Vittore Carpaccio. Paintings and drawings

The paintings of Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1460/66 – c. 1525/26) splendidly celebrate Venice at the turn of the 15th century, when the Serenissima ruled a vast maritime and commercial empire and flourished as a major centre of culture. In fact, Carpaccio, a stage director and set designer with a particular flair for the poetic and fantastic, transported into real life the narrative cycles of the biblical and religious stories he created for various confraternities, designing fantastic scenarios enriched with endless details, together with contemporary references to the society and surroundings of his extraordinary city. Perhaps even more than the work of other Venetian Renaissance artists, Carpaccio’s art replenishes us with the very essence of ‘Venetian-ness’, namely the pageantry and mythology of the Serenissima Republic at its economic and cultural peak. Carpaccio was an inventive painter of religious subjects for public and private use (altar paintings, organ doors, Madonna and Child images, profound meditations on the Passion of Christ, etc.) but he also created works for institutional and domestic civic life (portraits, painted furniture and unusual furnishings, such as the folding door with the famous panel of the Due dame in the Correr Museum, which is on show, temporarily reunited with the Caccia in valle scene placed above, which completed it. Although Carpaccio’s work was rediscovered and appreciated by art historians between the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, during the last half-century it has been somewhat neglected by historiography, especially its place in the critical reconstruction of stylistic developments from Giovanni Bellini to Giorgione and Titian. This is confirmed by the fact that no solo exhibition of Carpaccio’s work has been held since 1963, the year of his historic exhibition at the Doge’s Palace.