Carpaccio: The Lives of St George and St Jerome

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Mantegna’s Mantua and Carpaccio’s Venice were both surrounded by a great deal of water, but from every other point of view they were very different. The inland city of Mantua had only about 25,000 inhabitants in 1500, and the little Marquisate was ruled by members of one family, the Gonzagas, for about three hundred years from 1330 to 1630.

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The maritime city of Venice had as many as 110,000 inhabitants at this time. It was extremely wealthy, thanks to a virtual monopoly in luxury trade with the East; and in order to protect its trade routes, it possessed a kind of ‘ribbon-empire’, extending down the coast of Dalmatia, and taking in the islands of Rhodes, and, from 1489, Cyprus—whence, I remind you, the plot of Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice.

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In the early fifteenth century, the Lion of St Mark ‘stepped ashore’ (as they said euphemistically), and Venice extended her rule over the vast area of the hinterland which is coloured red on the map. And far from having a hereditary ruler, Venice was a republic, in which the political power—and membership of the various Councils—was spread among the two hundred families who constituted the noble class. Even more strikingly than any other medieval or early modern city, Venice consisted of a complex series of interlocking and overlapping communities and corporations.

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Certain areas of the city were dominated by people of one ethnic origin, as the place-names still tell us: for example, the Giudecca, the island where the Jews lived; and, next to the palace of the elected Head of State (the Doge), the Riva degli Schiavoni (Slavs), with, at right angles to it, the Rio dei Greci (Greeks), where we shall find the School of the Dalmatians. There were many associations based on trade or profession—the Guilds; there were the so called ‘Companies’ of Nobles; and there were, of course, a great many religious communities in the countless churches and convents.

This is a good point to remind you that Church and State, or Church and Society, were very closely bound up at all levels of activity; a feature which is nicely symbolised in the fact that the great Church of the Republic’s patron saint—not the ‘Cathedral’ at this time—that is, St Mark’s, lies between the Palace of the Doge to the right, and the central administration or ‘Procuratie’ to the left.

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But the most characteristic of all these ‘societies-within-a-society’ were the ‘Confraternities’ or ‘Friendly Societies’, which, in Venice, were always called ‘Schools’—‘Scuole’. These were formed by laymen for a mixture of purposes, inseparable, but varying in relative importance: for religious worship and religious instruction; to ensure respectable, well-attended funerals; for charitable help to members and their families who were ruined or fell ill, or to those who were widowed, or left as orphans. They also gave charitable help to the community at large: to the sick, the old, the paupers and the prison population.

There were more than two hundred of these ‘Schools’ in Venice, and it has been estimated that around two-thirds of the male population belonged to one or other or them; the choice depending on their wealth, their profession, their class, and also where they lived.

The point of telling you of all this is that some of the ‘Scuole’—especially the six ‘major’ schools, known as ‘Scuole Grandi’—became patrons of the Arts, particularly in times of prosperity, hiring architects to build or to rebuild their headquarters or perhaps the church with which they were associated, and hiring painters to decorate the walls of these buildings, in rivalry with each other, and with the State and the ecclesiastical establishment.

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PART ONE

This lecture falls into two distinct parts. In the first, we shall look at three cycles of canvasses which were commissioned for and by the Venetian Schools between 1490 and 1505 and which offer a very clear account of their ethos and characteristic activities. In the second, we shall concentrate on one long and sustained narrative, dating from much the same years, illustrating the life and martyrdom of the patron saint of a minor School: the Legend of St Ursula by Vittore Carpaccio.

We begin this first part, then, with some important canvases painted for a major School—including one by Carpaccio, and two by the older painter Gentile Bellini, who was the elder brother of the more famous Giovanni and therefore brother-in-law of Andrea Mantegna.

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Very often (as we shall see with regard to St George and St Ursula), the subject of the paintings commissioned by a School was the life of its patron saint. But in one very interesting case—the major School of St John the Evangelist—the Council of the Confraternity chose to represent and celebrate the miracles which had been worked by a sacred relic in their possession: miracles which had happened in Venice, some of them within living memory, to members of the School. As a result, their paintings give a fascinating glimpse of the social world for which all these ‘School-paintings’ were commissioned.

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The church of St John the Evangelist stands on the left of the Grand Canal, at the point of the green ‘arrow’ in Figure 00 FIXME; very close, as you can see, to the huge church of Santa Maria dei Frari, and to the School of San Rocco which we shall visit in two weeks time. In the 1490s the church looked like this (Figure 00 FIXME): that is, it had a brick facade, with a very handsome portico and five statues.

