which hold some of his largest paintings.
On either side of the choir rise his Last Judgment and his Worship of the Golden Calf, each almost 15 metres tall, painted in the early 1560s. His first work for the church came a decade earlier, for its organ. The Presentation of the Virgin, with the young Mary climbing a steep stair toward the high priest, belonged to that ensemble, together with two narrower canvases, the Vision of Saint Peter and the Beheading of Saint Paul, all still in the church.
The building goes back to the mid-14th century, when the Humiliati, a religious order, put it up and dedicated it to Saint Christopher. The present name came later, from a statue of the Madonna that had been left in a nearby orchard, an orto in Italian, before it was brought inside. The chapels hold more than Tintoretto, among them Titian's Archangel Raphael and Tobias. A Madonna by Giovanni Bellini also hung here until it was stolen on 1 March 1993.
