The story
Santa Maria della Salute is primarily a working church, the great domed basilica at the mouth of the Grand Canal in Venice, but its sacristy holds a small gallery of Titian. The church was a vow. In 1630 plague killed nearly a third of the city, and the Republic promised a church to the Virgin if Venice was spared. The young architect Baldassare Longhena won the commission, and the building was consecrated in 1687. Every 21 November Venetians still cross a temporary bridge laid over the Grand Canal to give thanks here.
The paintings came from another church. When the monastery of Santo Spirito in Isola, on a small island in the lagoon, was suppressed in 1656, its Titians were brought to the Salute. Over the sacristy altar hangs his early Saint Mark Enthroned, painted around 1510. Saint Mark, patron of the city, sits above four saints, Roch and Sebastian, invoked against plague, and Cosmas and Damian, the doctor saints. The picture is usually connected with the plague that struck Venice in those years, so the Salute received a plague painting more than a century older than itself.
Look up and you see the ceiling canvases Titian made for Santo Spirito in the early 1540s, painted to be seen from below at a steep angle. Cain and Abel and the Sacrifice of Isaac are among them, set among roundels with the symbols of the Evangelists, the angel of Matthew and the ox of Luke.
