Architecture
The church and its bell tower are built of dark red-brown brick, without plastering. The bell tower stands separately. The main entrance to the church faces west, but the most impressive facade is the colonnaded east side, which faces a canal.
The colourful stone mosaic floor of the church, including the yoked "cocks on the floor of San Donato, in Murano, who are carrying a fox" dates from around 1140, and bears superficial repairs. The relics of San Donato are located in a marble sarcophagus.
Behind the altar there are four rib bones, hanging from wires. The bones are more than 1 metre long. According to legend, these are bones of the dragon slain by St. Donatus in Greece. It is possible that these bones are from large extinct Pleistocene mammals.
Read more about this topic: Church Of Santa Maria E San Donato
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)
“The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
“And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)