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The Confraternity of St John had been founded as a community of flagellants back in 1261. Its members had rebuilt an alms house as their headquarters in the neighbourhood of this church in the 1340s; and they had obtained the cause of their future prestige in the year 1369, when the Grand Chancellor of the King of Cyprus gave them a piece of the True Cross, that is, a fragment of the cross on which Jesus was crucified. The picture above, which is one of the cycle, shows the relic being received into the church.

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To house this precious fragment, they made a reliquary of crystal and silver in the form of a cross; and in the picture above, you can see a picture of that cross by Titian. The other canvasses in our cycle—there are nine in total [FIXME: check number]—all represent miracles that were attributed to the reliquary and its fragment.

The Confraternity became wealthy and prestigious: in short, it became one of the major Schools. In the thirty years between 1480 and 1510, they built a new gate to their courtyard, and a new portal to their entrance;

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They followed these works with a new ceremonial staircase that led up to the two principal rooms on the first floor; one of them being the main meeting room (always known, in every School, as the Sala dell’albergo), the other being a much smaller committee room and sanctuary, measuring about 45 feet by 25 feet. It was here that they kept their reliquary, and which became known as the ‘Room of the Cross’, ‘Sala della Croce’.

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Apart from making these structural alterations, they had the larger room sumptuously redecorated, and in 1494 they placed an order for the eight canvasses which make up our cycle to decorate the smaller ‘Room of the Cross’, giving the commission to Gentile Bellini, whose father had been a member of the Confraternity, and who was by then about sixty years old.

Gentile, as was common practice, painted three of the canvasses himself, and subcontracted the other five to other younger artists (we shall look at one by Bastiani, and another by Giovanni Mansueti). However, Gentile clearly imposed certain conditions or conventions on his collaborators in order to unify the pictures. We shall see that the vanishing point is always placed about half way up the canvas, and, more importantly, that the artist is ‘viewing’ the scene as if he were looking through a window on the first floor, some fifteen to twenty feet above the ground, so that we are always looking down on standing figures.

The canvasses are no longer in the room for which they were intended, but they are at least all together, in a room of the right size, in the Accademia, where they were taken in the year 1806, when Napoleon closed all the schools down.

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The Accademia, I note in passing, is only half a mile away from the School, and it remains open for longer hours than the School of St John; it also houses Carpaccio’s Legend of St Ursula. The other green arrows that I have put on this map (Figure 00 FIXME) are there to reinforce the point that the miracles attributed to the Holy Cross were all local, and that they took place within about ten minutes walk of the Scuola itself.

One of the miracles occurred in the square outside the Church of San Lio, another on St Mark’s Square (which does not need an arrow), another in the Rio di San Lorenzo, and another next to the Rialto. It is this ‘local-ness’ that makes even the lesser paintings in the cycle so fascinating.

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The canvas by Bastiani does not represent a miracle, but the condition sine qua non, that is, the ceremony, back in the year 1369, when the precious relic was entrusted to the Church of St John. I will say no more than that the picuture is about twelve feet high by nearly sixteen feet wide, and that it lies to the centre-right of one of the longer walls, the one which would originally have been on your right as you faced the altar, but now stands on your left as you go into the room in Accademia.

The miracle which is recorded in the first picture in the cycle as you now see it in the Accademia (it lies to the left of the Bastiani) took place in the Campo di San Lio. It was entrusted to another minor artist, called Giovanni Mansueti, in the following canvas (Figure 00 FIXME), measuring about ten feet by fourteen feet:

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The main building is the Church of San Lio, with the square or ‘Campo’ compressed between it and the canal. The year is 1474—that is, only about 25 years before the canvas was painted; and I stress the date because the miracle may strike you as decidedly odd. The relic, inside the cross-shaped reliquary, was to have been carried to the Campo San Lio, to the funeral to one of the brethren. But this brother had been guilty of some irreverent remarks about the relic; and so, when the brethren tried to pick up the reliquary, it became too heavy for them to carry, and they had to find another cross in its place.

Alas, or thank goodness, Mansueti does not show the miracle—the breaking of the normal rule—but the norm itself. A procession of the ‘Confratelli’, wearing the robes of their School, carry the substitute cross over the bridge to the Campo, where the family kneel beside the coffin, below us, while other mourners are arriving either on foot, or by one of the two gondolas.

The perspective of this scene is rather primitive for a painting done in about 1500, because Mansueti has ignored the two most simple of all Alberti’s rules: namely, that there should be a common scale for buildings and for human figures, and that figures diminish in proportion to their distance. As a result, there is simply not enough space in the picture. But even in this ancient black and white photo, you can see that Mansueti must have rendered the brickwork of the Palazzo very carefully; and his representation of the windows, the hangings, and the costumes is so careful that the painting is well worth close attention when you are actually in the room in the Accademia.

