Restoration funded by Save Venice in honor of Lauren Santo Domingo and her dedication to preserve the artistic heritage of Venice, April, 2022

Between 1494 and 1505/10, the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, a confraternity dedicated to Saint John the Evangelist, commissioned a series of large narrative paintings known as the Cycle of the True Cross. The paintings illustrate the miracles associated with the confraternity’s most precious relic, a fragment of the True Cross donated to the Scuola in 1369 by Philippe de Mézières, former Chancellor of the Kingdom of Cyprus. The canvases, painted by Gentile Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio, Lazzaro Bastiani, Giovanni Manseuti, Benedetto Diana, and Pietro Perugino (lost) remained in the Scuola’s Oratory of the Cross until 1806, when they were removed during the Napoleonic suppressions.  The paintings were transferred to Venice’s Accademia Galleries on 4 July 1820, and are currently housed in a room adjacent to Carpaccio’s Saint Ursula Cycle, whose conservation Save Venice completed in 2019. In the same year, Save Venice also funded the creation of the Virtual Reconstruction of the Oratory, which offers visitors an immersive tour of the room as it looked in the 16th century.

Signed and dated in 1500, Gentile Bellini’s Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo depicts a miraculous event that took place during the procession of the first Sunday of Lent on 3 March 1370. The miracle is described in a twelve-page incunabulum, an early printed book produced by the Scuola around 1490 and discovered by Prof. Patricia Fortini Brown in 1982 at the Biblioteca del Museo Correr.

The procession started early in the morning and had as its ultimate destination the cathedral of San Pietro di Castello, where a Mass was celebrated at dawn. On its way back, the Scuola would visit many churches, including San Lorenzo where a lauda was sung; then the brothers would proceed to the next stop, the church of San Zaccaria. According to the incunabulum, when the procession was crossing the bridge of San Lorenzo, the relic was accidentally pushed into the canal due to the force of the crowds. The relic miraculously remained afloat and continued to elude the grasp of the faithful onlookers who jumped into the canal to retrieve it. Eventually, Andrea Vendramin, the Guardian Grande of the Scuola and one of the most prominent Venetians of the time, threw himself into the water and the Cross immediately moved toward him and allowed itself to be rescued.

In Gentile’s painting, the event takes place in late 15th-century Venice, thus setting the miracle in a historical narrative. Vendramin, whose face portrays his grandson, the later doge Andrea Vendramin, is depicted while floating in the middle of the canal, regally carrying the relic toward the embankment. The miracle is witnessed by the brethren—all wearing the white hooded robe bearing the insignia of the Scuola (cappa)—and countless Venetians. Among them stands Caterina Cornaro, the recently deposed Queen of Cyprus, who together with her maids of honor is kneeling in profile along the embankment to the left. While it is still a matter of debate whether the Cornaro family was an important donor to the Scuola, it is certain that Caterina’s ancestors had deep connections with King Peter I of Cyprus and his Chancellor de Mézières.

In the foreground, above a temporary plank platform that crosses the canal, there are more portraits: an old woman and a girl on the left, and opposite them, a group of five kneeling men in togas. There have been many attempts to interpret these men as portraits of the Bellini family, or as of the Cornaro or the Vendramin families, however, none seems convincing. A further hypothesis is that they portray Gentile Bellini and the four officers who commissioned the canvas in 1500, including the Guardian Grande, Pietro Amadi, and his Vicario, Nicolò de Bernardo. Be that as it may, this group portrait shows how the painting not only served as a celebration of the Scuola’s miracle-working relic but also as a means of self-promotion for its patrons.

This prodigious event was followed by no less than nine additional miracles. By the time the Scuola commissioned the narrative cycle, Marin Sanudo had published his Cronachetta (1493), a guide for visitors to Venice, in which the Scuola’s relic of the True Cross was praised as the only one able to work miracles in the whole city.

Conservation of Gentile Bellini’s Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo will take place at the Misericordia conservation lab in Venice, where the painting was transported in February 2022. Treatment will address the dirt and grime, oxidized old varnishes, and discolored inpainting and residues left from 19th-century conservation treatments by meticulously thinning and removing these non-original surface layers. Losses will be filled using removable conservation paint and a final coat of protective varnish will be applied.

Gentile Bellini (c. 1429 – 1507)
Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo
1500, tempera and oil on canvas
326 x 435 cm
Gallerie dell’Accademia, Room XX

Gallerie dell’Accademia: Homepage

Gallerie dell’Accademia: Link to the Work

Fortini Brown, Patricia. “An Incunabulum of the Miracles of the True Cross of the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista.” Bollettino dei Musei Civici Veneziani, 27 (1982): 5-8. Link to the article

Fortini Brown, Patricia. Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988

Glixon, Jonathan. Honoring God and the City. Music at the Venetian Confraternities 1260-1807. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003

Matino, Gabriele and Patricia Fortini Brown, eds. Carpaccio in Venice: A Guide. Venice: Marsilio, 2020

Petkov, Kiril. The Anxieties of a Citizen Class. The Miracles of the True Cross of San Giovanni Evangelista, Venice 1370-1480. Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2004

Tolstoy, Irina. Object and Image: The Role of Perspective in Bellini’s Cycle of the True Cross at the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista. In de Maria, Blake and Mary E. Frank, eds. Reflections on Renaissance Venice: A Celebration of Patricia Fortini Brown. Milan: Continents Editions, 2013, pp. 41-53