Vittore Carpaccio

Among the earliest works by Carpaccio are small-scale devotional paintings representing the Madonna and Child (for example, Virgin and Child in the Museo Correr. ca. 1488/89). Predating his Ursula Cycle, these are closer to the type of paintings which Giovanni Bellini and his studio produced for Venetians in large numbers, and similarly Carpaccio’s devotional paintings were in demand for multiples. It is likely that Carpaccio learned his trade in this milieu, in addition to the mastery of oil, the new medium Giovanni Bellini had taken up by the 1480s. Meanwhile, at this early point in his career, Carpaccio took on secular subjects. By far his most admired work is the mysterious portrait of Two Women on a Balcony (Museo Correr, Venice; ca. 1492/94), which depicts them waiting, bored in all their finery, for the return of their husbands from a hunt on the lagoon — a scene captured on the upper part of the panel, which had been sawn in half a long time ago (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles). It exemplifies the artist’s essentially secular spirit and his unique capacity to capture the attitudes of upper-class Venetian life.

Between 1502–1507/08, Carpaccio worked on two more important commissions for narrative cycles: one for the Scuola degli Schiavoni, the other for the Scuola degli Albanesi – simultaneously for the Dalmatian and Albanian communities in Venice. This comes just a few years after he painted the six-panel polyptych for his first Dalmatian patron, Martin Mladošić, notary and canon of the cathedral of Saint Anastasia in Zara (present-day Zadar in Croatia) intended for the altar he endowed there. The Schiavoni cycle, celebrating the lives of Saints George, Jerome, and Tryphon, are some of the most cherished works by the artist (a copy of the St George and the Dragon by Gustave Moreau hangs centrally in the French artist’s studio in Paris). These projects were followed in December 1508 by his contribution to the ongoing history cycle in the Hall of the Greater Council in the Doge’s Palace, which had been started by Gentile Bellini, alongside others, in 1474. Although Carpaccio’s canvas was destroyed in 1577, along with the rest of the cycle, his is the best documented of all scenes and is considered the apex of his career as a painter of narrative cycles. Unlike other leading Venetian artists in his lifetime, Carpaccio’s working methods are better understood due to the large number of surviving drawings. His close contact with Venice’s governing class on this project likely opened up opportunities for his public and noble commissions, such as the Virgin Adoring the Child with Two Donors (Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon) of 1505, a beautiful painting with extraordinary efforts made to depict the rich costumes of the noble couple, depicted as equals.

Carpaccio’s work for the foreign merchant citizens also meant access to more private commissions. In the first decade of the 1500s, he painted the Thomas Aquinas altarpiece (1507, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart) for the glassmaker Tommaso Dragan, whose family originates from Dalmatia. His masterpiece is the Presentation of Christ in the Temple (1510), painted for the church of San Giobbe in the Cannaregio district of Venice, to be displayed next to Bellini’s great Sacra Conversazione(Accademia, Venice) painted three decades earlier.

By 1513, Carpaccio is recorded to have rented a substantial house on the Grand Canal, next to the prestigious Palazzo Corner — a strategic location for shipping his works to far-off destinations. Around this time, he was commissioned by the Scuola di Santo Stefano to paint his 4^th great narrative cycle, the Life of Saint Stephen. Set in Palestine, it allowed Carpaccio to depict the confluence of cultures, the Christian, Jewish, Muslim and ancient Roman elements that he excelled at. He secured commissions for an increasing number of altarpieces later in his career, first in Venice between 1513–15, such as the Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand Christians on Mount Ararat (1515) for the Ottobon Altar in Saint’Antonio di Castello, then in other parts of the Venetian Lombardy: Treviso, Brescia, Bergamo.

Late in his career, Carpaccio’s most important patrons were from Istria, on the other side of the Adriatic: in Capodistria (present-day Koper in Slovenia) and Pirano (present-day Piran in Slovenia). Despite its monumentality, his Madonna and Child Enthroned with Six Saints altarpiece (1516) painted for the local cathedral reprises earlier ideas and in fact reverts to the static, symmetrical formulas from decades ago. Carpaccio died in 1525, just as a new generation of Venetian painters, led by Giorgione and Titian, sprang into action with their classicizing and heroic canvases.