Discover Madonna dell'Orto

The brick facade of 1460-64 is one of the best-preserved pieces of Venetian Gothic church building, and it is worth reading from left to right rather than as a whole. Pilaster strips divide it into three, matching the three aisles behind; niches along the upper edge hold statues of the twelve apostles, and a large rose window sits at the centre of the middle bay.

The main portal is the anomaly. Carved in the 1460s and attributed to Bartolomeo Bon, it mixes a Gothic ogee arch with classical Renaissance detailing in the same doorway -- the two vocabularies overlapping at the exact moment Venice was changing from one to the other, in a building whose facade above it is uncompromisingly Gothic.

The campanile, completed in 1503, ends not in the usual Venetian pyramid but in an onion dome ringed with statues, a form that reads as Eastern rather than Italian and is unlike any other bell tower in the city.

Inside, the church is a three-aisled Gothic hall on Greek marble columns, wide and high and -- crucially for what hangs in it -- lit from clear windows rather than stained glass. The apse was built deep enough to take Tintoretto's two enormous canvases facing each other, which is the arrangement the whole east end now exists to serve.