Santa Maria della Salute

At the mouth of the Grand Canal, where the water opens into the basin, the white dome closes the view from San Marco. The Senate vowed the church in 1630, the year a plague took roughly a third of Venice. Longhena drew the design in his thirties; the city spent fifty years building it on more than a million wooden piles driven into the lagoon mud. Every November 21st a pontoon bridge is laid across the Grand Canal and Venetians walk to it to light a candle. The white burns particularly hard against a winter sky.

Slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, in our family studio in Knoxville, Tennessee.