Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari Historical Timeline

Origins

Franciscan friars arrived in Venice in the early 13th century and were granted land in what's now the San Polo district for a modest first church. As the order's standing in the city grew, that original building proved too small, and construction began around 1340 on the much larger Gothic church that stands today.

Turning points

The new church took roughly a century to complete, with its campanile -- still the second tallest in Venice -- finished in 1396 while the main body of the building continued to rise around it. Titian's altarpiece "Assunta," installed over the high altar in 1518, was a turning point of a different kind: an enormous, boldly colored composition that helped establish Titian's reputation and gave the Frari its defining artistic centerpiece.

Influential people

Over the following centuries, the Frari became one of the two great mendicant-order churches of Venice (alongside Santi Giovanni e Paolo), and its scale made it a preferred site for prestigious tomb monuments -- several doges are buried here, alongside Titian himself and, much later, the sculptor Antonio Canova.

Present-day significance

Unlike many of Venice's great artworks, which were dispersed to museums over the centuries, the Frari's major paintings and sculptures remain in the settings they were made for -- making the church itself one of the more complete surviving records of Venetian Renaissance art still in its original context.