Delicate, dignified and delightful: Carpaccio in Washington DC
In the mid-nineteenth century Vittore Carpaccio was admired by Chateaubriand, Théophile Gautier and the Goncourt brothers. Later, John Ruskin declared, “Nothing can be more careful, nothing more delicately finished, or more dignified in feeling than the works of Carpaccio,” and shaped his modern reputation. Following Ruskin, Henry James in Italian Hours described “the enchanting picture of St. Ursula asleep in her little white bed, in her high clean room, where the angel visits her at dawn; or the noble St. [Augustine], a pearl of sentiment. It unites the most masterly finish with a kind of universal largeness of feeling.”
Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller to Renaissance Venice by Peter Humfrey et al (Yale UP, 340 pp., $65) is a handsome, lavishly illustrated catalogue for the exhibitions of Carpaccio (1465-1525) at the National Gallery in Washington (November 2022-February 2023) and the Palazzo Ducale in Venice (March-June 2023) captures the wit, charm, luminous details and linear perfection of the most appealing Venetian painter.
Many of Carpaccio’s major works were created for the scuole, confraternities of devout laity dedicated to Christian saints and sometimes organised by foreigners living in Venice: Germans, Slavs and Albanians. Carpaccio depicts impressive architectural backgrounds receding into the depths, according to Leon Battista Alberti’s principles of perspective. He includes vivid and often symbolic flowers and trees, birds and animals. Influenced by his master, Gentile Bellini, Carpaccio’s work contains costumed pageantry, dramatic spectacles and ritual solemnity, enhanced by a sweet melancholy and spiritual feeling. Individual figures stand out from the crowd, drawing us into the processions. His narrative cycles, such as the Life of Saint Ursula, run continuously around the walls of the chapels like modern motion pictures.
The Martyrdom and the Funeral of St. Ursula – Vittore Carpaccio
Carpaccio’s The Departure of Ceyx from Alcyone, based on a story in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, portrays the Queen begging her husband not to leave on a perilous sea voyage. (When he drowned, she leaped into the sea and they were reunited by the gods, who transformed them into birds.) The devoted Queen, surrounded by her handmaidens, kneels before the crowned and heavily robed King. He tries to reassure her, as a barge waits to row him to the huge ship in the harbour. The goldfinch in the foreground foreshadows their aerial reunion.
The rather strange Preparations for Christ’s Sepulchre shows His body between the Deposition from the Cross and His confinement before the Resurrection. The emaciated, dead Christ, painted in grisaille, is laid out on a long table, above the skulls and bones of five previous victims. Job mourns Him in a contemplative pose while workmen on the upper left busily construct the cave-like tomb. Tiny figures in the distant lake and mountain landscape seem unaware of the tremendous event.
Preparations for Christ’s Sepulchre – Vittore Carpaccio
Two secular scenes contrast to the spiritual tragedy. Fishing and Fowling in the Lagoon (Getty Museum, Los Angeles) shows four long narrow rowboats with 17 men in caps, belted blouses and tights. They use trained black cormorants to catch fish and disgorge their prey when they fly back to the boats. At the same time, four of the men complete their bounty by leaning over to shoot arrows at ducks floating in the still green water. In the background a V-shaped flock of birds fly through the clouds and over the hills to safety.
Carpaccio’s portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan portrays him in profile, with small eyes, furrowed cheeks, arched nose and thin lips. He wears the regal costume of a red-and-gold brocade cape with five large gold buttons, white stringed skullcap and horned ducal hat. This portrait, though fine, is not as impressive as Giovanni Bellini’s more vivid and incisive full-face portrait of the Doge that reveals his more severe and complex character.
Doge Leonardo Loredan – Vittore Carpaccio
Carpaccio’s five greatest paintings suggest the pleasures of this exhibition. A contributor notes the extensive travels of Venetian traders: “merchant galleys sailed to the Near East, the Black Sea, the Barbary Coast [of North Africa], and through the Straits of Gibraltar to France, England and the Low Countries.” The Life of Saint Ursula cycle, in nine monumental canvases, ranges from Brittany and England, to Germany and Rome. Carpaccio portrays “the legend of the fifth-century Christian princess of Brittany and her betrothed, the heathen prince of England, as they undertake a pilgrimage through Italy and northern Europe accompanied by eleven thousand virgins.” The elaborate pictures describe “diplomatic exchanges, ceremonial arrivals and departures, ritualised encounters, followed by Ursula’s tragic martyrdom [by pagan Huns in Cologne] and triumphant apotheosis.” In Reception of the Ambassadors the busy diplomats arrive in the court of Ursula’s father to ask for her marriage to the English prince. In Return of the Ambassadors an elegant figure, who holds a cartellino (little letter) behind his back, subtly conveys crucial details and the painter’s name. In the right section Ursula tenderly asks her pensive father for permission to marry, after the prince converts to Christianity.
