Conservation made possible through a major gift from Arnold M. Bernstein and support from Professor Patricia Fortini Brown.

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.

Gentile Bellini signed and dated the Procession in the Piazza San Marco in 1496. The canvas is the largest and the most impressive of the cycle, and it originally hung above the seats of the governing body of the Scuola (banca). The painting illustrates a miracle that occurred on 25 April 1443, feast-day of Saint Mark, during the doge’s procession in Piazza San Marco. The event 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.

According to the incunabulum, on the vigil of Saint Mark, Jacopo de’ Salis, a merchant from Brescia who was visiting Venice, received distressing news from home. A few days earlier, we are told, his younger son had broken his skull and was not expected to live. The following day, Jacopo was wandering in Piazza San Marco, his mind cluttered with thoughts when he saw the relic of the True Cross being paraded by the Scuola. Recalling its miraculous healing powers, Jacopo knelt in front of the relic and begged for his son to be cured—a wish that was immediately fulfilled.

In the painting, the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista occupies the front plane of the composition as it processes from right to left. The relic has attracted countless devotees, in fact even more than those who are attending the passage of the doge and his retinue as they emerge from the Porta della Carta, the ceremonial entranceway into the Ducal Palace. Encased in an elaborate reliquary, the Cross is being carried under a portable canopy (baldachino) and escorted by thirteen brothers holding heavy processional candles (doppieri). On the left, five vocalists and an ensemble of three instrumentalists—playing a lute, a harp, and a rebec—lead the Scuola, whereas on the right, the rest of the brothers follow from the back, each one clothed with the uniform of the Scuola (cappa), a lighted votive candle in hand and the scourge hung at the belt. Almost lost in the crowd, is Jacopo de’ Salis, the only one kneeling bareheaded as the Scuola processes, his gaze confidently cast on the relic as his prayers are being heeded.

Modern viewers may overlook the votive moment as their eyes wander across and delve into Piazza San Marco, literally overwhelmed by Gentile’s microscopic attention to detail. The whole city, in all its social facets and cosmopolitan complexity, seems to have gathered on the Piazza: patricians, citizens, ladies, young Companions of the Hose, children, commoners, beggars, friars, monks, Germans, Turks, Greeks, and many others. Taken as a whole, this huge cast of portraits acts as the witness of the event, authenticating that the miracle really occurred.

Gentile’s painting also offers a glimpse of what the Piazza looked like in 1496, before Mauro Codussi’s Torre dell’Orologio was erected, the Procuratie Vecchie was replaced and, on the opposite side, the Procuratie Nuove was built. Remarkable is also the depiction of the basilica di San Marco, which Gentile rendered with astonishing accuracy. This canvas is the sole visual record of the lost Byzantine mosaics on the basilica’s façade, including three of the four portal lunettes depicting the legendary translation of Saint Mark from Alexandria to Venice.

Conservation of Gentile Bellini’s Procession in Piazza San Marco will begin in early 2022 and will take place at the Misericordia conservation lab in Venice.  Treatment will address the dirt and grime, oxidized old varnishes, and discolored inpainting and residues left from 19^th-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. 

*Published sponsorship costs are subject to change due to conservation plan modifications and fluctuations in exchange rates. Please contact kim@savevenice.org for the latest cost estimates.

Gentile Bellini (c. 1429 – 1507)
Procession in the Piazza San Marco
1496, tempera and oil on canvas
373 x 745 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

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