The story
Just off the Merceria, the busy shopping street between the Rialto bridge and Piazza San Marco, San Salvador is a working parish church that holds two altarpieces by Titian, the leading Venetian painter of his century. The building behind its Baroque front of 1663 is older and calmer. Begun in 1508 by the architect Giorgio Spavento and finished by Tullio Lombardo and others, its interior is three domed squares set one after another, each lit from above by a lantern.
The painting most visitors come for is Titian's Annunciation, in the right aisle, painted in the early 1560s when he was already an old man. The angel arrives from the left in a rush of light, and the brushwork is loose enough that Giorgio Vasari, the Florentine biographer of artists, thought little of it. At the bottom Titian signed it "Titianus fecit fecit", writing the Latin word for "made" twice. Why he doubled it is still argued. His Transfiguration hangs over the high altar.
In the right transept lies Caterina Cornaro, the Venetian noblewoman who became Queen of Cyprus and gave the island up to Venice in 1489. Outside, at the foot of the left column of the façade, a cannonball is still lodged in the stone, left there by the Austrian bombardment of 1849.
