The eighteenth-century Duomo of Santa Maria Assunta is unremarkable as architecture — a plain neoclassical box rebuilt in the 1720s — but it houses Giorgione's signed altarpiece, the Castelfranco Madonna, and that alone justifies a stop. The painting hangs in the Costanzo chapel on the south side of the church.
The composition is unusual: the Virgin is enthroned high above a low landscape, with Saint Francis and Saint Liberalis standing on a tiled floor below. The figures are dreamlike and slightly disconnected, the colours soft and warm, and the landscape behind — a country house, a calm horizon, a strip of distant town — became one of the founding images of Venetian landscape painting. It is one of the few moments in Italian Renaissance art where you can see a painter inventing an entirely new way of seeing. The chapel is dim; coin-operated lighting is worth the euro.