This article is taken from the May 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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The most visible Carpaccio in Venice today is the one no one mentioned. Crossing the Accademia bridge in the direction of San Marco, one passes the church of San Vidal on the left, at the southwestern corner of Campo Santo Stefano [1]. The church is used for daily Vivaldi concerts, but if one looks past the tourists queueing for tickets and the musicians preparing for another rictus-faced saw through the Primavera, there it is, lambent, patient, benignly aggressive. 

Whatever the season, the picture distils every colour from the outside world into the charged stillness of its space, the graceful saint holding his vicious axe in perpetual readiness. 

Within the Anglo-American tradition, John Ruskin is usually credited with the “rediscovery” of Carpaccio in the mid-nineteenth century. (In fact, various French art historians had been celebrating Carpaccio’s exquisite draughtsmanship and innovations as a colourist since the 1830s, while the now unfairly-forgotten Anna Jameson, whose popular series on sacred art was a bestseller in the 1850s, was observing Carpaccio’s “richness of fancy” and “lively dramatic feeling” long before Ruskin got to the party.) 

In the first volume of Modern Painters, Ruskin mentioned Carpaccio rather dismissively as the faithful recorder of the architecture of Old Venice, but writing to Edward Burne-Jones in 1869 he described the Sant Ursula cycle in the Accademia as having opened up a “new world”. 

The Index to American Art Exhibitions for 1776-1876 does not contain a single entry relating to Carpaccio, but Ruskin’s epiphany marked the beginning of a renewed late-nineteenth-century passion for the Venetian Primitives which the scholar Rosella Mamoli Zorzi has characterised as “rampant Carpacciomania”.

In contrast with Titian, his great rival and successor in the next generation of Venetian painters, neglect and misunderstanding have nonetheless clouded Carpaccio’s reputation. Maybe his work is simply too pretty. Edith Wharton’s 1924 story False Dawn has a young American buying up paintings by the artist his father dismisses as “Carpatcher”, enchanted by their depictions of “a fairy-tale land … full of lithe youths and round-faced pouting maids, rosy old men … pretty birds and cats and nibbling rabbits — and all involved and enclosed in golden balustrades, in colonnades of pink and blue, laurel gardens festooned from ivory balconies, and domes and minarets against summer seas!” 

One of the most significant changes in the fifteenth century’s perception of the purpose of art was that it could exist to please and delight, principalmente per dilettare, in the words of the sixteenth-century Venetian humanist Lodovico Dolce. 

Perhaps Carpaccio was just too good at conjuring charm, since the reactions of his nineteenth-century champions tend to celebrate what they saw as his naïve sincerity, innocence and “purity”. Vittore Carpaccio: Paintings and Drawings at the Palazzo Ducale, the first monographic show of the artist’s work in Venice since 1963 engages with him not only as an unsurpassed storyteller who perfected the eyewitness narrative style inaugurated by Bellini, but as an unrivalled technician. 

Biographical detail on Carpaccio is scarce, but it is known that in a flourishing city of whose population of 100,000 an estimated half were immigrants he was a true Venetian, classified as a cittadino originario, the son of a fur dealer in the working class parish of Sant’Angelo Raffaele. 

Whilst his date of birth is uncertain, consensus has it that he was working independently from around 1485, having been involved with the studios of both Bellini brothers, Gentile and Giovanni. His great Sant Ursula series [2] was completed between 1490 and 1498 and led to three further major cycle commissions after 1500, the Schiavoni, Albanesi and Santo Stefano. 

His social and financial success enabled him to move to what is still the fashionable end of the Grand Canal, where he was reported to be living with his wife and sons in San Maurizio until his death around 1526. 

Information on Carpaccio’s apprenticeship and influences is equally scant, but it is notable that he is known to have been tutored by the hydraulic engineer Giolamo Malatini, enabling him to represent three-dimensionality in a more sophisticated fashion than his predecessors. 

