Vittore Carpaccio

According to legend, the epic encounter took place in the 4th century AD near the city of Selene, in Libya. One notices at once how the knight’s armour, his weapons and the horse’s trappings take up the fashion in arms of the age of chivalry, mindful of Ariosto and also of the French romances in vogue in Venetian cultural circles. What matters most is the insertion of the action into the landscape, explored to infinity, with the far-off sailing ships on one side and the oriental-looking city on the other, in which a minaret decorated with incredible inlays, a medieval fortress and a turreted circuit of walls recalling certain towns of the Venetian hinterland all coexist.

The vastness of the landscape draws attention away from the foreground, strewn, among snakes, lizards and squalid weeds, with human remains and dismembered corpses, with absurd skulls and heads and busts unreasonably “standing up”; a tribute to the macabre the myth requires, but treated somewhat as a free exercise in anatomy and in arranging objects in space. It is more interesting to observe the crowd packed on the various levels of the minaret and scattered through the city: they are all spectators, intended by Carpaccio as witnesses of the scene he narrates.

The saint allows himself to hold the dragon on a leash (the princess’s girdle, as the legend has it) as if it were a little dog, and is about to execute it in front of a crowd in sumptuous oriental dress and the colourful procession led by the king and queen on horseback, with their daughter accompanying them on foot. A band of players with trumpets and drum provides the musical commentary to the scene. Compared with the previous painting, this work is dominated by a taste for decoration, a display of costumes perhaps in rivalry with the canvases of Gentile Bellini. Spatial unity is provided by the architecture depicted: the temple, placed almost centrally, recalls the Holy Sepulchre and the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, while on the left of the picture the bell tower of the Holy Sepulchre appears almost literally, next to a perspective of houses that brings Piero della Francesca to mind. Here too a large audience, on stands and terraces, watches the scene.

St. George baptises the king and the princess of Selene, devoutly kneeling on the steps of what might be a temple or perhaps the royal palace. Behind them stand the queen and a lady-in-waiting holding the princess’s headdress; further back, dignitaries with large turbans wait their turn, while one of them, kneeling, has left his turban on a step, almost stealing the scene. The band of musicians on a podium on the left is the same one already present in the episode of the slaying of the dragon, and some have considered this a “carry-over”, a sign of weariness. The animals at the foot of the steps are obviously symbolic: the parrot indicates redemption, the dog alludes to George’s chivalrous fidelity. The architecture no longer takes up Oriental elements but, apart from the soaring towers resembling minarets, precisely recalls the buildings of the Venetian mainland.

The young Tryphon, martyr and protector of the city of Cattaro in Dalmatia, had been summoned by the Emperor Gordian to exorcise his daughter. The painting shows him when the demon has already left the girl to take the form of the basilisk, a heraldic beast much used in coats of arms, though here not really very monstrous. This canvas, the worst preserved of the series, is also considered the one painted with the least care: its layout refers back to the cycle of St. Ursula (and indeed the Roman emperor is a “carry-over” of the King of Brittany in the Return of the English Ambassadors) and to the Presentation in the Temple of the cycle of the Albanians. The architecture here has become decidedly classicising, with profiles of emperors occupying the bases of the columns and the plinth of the building. Noteworthy are the loggia on the left and the many windows of the palace on the right, where a myriad of figures lean out to admire the event.

This painting forms part, together with the Calling of St. Matthew, of a tribute to a wealthy donor, whose coat of arms appears on both canvases. Deliberately archaic in its scheme, which recalls Mantegna and the early Giovanni Bellini, it contains absolute novelties in the use of colour, such as the red of Christ’s robe, and in the contrast between the foreground, lit by the torches of the approaching soldiers, and the twilit background that envelops the city in the distance. Peter’s realistically crossed legs, too, lying as he is on a slope, are a detail not yet seen in the painting of the time.

