Church art: brilliant colors, stucco, statues and mosaics

There are more than 250 churches in Venice, says That’s Venice, and between them “they make up a cultural, artistic and human heritage of inestimable value.” Venetian churches are “places where you’re likely to get lost amid a magnificence of colors, stucco, statues, mosaics … but what is really interesting is that the greatest artists and architects who lived between the 14th and the 17th centuries, in turn, stirred like the damned in Dante’s inferno to work on the creation and set up of these places of worship.”  

Venice’s churches are often indistinguishable from its grandest palaces, observes Lonely Planet. “Working largely free of papal interference, artists were granted extraordinary opportunities to create new artwork within, endowing Venetian churches with avant-garde Bellini altarpieces, soul-stirring Titian paintings and heart-lifting Veronese frescoes” -- and at the centre of it all, St Mark’s Basilica “still boldly proclaims Venice’s cosmopolitan character with its onion-bulb domes, Greek cross layout and Egyptian marble walls.”