Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller
of Renaissance Venice,
an exhibit at the National Gallery,
Washington, D.C.,
November 2022–February 2023.
It’s a killing ground and has its greeter, the emaciated torso of an ashen corpse that seems propped up on the earth like a ventriloquist’s dummy, mouth agape as if astonished to find itself there. And it’s not alone. Nearby lie human and animal skulls and jawbones, a horror-show memento mori to remind us, if we need reminding, that all things come to this, and that it’s better to be quick, like the snakes and lizards squirming on the ground, than dead. There’s semi-fresh meat, too: a dead maiden’s ripped bodice reveals her breasts, while her lower body dissolves to shredded blackened flesh. The bodily debris offers unvoiced testimony to what’s happened.
What’s happened in this spectacular glittering painting, by the sixteenth-century Venetian Vittore Carpaccio, is that the pagan Libyan city of Silene has been besieged by a dragon that demands the sacrificial tribute of youths, one of whom, the king’s daughter, stands alive and anxious behind the hero. The St. George legend is a powerful subject for painters. In Vitale da Bologna’s brilliant, brutal version, dragon and hero muscle around each other in a knotted convulsive violence; in Paolo Uccello’s tapestry version, a slinky monster rises and approaches George like a begging dog. The legend tells us the dragon is a murderous disorder come to imperil a civilization: if human culture is to preserve itself, insanity must be slain. In Carpaccio’s version, George is a fair-haired minister of deliverance. His steed’s hooves and the dragon’s talons rise in assaultive confrontation. The ramping antagonists pitch into each other with such force that George’s lance fractures in the dragon’s mouth. It’s not a pretty picture, but it is a gorgeous one. The display of human remains reminds us that those predations, of the monstrous holding hostage an established human moral order, happened yesterday somewhere, tomorrow maybe here.
The picture hangs in Venice’s Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, the city’s most electric picture gallery, though it wasn’t created to be that. The Scuole were devotional lay confraternities, bound by shared interests and nationalities, devoted to charity and good works. Members of the Schiavoni came mostly from Dalmatia. The interior enchants and induces meditative wonder. Another Carpaccio in the Schiavoni is about meditative wonder. Across from St. George’s triumphant scene, offering a contrary mood to that gusto of violence, hangs one of the great images of intellectual ardor: St. Augustine, seated at his desk, is writing a letter to St. Jerome the moment Jerome dies. He’s looking out his studiolo window toward the light announcing Jerome’s death, which washes the interior and planks long shadows across the floor. A curly-haired dog looks on, as alert and attentive as Augustine to the revelatory light, as if all sentient creatures were somehow touched by Jerome’s death. Augustine looks stunned and eager. Like most writers’ workplaces, his quarters have a casual disarray. A sense of the sacred saturates the workplace and its tools of inquiry: books, pens, armillary, maps, sheet music, statuary, candlesticks. All seems blessing or revelation. Augustine’s pen hovers above the paper, his body tilting toward the light as if imploring its power to stream through his pen from its source in the yonder. It’s a pose of intellectual aspiration inseparable from spiritual desire. Is he awaiting dictation? Looking elsewhere? Elsewhere is here!
The two images were part of last winter’s Carpaccio show at the National Gallery, the first time they’ve been shown outside Italy. Grand as they were, it wasn’t like seeing them at home, where the Schiavoni’s smallish space and non-museum lighting somehow compress the pictorial energies. I’ve been visiting them for thirty years and those pictures still have a mysterious hold on my inner life, partly because of their conflicting events and moods, but also because the execution is so rich and exact. Because the Scuola is out of the way, it isn’t overwhelmed by visitors, and Henry James’s impression still applies: “[It] is small and incommodious, the custodian is rapacious, but the shabby little chapel is a palace of art.” Carpaccio’s sharp delicate clarity of line tightens the force, martial and moral, in both pictures, and infuses every detail with visionary desire. St. George’s expression is as devotionally concentrated on killing as Augustine’s is transportive, blissful, receptive. George is fighting over who or what controls the social order, and the picture has its code. The dragon lair is a wasteland, parched and veiny. A background tree marks the division between the dragon’s chaos and the restoration of civil order. Its left half is withered and desiccated, its right vital and in leaf, and behind St. George stands the anxious, not-yet-sacrificed princess, futurity’s freshness.
A native son of Venice, Carpaccio was a poet of Renaissance urban life and a kind of archivist of the commercial and streetside realities of a powerful maritime empire, the greatest of its time. Born sometime around 1565, and older than the stormy masters to come—Tintoretto, Titian, Veronese—he studied with Giovanni Bellini. But none of these other painters incorporated, as Carpaccio did, so many amassed spectators of Venetian life, as it was lived on the Bacino and quays, in official chambers and bedrooms. He was a city enthusiast who theatricalized his city’s buildings, ceremonies, and crowds. In the deep distance of the St. George picture we see dozens of minuscule turbaned citizens of Silene watching the fight from the ramparts of a minaret. Carpaccio’s altars and belvederes and streets teem with expressions of the prosperity of the grandest trading power of its time. He painted that wealth as conglomerate: his masses are an index of Venetian diversity, including native Italians, Muslims, northern Europeans, Blacks. Some people in Miracle of the Possessed Boy at Rialto, in which a child is cured by the touch of a piece of the True Cross, are so richly outfitted as to push the limits of Venice’s sumptuary laws. In this huge canvas (which stayed behind in the Accademia during the show), nearly a dozen gondolas oar along the canal where it passes beneath the Rialto Bridge, and the scene is thick with individuated townspeople. Each face discloses a character, a destiny, some of them curious about the miraculous event, others distracted or parlaying. I’ve stood before the crowded panels of Carpaccio’s public narratives and puzzled over the human variety he honors: everyone is a type, everyone singular. The coarse and the fine, the contrite, the haughty, the shy and the contemptuous, the aggrieved, the indifferent, the amused and the conniving and the bored. We read their faces as they read their world. The momentous exorcism of the possessed boy, however, is tucked into the high left corner of the frame, as if shelved in a designated space in consciousness. The entire picture is a visual gossip-field of urban facts—clothes hung out to dry, bucket-shaped chimney pots, and a small flotilla of gondolas, roughly ten thousand of which then crowded the canals. The faces are delicately articulated, each a moment and mood and history pleated into the daily ongoings of the great maritime city.