Return of Ambassadors – Vittore Carpaccio
The ladies in Two Women on a Balcony look like sisters. They have the same features seen in profile: frizzy blonde hair, rouged cheeks, full figures and bored expressions. One sits up straight, holding a long white scarf, staring into space and doing nothing. The other, with richly brocaded sleeves and deep cleavage, plays with two dogs. The brown dog pulls at a rope in its snouty mouth; the white dog in a red collar sits up and offers a paw to its mistress. The picture includes four different birds and a decorative vase with a lily. In a wild swing of interpretations, this painting, once considered to show a pair of Venetian courtesans, now “represents chaste and faithful wives obediently waiting at home for the return of their husbands,” possibly announced by a young boy who enters with a message. Ruskin called it “the best picture in the world and no other picture can be compared with it.”
Two Women on a Balcony – Vittore Carpaccio
In A Young Knight the hero is dressed in armour. He carries a striped and sheathed sword, but his legs, clad in red tights, are exposed and vulnerable from behind. He has long chestnut hair, wears a soft velvet hat, and has gentle and delicate rather than tough martial features. Behind him, his helmeted squire is dressed in a bright blue-and-yellow checkered costume, rides a horse and carries a lance. A sleek white ermine crawls toward the knight. Deer and cranes stand on the shore of the tranquil lake. Carpaccio expresses the military spirit in the windswept aerial combat of a falcon and heron, and a vulture consuming the carcass of a duck.
A Young Knight – Vittore Carpaccio
According to The Golden Legend (a popular collection of late medieval saints’ lives), the city of Silene in Libya had sacrificed many people to a ravenous monster lurking outside its walls. In Saint George and the Dragon , the beast has a curved snakelike tail, muscular haunches, huge spiky wings, defiant taloned claws and a mouth filled with sharp teeth. The handsome golden-haired armoured knight, on a leaping, richly saddled black horse that turns his head away, thrusts his spear into the mouth and right through the head of the dragon. The ground beneath them is littered with skulls, bones and grotesquely amputated male and female carcasses, devoured by lizards, snakes, toads and vultures. Castles and pergolas rise in the background, and the high balconies of domed towers are filled with spectators witnessing the fatal combat. On the right the terrified princess and designated next-victim gives prayerful thanks to her saviour. One contributor notes that “the theme offered a potent metaphor for the contemporary struggle between the Catholic West and [its perpetual enemy] the Ottoman Empire, with George as the archetypal Christian soldier triumphing over the monstrous infidel.”
Saint George and the Dragon – Vittore Carpaccio
Carpaccio’s masterpiece is the exquisitely detailed Saint Augustine in His Study, perfectly furnished for spiritual contemplation and theological scholarship. The bearded saint—dressed in heavily folded red and white robes and black cape—sits at his desk on a green platform. He pauses with pen in hand to gaze at the illumination spreading through the tall narrow window and casting shadows on the sand-coloured floor. His desk contains a seashell, scissors, bell, hourglass and scientific sphere. Three volumes and a scroll of music lie open at his feet. Three astrolabes (models of the universe) hang above him; and high shelves on the left hold statues, candlesticks and a long row of books. Behind him an open cabinet displays his collection of small treasures. In the centre background his bishop’s crozier and white mitre rest on the altar, which also displays a tall bronze statue of Christ holding a staff with a fluttering banner. A faithful fluffy white Maltese dog stares attentively at the saint. Andrew Marvell could have been describing Carpaccio’s Saint Augustine when he wrote: “All things are composéd here / Like nature, orderly and near.”
Saint Augustine in His Study – Vittore Carpaccio
Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published Painting and the Novel, Impressionist Quartet and Modigliani: A Life.
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