Discover San Sebastiano

Antonio Abbondi, called Scarpagnino, rebuilt the church from 1506 into a shape that turned out to be ideal for what happened to it later: a single unbroken nave with no side aisles, no columns and no transept, ending in a raised presbytery under a small dome. There is nothing structural anywhere to interrupt a ceiling.

That ceiling is coffered -- divided into deep compartments by carved and gilded ribs -- and the compartments are not decoration around the paintings but the frames of them. Veronese's three Esther panels and the smaller fields around them were painted to fit an existing grid, which is why the scheme reads as one designed object rather than a set of pictures hung in a room.

The barco, the raised nuns' choir running across the west end above the entrance, is the other feature that shaped the decoration. It gave Veronese a second storey of wall to work on and gave the church a viewing gallery at ceiling height, and its underside and parapet are painted as thoroughly as anything below.

The facade, in plain Istrian stone with a simple pedimented front, is deliberately modest and gives no indication of the interior -- a pattern this church shares with several of Venice's richest painted rooms.