San Francesco della Vigna Church in Venice and the Kabbalah

San Francisco is definitely one of the most important Italian traditional medieval saints and in Venice his cult became very popular. In fact, in 1253, 27 years after the Saint's death, the nobleman Mark Ziani, Doge Pietro's son, donated some land on which a monastery and a church dedicated to St. Francis of Assisi could be built and because this land was full of vineyards, the church took the name of San Francesco della Vigna.

In the sixteenth century Doge Gritti decided to rebuild the church and entrusted the design to the famous architect Jacopo Sansovino, but then he decided to change him and called Brother Martin from Pisa, a Franciscan monk and an expert in Kabbalah. The building was constructed according to the Kabbalah music, so that the proportions of the building also included the Pythagorean musical consonance: the church was in fact to reflect universal harmony. All dimensions of the building are based on the number 3, which was considered the divine number, as a symbol of the Trinity.

Even the ratios  between the dimensions of the various parts of the church were linked to the number 3 and corresponded to musical intervals.