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The only trouble with this advice is, that, once in the room, your eye goes straight to the painting in Figure 00 FIXME—a single, huge canvas, measuring eleven feet by twenty-four, that occupies the whole of the shorter wall facing you. This is by Gentile Bellini himself, who succeeds in suggesting the vast expanse of the Square of St Mark’s just as effectively as a modern photograph does, while also giving us a superbly detailed, highly accurate account of the elaborate façade of the main civic church, with its cupolas, the four horses, the original mosaics, and the five arches.

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He also shows the two flanking buildings that I have mentioned, the Procuratie and the corner of the Doge’s Palace, with its beautiful arches and ornamental brickwork.

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The bottom of the campanile or bell-tower is also shown; and if you know Venice well, you might ask, ‘Where is the clock-tower?’. To this, there is a simple answer: it had fallen down, and was not rebuilt until after this picture was painted.

What we see in this scene is a procession on a far greater scale than that of a mere funeral like that in the Mansueti. We are looking at the real relic and reliquary, carried under a superb baldacchino. All the members of the School are there on parade, since the leaders have already gone across the Square.

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The day is the Feast of St Mark on April 25th. The second procession, which is shown emerging from the Doge’s Palace, is headed by the Doge himself; and the School is here affirming its own central role in the civic and religious festivities of that day.

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It may therefore seem rather pedantic to record that this particular procession is supposed to have taken place in the year 1444, and that the kneeling figure is a merchant from Brescia, a certain Jacopo De’ Salis, who made a vow to the relic on that day—a vow which resulted in his son’s recovery from a serious wounding.

The picture is inscribed with a significant phrase: ‘The work of Gentile Bellini, Knight of Venice, inflamed by love of the Cross’, ‘amore incensus’.We cannot understand the phenomenon of the Schools, unless we understand this mixture of social display, popular religious feeling and personal belief; just as we cannot enjoy this picture, if we do not appreciate the mixture of stiffness and naivety in the figures, and the quite extraordinary sophistication of the perspective and the rendering of the play of light, which are already pointing the way forward to Canaletto 200 years later.

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Notice the candles close to the reliquary in particular, because they are to become the ‘carriers’ of the healing power of the cross in two of the miracles on the third wall, that is, the other longer wall, which you see below (Figure 00 FIXME):

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The first canvas is about six feet wide and it is by Gentile Bellini again, while the other, placed at the other end of the wall, is about seven feet wide, and is by Giovanni Mansueti. Both illustrate very strikingly the point made earlier about the high point of view which is common to all the paintings. I will not spend long on these two ‘indoor’ scenes; but in the first we should note, at least, the eagle of St John on the superb ciborium above the altar (splendidly lit from the high source of light in the windows, out of sight to the left, which suggests that this is intended to be the interior of the Church of Saint John). Notice too that the so-called ‘miracle’ is once again a relatively minor one: Pietro de’ Ludovici was cured of the quartan agüe when he was touched by a candle that had been near the cross.

The same sort of comment is required for the canvas by Mansueti (Figure 00 FIXME). Even if we ignore the gondolas and the cramped space in the lower half, and concentrate on the splendid hall—the hall of the house of Ser Nicolò Benvegnudo, with the light streaming through the marble columns—and even if we go into colour (Figure 00 FIXME), and look hard at the principal figures, I would defy you to work out for yourselves that Benvegnudo’s daughter, an invalid from birth, was cured of her ailments in the year 1414, when she touched three candles which had been in contact with the reliquary.

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Let us go back outdoors again, and back to Gentile Bellini, for the central picture on this wall, which measures eleven feet by fourteen:

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This is the only picture to make the miracle the central event. We are in front of the Ponte San Lorenzo, crossing the Rio San Lorenzo, near the church of that name, north of the Riva degli Schiavoni.

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We are supposed to be back in the period between 1370 and 1382, just a few years after the School received its precious relic, and we are witnessing the first, and the most bizarre, of the recorded miracles. The relic was being carried in procession by the brethren (as we have seen twice before), but, as they were crossing the bridge, the relic fell into the water. Various people stripped off and plunged in to rescue it, or, at least, were preparing to take the plunge:

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The cross, however, ‘dodged’ them all, and would allow itself to be saved only by the Guardian General of the School, who in those years was a certain Andrea Vendramin, obviously the man pictured fully dressed, but not weighed down: