Venice has two brilliant cycles of pictures by Vittore Carpaccio , the most disarming of Venetian artists - one is in the Accademia, the other is in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni . Venice’s relations with the Slavs ( schiavoni ) were not always untroubled - the city’s slave markets were originally stocked with captured Slavs, and in later centuries the settlements of the Dalmatian coast were a harassment to Venetian shipping.

---

The Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni is open Tues-Sat 9.30am-12.30pm & 3.30-6.30pm, Sun 10am-12.30pm; L5000/2.58.

---

By the mid-fifteenth century, though, Venice’s Slavic inhabitants - many of them sailors and merchants - were sufficiently established for a scuola to be set up in order to protect their interests. After several years of meeting in the church of San Giovanni di Malta, the scuola built itself a new headquarters on the church’s doorstep at the start of the sixteenth century, and summoned Carpaccio to brighten up the first-storey hall. Painted from 1502 to 1508, after the Accademia’s St Ursula cycle, Carpaccio’s pictures were moved downstairs when the building was rearranged in 1551, and the interior has scarcely changed since.

The cycle illustrates mainly the lives of the Dalmatian patron saints - George, Tryphone and Jerome. As always with Carpaccio, what holds your attention is not so much the main event as the incidental details with which he packs the scene, and the incidentals in this cycle feature some of the most arresting images in Venetian painting, from the limb-strewn feeding-ground of Saint George’s dragon in the first scene of the cycle, to the endearing little white dog in the final one. The scenes depicted are: St George and the Dragon ; The Triumph of St George ; St George Baptizing the Gentiles (George had rescued the princess Selene, daughter of the royal couple being baptized); The Miracle of St Tryphone (the kickshaw little basilisk is a demon just exorcized from the daughter of the Roman emperor Gordianus); The Agony in the Garden ; The Calling of Matthew ; St Jerome Leading the Lion to the Monastery ; The Funeral of St Jerome ; and The Vision of St Augustine (he was writing to Saint Jerome when a vision told him of Jerome’s death).

The Madonna and Child altarpiece is by Benedetto Carpaccio , Vittore’s son, while the panelled upstairs hall is decorated with mundane primeval seventeenth-century paintings in honour of various brethren of the scuola, which is still functioning today.