Church of St Mary of Miracles

This guide to the Church of St Mary of Miracles in Venice opens on August 23, 1480, when a man named Francesco Bendi attacked his sister-in-law inside a Venice house, and she turned in her last strength toward a small painted icon of the Virgin and Child hanging nearby. It traces the icon itself back to a triptych commissioned decades earlier by the merchant Francesco Amadi, and how his nephew Angelo later hired the sculptor Pietro Lombardo to rebuild around it. Look closely at the marble panels for the different stones Lombardo's workshop combined.