The story
A few streets back from the Riva degli Schiavoni, the waterfront east of St Mark's, stands a modest brick church with a late-Gothic front. On 6 May 1678 the infant Antonio Vivaldi, the future composer, was brought here for his formal baptism. He had been baptised in a hurry at home two months earlier because he seemed too weak to survive. The font is still in the church, beside a copy of the register entry.
Most of what visitors see dates from a rebuilding between 1475 and 1505, when the parish turned to the leading Venetian painters of the day. Over the high altar is the Baptism of Christ by Cima da Conegliano, a painter from the Veneto town of Conegliano, painted between 1492 and about 1494. Christ stands with his hands joined as John the Baptist baptises him, three angels hold his robes on the left, and towns crown the hills behind. It still sits in the marble frame carved for it by the stonemason Sebastiano Mariani, on the altar it was made for.
Nearby hang Cima's Constantine and Saint Helena with the Cross, from the early 1500s, and a Risen Christ dated 1498 by Alvise Vivarini, from a Murano family of painters.
