San Zulian Site Features

The church is built on a rectangular plan in the Renaissance style. Its facade, designed by Jacopo Sansovino and finished after his death in 1570 by Alessandro Vittoria, carries a bronze statue of Tommaso Rangone -- the physician and philologist who financed the facade in exchange for this very monument to himself.

Inside, a single rectangular nave leads to an apse covered by a vault, flanked by two small chapels. The decoration of the walls and ceiling was largely completed in the decade following the church's 1580 consecration, in three layers: a cycle of Christ's life around the upper register of the nave, an allegorical ceiling cycle illustrating the Passion of Christ and the triumph of Saint Julian by Palma the Younger, and a series of side altars furnished over time by the parish's own confraternities and devotional schools.

Of the church's seven altars, the main altarpiece is by Giuseppe Sardi, with a "Coronation of the Virgin and the Saints" signed by Girolamo da Santa Croce.

Paintings by Palma the Younger and Veronese also remain in the church -- Veronese's St. Mark, St. James, St. Jerome and the Dead Christ Supported by Angels (1581-82) was painted for the altar of the Strazzaroli guild, dedicated to St. James.

The organ, on a cantoria above the counter-facade, was built by Gaetano Callido in 1764.