The story
In the Dominican church of Santa Corona in Vicenza, a side altar still holds the Baptism of Christ that Giovanni Bellini, the great Venetian painter, made around 1500 for the chapel of a local family, the Garzadori. Christ stands in the Jordan before a wide landscape of hills, with three angels waiting on the bank. The church was built in the 13th century to house a relic said to be a thorn from Christ's crown, a gift from King Louis IX of France, and it also has an Adoration of the Magi by Paolo Veronese.
Santa Corona is one of seven sites run together as the Musei civici di Vicenza, the city's civic museums. Most of the others are the work of one man, the architect Andrea Palladio. Palazzo Chiericati, which he designed in 1550, has held the city's art collection since 1855, more than 35,000 works from the 13th to the 20th century. Across the square stands the Teatro Olimpico, his last project, begun in 1580 and finished after his death by Vincenzo Scamozzi. It opened in 1585 with Sophocles' Oedipus the King, and Scamozzi's wooden streets of Thebes, built in false perspective, still recede behind the stage.
The circuit also takes in the Basilica Palladiana on the main square, an archaeological and natural history museum in the old convent of Santa Corona, and a museum of the Risorgimento and the Resistance in a hillside villa.
