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The profile of the church façades is enclosed above by an actual crown
in white marble that gives the building an airy, fragile late-Gothic finish.
The Byzantine type vaults with extrados are set in inflected arches (with
busts of saints in the resulting spandrels) which externally have large
jagged leaves moving in the wind alternated with busts of Prophets. At
the top of each of these arches there is the statue of a saint worshipped
in Venice or the personification of a Virtue. Corresponding to the centre
of the main façade there is a wider arch topped by a more thrusting external
profile. In the intermediate space, in a starry sky, there is a lion of
St. Mark, a 19th century cast iron reproduction of the original destroyed
in 1797. This more significant cusp is topped by a statue of the evangelist
to whom the church is consecrated and there are six golden-winged adoring
angels along the profile.
Between the arches there are high Gothic aedicules (the one in the north-west
corner that also contains a bell is dated 1384 and marks the beginning
of works on this part of the church). Each aedicule contains a statue:
at the two ends of the west façade, the Annunciating Angel and the Virgin
of the Annunciation, repeat the layout of the relief slabs on the lower
part of the façade with an allusion to the Venetian New Year and the legendry
origins of the city on 25th March 421. In the four aedicules of the west
façade are the four evangelists; in the northern flank the Fathers of
the Church and in the southern two saints (Anthony the Abbot and Paul
the Hermit).
Beneath the four central aedicules of the west and north sides there are
robust human figures supporting wineskins, enclosed within the narrow
space of the niches cut in the spandrels: these are the so-called spouts
or 'gargoyles' that once actually conveyed rainwater from the roofs behind,
evoking the concept of the Rivers of Paradise (another four rivers, now
reduced to two, were in the lower 13th century part of the west façade).
The high reliefs of the arch around the central window, behind the horses,
also belong to the same phase: the intrados contains four Patriarchs of
the Old Testament and the four Evangelists within baldachins while on
the front there are events from the Old Testament in hexagonal panels
alternated with foliage.
Most of the sculptural decoration - in which, among others, there is also Carrara
marble - must have taken place at the time of the two documented supplies
of marble from Lucca in 1414 and 1419. This leads us also to the names
of the artists who were probably in charge of the enterprise: in 1414
Paolo di Jacobello dalle Masegne and in 1419 Niccolò di Pietro Lamberti
from Florence.
The statues in the aedicules belong to the first or Venetian phase of
the works while the St. Mark in the centre of the west façade and above
all the reliefs of the central arch, full of Ghibertian references, are
of the second or Tuscan phase. One of the Tuscan sculptors who worked
here was Nanni di Bartolo to whom three of the spouts on the north façade
have been attributed, whereas the hypothesis that Jacopo della Quercia
was involved cannot be confirmed. Four figures of saints (Constantine,
Demetrius, George, Theodosius) which fell in an earthquake in 1511 were
replaced in 1618 by Giorgio Albanese.
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