Restored in 1989 with Save Venice general funds.

Carlo Loth’s Martyrdom of Saint Peter Martyr is a faithful replica of Titian’s most frequently copied altarpiece, which was destroyed by a fire in Santi Giovanni e Paolo in 1867. This excellent copy may well be the painting that Ferdinando de’ Medici, Grand Prince of Tuscany, asked Loth to paint for his collection in 1691. After the fire that destroyed Titian’s original work, Vittorio Emanuele II sent a replacement from Florence to Venice as a gift, and this copy by Loth now fills the original work’s great marble frame over an altar on the left side aisle of the church. In 1526 the Scuola di San Pietro Martire, a small confraternity (scuola piccola) attached to Santi Giovanni e Paolo, commissioned the original painting from Titian.

Born in Verona, Peter Martyr (c. 1203–1252) was a Dominican friar and the first member of the order to be canonized in 1253, only nineteen years after Saint Dominic himself.  He was appointed grand inquisitor and spent his life preaching against heresy across Italy. In 1252 a group of Cathars from Milan plotted Peter’s assassination; it was carried out by a hired assassin named Carino, who eventually repented and joined the Dominican Order himself. According to a witness of the crime, Peter raised his arms to heaven and, repeating the words of Christ on the Cross, recommended his spirit to the Lord. The articles of Peter’s canonization report that he died declaring the first words of the Credo.

Peter was celebrated in Venice for the miracles he performed there, and that devotion led to the foundation of the Scuola di San Pietro Martire in 1433, and the establishment of an altar for their devotional needs in Santi Giovanni e Paolo. The Scuola decided in 1525 to replace their older altarpiece by Jacobello del Fiore with a more modern one and commissioned the new altarpiece from the leading painter in Venice. Titian’s painting was on the altar by the celebration of the feast day of Peter Martyr on April 29, 1530 — although ten years later he was still suing for payment of one hundred ducats.

In this painting Titian took another step forward in revolutionizing the traditional altarpiece, moving beyond the innovations of the Assunta and the Pesaro Madonna at the Frari. Here he added a dramatic narrative dimension to the genre, setting the action in a monumental landscape; the great trees, echoing the gestures of the heroically scaled figures, open to make way for a heavenly glory of angels bearing the palm of martyrdom to the dying saint, who begins to write his final words on the ground with his own blood. Loth’s copy, produced toward the end of the seventeenth century, is a precious record of Titian’s lost masterpiece.

The work was restored by conservator Ferruccio Volpin, with the guidance of project director Sandro Sponza of the Superintendency of Fine Arts of Venice.

For select projects, conservation dossiers in Italian containing limited textual and photographic documentation may be available for consultation by appointment at the Venice office of Save Venice and the Rosand Library & Study Center. For inquiries, please contact us at venice@savevenice.org.

Carlo Loth (1632–1698), after Titian
Martyrdom of Saint Peter Martyr
1691, oil on canvas
570 x 330 cm

Humfrey, Peter. “Competitive Devotions: The Venetian Scuole Piccole as Donors of Altarpieces in the Years around 1500.” The Art Bulletin 70, no. 3 (1988): 401-23.

Nichols, Tom. Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance. London: Reaktion Books, 2013.

Rosand, David. Titian. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1978.