I made the picture with a china marker and watercolour - two mediums that do not complement each other. The roughness of the china marker is a sharp contrast to the delicacy of tone possible with watercolours, although here I laid down the paint more garishly than usual.
Murano is a peripheral suburb of Venice that is chiefly famous for its glass. Other than glass studios, its principal attraction is this church, to which my sketch hardly does justice.
It's an old church, perhaps going back to the 7th century, although the structure is largely of the 11th century. The famous mosaic pavement within dates from 1140.
Also inside are the bones of a dragon slain by Saint Donatus. Dragons were apparently quite common in Italy in the late Roman period, but seem to have been largely exterminated by the saints of the 4th and 5th centuries. Certain heathens have attributed the bones behind the altar of this church to a pleistocene megafauna of some sort, but they have no poetry in their souls.
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