The Doge Tombs of Venice

Where the doge tombs are in Venice

Two churches hold most of them. Santi Giovanni e Paolo, the Dominican basilica in Castello, earned the nickname of pantheon because of the number of doges and other eminent Venetians commemorated there in sumptuous monuments (Colombo, 2016, p. 270). The Frari holds the other great cluster, including the monument to Doge Giovanni Pesaro in the third bay of the left nave (Colombo, 2016, p. 78).

The habit of the civic ducal monument starts in the Middle Ages, and in particular with the tomb of Doge Jacopo Tiepolo, who died in 1275, in Santi Giovanni e Paolo. By the burial of Doge Francesco Dandolo in 1339 the role of the ducal tomb as public commemoration was well understood, and together with the Frari this church rapidly became the tomb church of office holders during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Colombo, 2016, pp. 28 to 29).

Other churches hold one apiece. San Giorgio Maggiore has the monument to Doge Marcantonio Memmo, begun in 1613 during his dogate and finished after 1618 (Colombo, 2016, pp. 71 to 72). Santo Stefano holds the floor slab of Doge Francesco Morosini. Walking the monuments is itself an old habit: nineteenth-century guidebooks already encouraged foreigners to visit San Zanipolo by taking a path around them (Colombo, 2016, p. 270).

Why most doge tombs hold no body

The distinction is between a tomb and a monument. A tomb is the burial place where a corpse is interred. In seventeenth-century Venice tombs were generally modest, because their patrons were interested in erecting expensive and splendid monuments instead, and most of those monuments do not house the deceased (Colombo, 2016, p. 5). The ducal monuments of the period cannot properly be called sepulchral at all, because they do not accommodate the body (Colombo, 2016, p. 303).

The bodies went elsewhere in the same building. The general practice in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Venice was burial in a grave next to the funerary monument or in a prominent area of the church, although this was not always the case (Colombo, 2016, p. 53). Doge Giovanni Pesaro lies in the grave of his ancestors before the Frari high altar, marked by a marble slab with an inscription at the centre and the Pesaro arms at the sides, while his monument stands in another part of the church (Colombo, 2016, p. 77). The remains of the three Valier commemorated in San Zanipolo sit in a tomb independent of their mausoleum, architecturally and iconographically (Colombo, 2016, p. 300).

The Loredan monument makes the point visible. It does not accommodate the doge's grave, and it carries almost no Christian imagery: the only reference to his devotion is a single allusion in the epitaph (Colombo, 2016, pp. 52 to 53).

Who paid for a doge's tomb, and who gave permission

The grandest were self-commissioned by will rather than awarded by the state. In a codicil of 1659 Doge Giovanni Pesaro asked for a monumental tomb in the Frari and left 12,000 ducats to execute it within ten years, specifying statues, columns and a seated figure of himself (Colombo, 2016, p. 77). Antonio Barbaro left 30,000 ducats in October 1678 for a new facade at Santa Maria del Giglio incorporating a monument to himself and his family (Colombo, 2016, p. 147). Doge Francesco Morosini left 27,000 ducats in his will of 1693 (Colombo, 2016, p. 217), and Girolamo Cavazza left 75,000 for the facade of the Scalzi (Colombo, 2016, p. 150).

These are not the largest sums a Venetian family could spend. Admission to the nobility required 100,000 ducats, which secured the treasury enough funds to pursue the war against the Ottomans (Colombo, 2016, p. 167).

Permission came from the religious house, not from the state. Leonardo Pesaro obtained permission to build from the friars of the Frari in 1665 (Colombo, 2016, p. 77), and the chapter of the convent of Santo Stefano authorised Morosini's two wall tombs on 4 August 1692 (Colombo, 2016, p. 219). Where the state did pay, it chose carefully: the Senate commissioned the monument to Captain Bartolomeo Orsini d'Alviano in 1629 and preferred the more traditional of two proposals, because governmental bodies were concerned to avoid any inopportune self-celebration of the deceased (Colombo, 2016, pp. 127 to 128).

San Zanipolo: from the Loredan monument to the Valier mausoleum

The Loredan monument shows how slowly these things went up. Doge Leonardo Loredan's son Lorenzo gained permission to erect a monument in the presbytery in 1517. The project was approved in 1536 and remained unexecuted until the 1560s, when Danese Cataneo was finally recruited. By 1572 the statue representing Venice and the personifications of Peace and Abundance were complete. Documents of 1600 record that the doge's great-grandson had left 2,000 ducats for the completion of the work, a letter of 1604 reports the doge's own statue still unfinished, and it must have been in place by 1616, when a timber merchant asked to be buried near the monument (Colombo, 2016, pp. 43 to 44). Colombo's text gives Loredan's death as 1521, while the epitaph he transcribes reads MDXIX, 1519, so the two differ (Colombo, 2016, pp. 43, 45).

