Jon and Barbara Landau with support from Randa and K.C. Weiner

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.

Vittore Carpaccio painted his iconic Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross at the Rialto Bridge between 1494 and 1496. The canvas is one of the most celebrated of the cycle, in fact, one of the most famous paintings of the Renaissance. It originally hung next to the altar on which the relic was kept and illustrates a miraculous exorcism that occurred circa 1367-1372 at Ca’ del Papa, the palace of the Patriarchs of Grado near Rialto. The event is recounted 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.

In the days of Patriarch Francesco Querini, the incunabulum recounts, there was a possessed boy in Venice. His relatives had tried everything to deliver the boy from his diabolic tormentor but in vain. One day the family beseeched Querini to perform an exorcism. The Patriarch said he did not have such powers, and suggested to bring to him the miraculous relic of the True Cross, which he venerated greatly. As the relict was brought to Ca’ del Papa, Querini showed it to the child who was instantly healed.

Although the miracle took place in the 14th century, Carpaccio depicts it at the Rialto of his own day. Indeed, he embeds the miracle within the hustle and bustle of everyday life, rendering it as concrete and tangible as the city in which it occurs. In designing the composition, the painter employed the technique of continuous narrative, a technique he had been using since at least the early 1490s to paint the Saint Ursula Cycle. The relic is shown twice. It is first seen far in the background, being carried by the Scuola across the old wooden Rialto Bridge, rebuilt in its present form in 1588-1591. The procession would have continued through the Rialto market, down the Ruga San Giovanni, to arrive at Ca’ del Papa on the edge of the Grand Canal. But Carpaccio leaves this sequence to the spectator’s imagination, instead depicting the relic for the second time in the Patriarch’s loggia on the left, where the miracle is taking place. Scuola members and other Venetians, as well as Greeks and Armenians, gather in front and beneath the arches of the loggia. Three members of the Company of the Hose appear among them, dressed similarly to their counterparts in the Saint Ursula Cycle. Turning their backs to the viewer, they focus their (and our) attention on the miracle.

Beyond the Rio di San Silvestro, the bold perspectival rendering of the buildings draws our attention down the Riva del Vin, accompanied by the now silent voices of shopkeepers, errand boys, noblemen, and turbaned merchants, to the sign of the most famous inn of the time, the Locanda dello Sturion. The inn once stood next door to the Ufficio del Dazio del Vino, for which Carpaccio painted his Lion of Saint Mark, whose conservation Save Venice completed in 2021. The movement of the crowds is mirrored by the stream of gondolas passing by on the Grand Canal. At the center of the foreground, Carpaccio has portrayed an African gondolier, one of the mori (moors) who were employed during this time to row ferries such as the traghetto of the Camerlenghi, just beyond the Rialto bridge.

Carpaccio has included this abundance of descriptive detail to impress the viewer, showing the city and its inhabitants dressed in their best finery. There is no indication of the precarious state of the Rialto bridge, which was rotting beyond repair during these very years. As for the patriarch’s loggia, the palace had already fallen into a state of neglect by 1451, when it was transformed into an inn, then later into barracks, and finally rented out to artisans. Carpaccio’s view of Venice offers an idealized—but highly credible—image of the blessed city, chosen by God to house the miraculous fragment of the True Cross.

This iconic painting suffers from discolored varnish and chromatic alteration of the paint used for retouching in past conservation campaigns. The canvas is now undergoing conservation by the CBC firm at the Misericordia conservation lab in Venice. Surface dirt, old varnishes, and discolored inpainting and residues left from 19^th-century conservation treatments are being thinned and removed. Losses will be filled using removable conservation paint and a final coat of protective varnish will be applied. 

Vittore Carpaccio (ca. 1465 – 1526)
Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross at the Rialto Bridge
ca. 1494-1496, tempera and oil on canvas
371 cm x 392 cm
Gallerie dell’Accademia, Room XX

Gallerie dell’Accademia: Homepage

Gallerie dell’Accademia: Link to the Work

Casini, Matteo. “The «Company of the Hose»: Youth and Courtly Culture in Europe, Italy and Venice.” Studi Veneziani, 63 (2011): 133-153

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

Lowe, Kate. “Visible Lives: Black Gondoliers and Other Black Africans in Renaissance Venice.” Renaissance Quarterly, 66, 2 (2013): 412-452

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

Nepi Scirè, Giovanna, ed. Carpaccio pittore di storie. Venice: Marsilio, 2004