The future apostle, richly dressed as a Jewish tax collector, is invited by Christ (in a red mantle that prefigures the Passion) to leave his counter and follow him. Carpaccio seems to have depicted a corner of Venice where shops of this kind abounded, with the typical medieval openings and wooden awnings. In the background, but with considerable weight, the Capernaum of the Gospels appears with the gate of a town of the Veneto, Treviso or perhaps Castelfranco. Among the figures around Christ the prior Sebastiano Michiel, who directly commissioned the cycle for the Scuola of the Dalmatians, can be recognised.

This episode too draws on the Golden Legend, which tells of the lion tamed by the saint, who had pulled a thorn from its paw. The picture is one of Carpaccio’s boldest and most inventive; it plays on the shapes and colours of the habits of the friars fleeing in terror, on an exuberant wealth of detail and on a boundless array of animals, domestic and exotic, all symbolic. Fallow deer, beavers, hares, peacocks, guinea fowl, parrots and others besides can be seen. The agitation of the scene, in which the least agitated of the “characters” is the lion, since even St. Jerome is astonished by the flight of his brethren, is tempered by the tranquillity of the setting, with an architecture that conveys all the peace of a convent courtyard.

Rarely can one see such a serene funeral, and here Carpaccio’s famous “sentimental independence” is clearly demonstrated. The main scene occupies only the lower third of the picture: the rest is a typically Venetian setting, with, in addition, the crown of a palm tree that seems to want to burst out of the canvas and at the same time to hold it up. One can admire the rhythm of the white and blue of the friars’ habits, or lose oneself in the almost farmyard atmosphere of the background (barnyard animals, people busy with their daily tasks or chatter); the canvas nonetheless leaves one estranged, because it holds something of a mystery. And the scroll with the signature reads fingebat instead of pingebat or pinxit, and this is certainly not a slip of the pen, not least because it will be repeated.

Dated by the artist with the addition of the word fingebat, it is the most admired canvas in the whole Scuola. The protagonist is not Jerome but a humanist St. Augustine who combines faith and science, nonchalantly transported from the 5th to the 15th century, and caught (as related no longer by the Golden Legend but by the hagiography Hieronimus: Vita et Transitu) at the moment when a miraculous light informs him of the death of the holy monk to whom he is writing. Here, setting aside for the moment the countless details, the protagonist is the light, which takes the saint by surprise as it does the viewer. It enters through a window, stops Augustine’s arm, illuminates his whole study and sculpts every object. It would have been much easier, but naive, to show Jerome himself ascending to beatitude; but Augustine would not have been equally astonished, because such things happened in everyday paintings. Once the dazzlement has passed, the details remain to be searched out: open books left on the floor, a writing desk happily cluttered with scissors, bells, inkwells and shells (note: the shell was used to smooth parchment), musical scores so legible that they could be performed, containing both sacred and secular compositions, a shelf with vases and small bronzes probably of archaeological value, the armillary sphere, the revolving lectern in another small room at the back together with the astrolabes, and the sacred objects such as the mitre, the censer and the crosier resting on the altar of the study. Yet nothing is in disorder, not even the cabinet left open beneath the altar or the scattered books, because each object has a life of its own, the one conferred on it by the light at the exact moment of the miracle. The little white dog, the only living being apart from the saint, is on the other hand frozen; not so much by the light-message, which it probably, or canonically, cannot perceive, as by the sudden halt of St. Augustine’s hand in mid-air. One can try extending the line of its gaze, with the tip of its nose as an ideal gunsight, and see that it does not reach the saint’s face and that, although turned towards the window, it seems to end between the pen and the arm. Perhaps these are only suggestions, or games of interpretation; at any rate an amusement that Carpaccio would surely have sanctioned.

Numerous other works of art from various periods complete the rich holdings of the Scuola, even though they necessarily succumb before the overwhelming presence of Carpaccio’s canvases. Noteworthy, also for its central position above the altar of the lower hall, is the altarpiece of the Madonna and Child. It is the work of Benedetto Carpaccio, Vittore’s son, and can be dated to around 1540. It is a regal Madonna, with a richly arabesqued mantle, a cushion supporting the blessing Child, and two angels holding the crown over her head. The great throne on which she sits appears to be set in open countryside, against a background of hills; and the little clouds from which the angels emerge seem, at least in part, to spring from the landscape.