Inevitably, it too is shaped by practical limitations on what could be borrowed still, it is a bracing introduction to this exceptional painter’s career.īorn around 1460–1465, Carpaccio is best known for a series of narrative paintings he created for Venetian religious confraternities-called scuole-in the years around 1500. The show currently on view at the National Gallery of Art is the first ever outside Italy. Exhibitions of his art are comparatively rare, since so many of his most important works are too large or too fragile to leave Venice. Although overshadowed today by his contemporaries Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, and Titian, if we want to sense what La Serenissima looked like and felt like around 1500, it is to Carpaccio that we first turn. No artist captured better than Vittore Carpaccio the imaginative grandeur and the ceremonial refinement of Venice in that era. One visitor called it “the most triumphant city that I have ever seen.” Erasmus, who lived there for a year, said it was “the most splendid theater of all Italy.” The wealth of its citizens, the splendor of its buildings, the magnificence of the art and tapestries and jewelry on display everywhere, the vitality of its intellectual life, and the stability of its republican form of government made it unlike any other place on earth. That Venice is among the wonders of the world strikes everyone who sees it, but its glory was never greater than in the early sixteenth century, when it was possibly the richest and most cultivated city in Europe.
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