Mantegna's triptych
The 1459 perspective that opened the north to the Renaissance.
Adert — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Manuel Ramírez Sánchez — CC BY-SA 4.0 · José Luiz — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Rijksmuseum — CC0
Verona's eighth bishop (d. c. 371), come from Africa — a brilliant preacher and, by his beloved legend, a fisherman, so his statues hold the rod and laugh. He is the city's true patron before all its myths, his statues' darkness a striking reminder of the early church's breadth.
Because the triptych is the first complete Renaissance altarpiece north of the Apennines: mathematical perspective, painted architecture continuing its real frame, saints with sculpture's weight — the whole north learned from it, Veronese and Venice its heirs. Napoleon took the original predella panels, still in France — the copies beneath tell the grievance.
Real in the play, not the record: Shakespeare set the marriage in Friar Laurence's cell, and Verona housed it in San Zeno's crypt — aptly choosing its loveliest undercroft. Believe it exactly as much as the house and balcony: the rituals of a city living gracefully with its legend.
Sign in to write your review of this place.
No reviews yet — be the first.
San Zeno is Italian Romanesque at its summit: a golden-tuff basilica glowing toward sunset in its quiet square west of the centre, built over the grave of Verona's laughing African bishop — Zeno the fisherman, as the city loves him — its bronze door of forty-eight cast panels a "poor man's Bible": scripture's stories poured a thousand years ago for those who could not read. The interior stages three levels: a column-forest crypt where Zeno rests dark-faced and smiling, a nave under a wooden ship's-keel ceiling, and a raised chancel bearing the treasure — Mantegna's triptych of 1459: Virgin and saints in perspective that pierces the frame, the painting that taught northern Italy the Renaissance. And Verona holds that in its crypt Romeo married Juliet in secret — legend completing itself in the city's truest church.
The 1459 perspective that opened the north to the Renaissance.
A millennium-old cast Bible — the poor's eternal reading.
The African bishop grinning in his column crypt.
Piazza San Zeno 2, 37123 Verona