As the show’s curator Peter Humfrey emphasises, Carpaccio’s cycle series were commissioned by scuole (lay religious confraternities), that is by members of the prosperous merchant class who had established the Venetian Republic as a pre-eminent economic power. Carpaccio’s first viewers might therefore have felt an affinity with a painter who shared an enthusiasm for technological disruption: the same boldness of spirit which saw their ships rattling off the production line at the Arsenale was reflected in his representations of their bustling prosperity, whether in the teeming vivaciousness of works such as The Miracle of the True Cross or the airy, light-filled domestic interiors to which their wealth permitted them to retire. 

Considered thus, Carpaccio’s intense and lovely piety attains a depth which Ruskin appears to have missed. Carpaccio was not painting for the delight of a troubled and nostalgic post-industrial spectator, he was working for the patrons whose portraits appear in his paintings — busy, alert, modern people whose sincere spiritual devotion did not preclude an awareness of worldly pursuits and preoccupations. 

Ruskin claimed that religion and faith were necessary conditions for the making of good art: since we are largely dispossessed of both, it is perhaps this latter point which continues to make Carpaccio so very much worth looking at. 

The Palazzo Ducale show effectively begins before the exhibition itself, with the resonances of the approach through the courtyard and staircase of the seat of Venetian government, externally unchanged since Carpaccio worked there. Inside, the paintings unfold in a lapidary enfilade against a deep blue background. The light on the labels could be stronger, but since the labels are the only fault, fussy, pedantic and sloppily translated, one needn’t be distracted by peering at them, but come at the works fresh-eyed. 

One of Carpaccio’s most compelling and enigmatic paintings, Two Women on a Balcony [3], has been reunited with its original panel companion, Fishing and Fowling on the Lagoon [4]. The two ladies might have looked less miserable were they, as for many years was assumed, a pair of courtesans. Promoted to the respectable status of a bride and her companion awaiting the return of their roistering men, they become an affectingly powerful study of ennui. 

The sly psychological brilliance of this picture is present in their glazed thousand-yard stares and in the snarling dog the older woman is listlessly provoking, but most of all in the subjects’ posture. These are women alone if not at ease, slumped and sprawl-legged, indifferent to the decorum their status — as evinced in their clothing and jewellery — would conventionally demand. They are surrounded by the symbols of virtuous love: a pair of turtle doves, a pot of myrtle, but they are obviously wretched, confined and radiating volcanic resentment. Not for them the wide skies and bright waters enjoyed by their aristocratic husbands. 

If Two Women is sneakily subversive, the 1496 Blood of the Redeemer is outright surreal. Christ stands on a pedestal flanked by jewel-plumed angels against a background of magnificent drapery and a dreamy, pellucid landscape. The savagery of His suffering is almost missable — a tiny motif of a hind struggling in the jaws of a leopard makes the allusion, but the stigmata of the Crucifixion are almost surgically discreet. Until, that is, one observes the blood of the five wounds spurting into the Holy Grail, gushing upwards from the feet, re-delineating the perspective towards the dizzyingly miraculous. 

A similarly gory spirituality appears in the Scuola degli Schiavoni San Giorgio [5], where the soldier saint delivers the dragon its death blow on a charnel ground of skeletons and half-eaten cadavers, one of which bears an uncanny resemblance to the foreshortened body of the supine Christ in Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation (c. 1480s). An edited version from the monastery of San Giorgio is shown here; the body count lower but the martial element even more tensely realised. 

This is a courtly rather than a Christian picture, man and mount braced for a joust where the opponent is a nominal if captivating demon. Recalling the San Vidal, which none of Carpaccio’s early admirers were able to see, it reminds us that beyond his frames, Carpaccio’s was a violent as well as a gorgeous world, and that violence was at the core of the Venetians’ living faith. The triumph of this exhibition is its revelation that despite that almost endlessly inventive delightfulness, there’s nothing pretty about Carpatcher.