The sequence ends in the fourth bay of the right nave. The Valier mausoleum was devised by Andrea Tirali and completed in 1707, commemorating Doge Bertuccio, his son Doge Silvestro and Silvestro's wife Elisabetta Querini (Colombo, 2016, pp. 270 to 271). Bertuccio's death year is given as 1659 in the text and as MDCLVIII, 1658, in the inscription (Colombo, 2016, pp. 270, 285). Its height equals that of the nave (Colombo, 2016, p. 288). Elisabetta was recalled by biographers as the last dogaressa to be crowned in a pompous ceremony (Colombo, 2016, p. 295).

The Pesaro monument in the Frari

This is the strangest object in the group. Pedestals of black and white marble with lion heads and garlands support telamones in the guise of Moors carrying a Doric entablature, shown with a variety of pained expressions and bearing white marble cushions. Between them, bronze skeletons hold marble drapes with the funerary eulogy. At the centre a door is surmounted by an arch whose keystone is a putto with a scroll reading SIGNA SPIRANTIA STABUNT, which Colombo renders as statues will breathe. Above, four Corinthian columns of black variegated marble frame the enthroned doge against a slab of red marble (Colombo, 2016, pp. 78 to 79).

The contrast in the Moors is deliberate. Their limbs are basanite against the candid white Carrara of their clothes, emphasising their condition as slaves, a form of spoils from the war of Candia, which Pesaro defended against the Turks (Colombo, 2016, p. 100). Four sculptors worked on it: Giusto Le Court, Melchior Barthel, Francesco Cavrioli and Michel Fabris (Colombo, 2016, p. 23).

The programme was written down in advance by a Jesuit rhetorician and printed in 1665, and the carved eulogy had to be shortened for lack of space. The gap between the printed programme and the stone was enough to prompt a state inquisitor to write to the Venetian ambassador in Rome in October 1669 (Colombo, 2016, pp. 79 to 80). The monument magnifies the doge rather than Venice, whose personification is excluded from the composition (Colombo, 2016, p. 304).

Francesco Morosini, under the floor of Santo Stefano

The most celebrated doge of his century has the plainest resting place. Morosini superintended the defence of Candia during a twenty-five-year siege, was accused of high treason after the island was ceded in 1669, returned to command at the outbreak of the Morean war in 1684, conquered most of the Peloponnese, and during the siege of Athens in 1687 took a major role in the bombardment of the Parthenon, where opposing forces had sought refuge. He was proclaimed doge in 1688 with the epithet Peloponnesiacus and died on 6 January 1694 (Colombo, 2016, pp. 216 to 217).

His will of 1693 left 27,000 ducats for the renovation of the family palace and two funerary monuments on the sides of the high altar of Santo Stefano, the parish church of his branch of the family (Colombo, 2016, p. 217). The convent chapter authorised the two wall tombs in August 1692 and the request was formally approved in 1694, but concerns about altering the presbytery led to a dispute with the friars and the scheme was abandoned. On 10 November 1694 his nephew agreed with the friars that the doge's tomb should go in a grave in the central nave, in front of the altar dedicated to the Annunciation (Colombo, 2016, pp. 219 to 220).

The Senate honoured him differently. Having decreed a marble bust in August 1687, it opted in December for a bronze portrait statue, and an identical marble bust survives at the Museo Correr (Colombo, 2016, p. 218).

Visiting Santi Giovanni e Paolo and the Frari in 2026

Santi Giovanni e Paolo opens for visits on weekdays from 9.00 to 17.45 and on Sundays and public holidays from 12.00 to 17.45, and visits are never allowed during services. Entry is by an offering of 3.50 EUR full, 1.50 EUR reduced for students aged 13 to 25, and 2 EUR per head for guided groups of at least 15. Entry is free for children under 13, for residents of the Comune di Venezia, for licensed guides, and for anyone coming to pray (Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo, 2026).

The Frari charges more and keeps two seasons. From 1 November to Easter Sunday it opens Monday to Saturday 9.00 to 18.00 and Sundays and holidays 13.00 to 18.00; from 25 April to 31 October Monday to Friday 9.00 to 19.30, Saturday 9.00 to 18.00 and Sundays and holidays 13.00 to 18.00, with last admission 30 minutes before closing and visits suspended all day at Christmas, Easter and Ferragosto. The two published seasons leave the weeks between Easter Sunday and 25 April unstated. Tickets at the desk are 8 EUR full, 5 EUR over 65 and 3 EUR for students aged 12 to 29, and free for children up to 11 and for residents of the Comune di Venezia. The Frari states that it takes part in no tourist circuit or city pass, naming Venezia Unica, the Chorus Pass and the Venice Pass (Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, 2026a, 2026b). Santo Stefano publishes its own hours separately.