Carpaccio tells stories of people telling stories. His busiest storytelling is in the Accademia’s Legend of St. Ursula series (none of which made it to the Washington exhibit). Nearly all of its panels involve communications of various kinds—consultations, emissaries’ reports, entreaties, and one angelic messenger. Things are both announced and overheard. Ursula, daughter of the Christian king of Brittany, is betrothed to the pagan prince of England, who will convert to Christianity to win her hand, the deal negotiated by ambassadors shuttling back and forth between the two countries. After a pilgrimage to Rome, on a return stopover in Cologne, she and her entourage of ten thousand virgins are massacred by Huns. Carpaccio deploys crowds like a movie director but still manages to give individual figures a knifing singularity. Among a throng of pilgrims are a cluster of prelates whose white miters tilt in unison like a battery of ground-to-air missiles. The massacre is staged as a horrific rout, except for Ursula’s tense final moment on her knees, when she is about to be shot through with an arrow by a Hun.
George’s fight with the dragon has had endless variations because it’s an unending story in our world, but Carpaccio also dramatized solitude and hermeticism, as in his picture of Ursula asleep, dreaming the arrival of an angel who stands at her bedchamber door holding a palm that announces Ursula’s soon-to-be martyrdom. In the solemn spaciousness of her bedroom we see the angel she sees only in her dream, and her four-poster canopy bed expands the intimacy of her dream. An even deeper and more resonant internal narrative is worked out in Carpaccio’s Annunciation. Consider how other painters treated the subject. In Tintoretto’s version, a sinewy Gabriel’s swooping energy feels like an expression of historical violence. In Veronese’s, a huffy insistent angel appears to a Mary who is just waiting to be called. Carpaccio had already treated the subject of news-bringing in the Augustine and Ursula pictures, but his Annunciation, part of a series commissioned around 1502 by the Scuola degli Albanesi, is the serenest and loveliest of his tellings. As in his invocation of the yonder in the Augustine picture, he dramatizes a transcendent order penetrating ours. The Virgin at her prie-dieu is momentarily distracted by the appearance of the angel. Her sweetness leans shyly and a little nervously toward Gabriel’s demure severity, while the Holy Spirit slides down a laser beam from God to human. Gabriel, in his cobalt blue and glistening ashy-red wings, seems to be saying, “Listen to me, I have something to say.” He’s not announcing, he’s confiding.
Carpaccio has had a special hold on writers. Though Henry James revered Tintoretto as the epic genius of Vene-tian painting, he was deeply moved by (and, I think, sought to imitate in his fiction) Carpaccio’s “sweetness of ima-gination.” Sweetness is just right. As in sweet grace. As in the balancing act on gondolas performed by young men who, as they hunt fish with the use of trained cormorants, strike the same hipshot stance as the Hun murdering Ursula. The figures look set on pins, even the birds. But then, in his greatest work, Carpaccio sets all of creation on pins for our wonder and delight. The cormorants catch the fish and come up for air, while the bravos continue to shoot, not arrows, but small clay balls that make the birds release the fish.
Ruskin declared Carpaccio’s Two Women on a Balcony “the best picture in the world.” The women are finely attired in high-waisted, gold-threaded dresses, pearls, and silver adornments. Their bodies possess a sullen, wearied boredom: they may be courtesans, but they are somehow related to those cormorant hunters, since scholars now know that the lagoon image was originally hinged to the women picture. (The two are presented thus—maybe for the first time—in the Washington exhibition.)
I’m overcome by these images of George and Jerome and Augustine, a dreaming Ursula and a surprised Mary, because they are about elementals, the things that suffice in making a completed life, one that must include boneyards and heavens. One summative picture is Meditation on the Passion of Christ, which, like so much of Carpaccio, depicts existence as a world of excited, mortal particulars. Three figures sit among ruins. Christ sags on a broken throne. Job seems to be disputing yet another grievance with Yahweh. Jerome, strung out by distress and grief, looks directly at us. What Carpaccio relishes, though, and takes pains to delineate, are details that ground us in the world. Two rabbits, a leopard, a stoat, a redbird. The spikes in the soles of Jerome’s sandals; his walking stick handle carved in form of a hand clutching a bone; rosary beads made of human vertebrae.
Simone Di Piero’s latest book of poems is The Complaints. He lives in San Francisco.
