Vittore Carpaccio, an Italian painter active in Venice between the 15th and 16th centuries, is considered one of the most important painters of the Venetian School, alongside Canaletto and Francesco Guardi. Influenced by the Renaissance style of Antonello da Messina as well as Dutch masters, he produced a series of telari – large canvas paintings usually completed in studios and then installed inside churches or confraternities.
Over the years, Carpaccio made telaris for the confraternities of St. Ursula, St. George, and St. John the Evangelist.
During the time of Carpaccio, Venice hosted many confraternities, composed of lay men and women who were inspired by the lives of saints and worked together to fund charitable activities, hospitals and public projects. Carpaccio’s series of telaris for the confraternity of St. Ursula, illustrating the life, pilgrimage, and martyrdom of the saint, is famous for its vivid rendering of the saint’s life and for the accurate portrait of Venice’s street life.
In his work, Carpaccio constructs a new conception of space, abandoning Da Messina’s mathematical use of linear perspective for a more realistic rendering of real life objects–a style that was picked up by northern Italian painters like Paolo Veronese, Jacopo Bassano and eventually Venetian master Canaletto.
At the peak of his career, between the 1490s and 1510s, Carpaccio was considered “the narrator” of Venice, capable of capturing Venice’s civic and religious life during the Maritime Republic’s political peak.
It was during the Venetian artist peak years, in 1518, that he made an altarpiece to decorate the main altar of St. Francis’ church in the Venetian town of Pirano, titled “Madonna on the throne with the Child and Saints.” The panel, which depicts the Virgin with Christ Child, St. Ambrose, St. Peter, St. Anthony, St. Clare, St. George and two angels, was preserved inside Pirano’s main church for almost 400 hundred years, until, in 1943, the Italian General Directorate of Antiquities and Fine Arts stepped in to protect it from damage as World War II ravaged Pirano and nearby cities.
At first, the panel was kept in the villa of Count Leonardo Manin, located near the Italian city of Udine, but after Italy’s armistice of 1943, which left Italy in a state of civil war between Fascists and Allied supported anti-fascists, Manin’s villa was no longer a safe space. That’s when local Catholic ministers stepped in.
After learning that friars from St. Francis Church in Pirano had been arrested by the Germans SS and locked up in prison, provincial minister Andrea Eccher of Padua asked Manin to preserve Carpaccio’s “Madonna on the throne with the Child and Saints” in Padua’s Basilica of St. Anthony. There, it was kept inside a storage room for years until, in 1995, researchers collecting works destined for a new museum dedicated to St. Anthony of Padua, the Museo Antoniano, re-discovered the Venetian masterwork.
Alerted about the discovery, Padua’s parish authorities contacted their Slovenian counterparts–Pirano had eventually become part of Slovenia in 1991–to return the work to its original place. In the meantime, the altarpiece was restored and displayed during an exhibition dedicated to Carpaccio hosted inside Venice’s Doge palace, which further underscored the importance of this work to understand the evolution of the Venetian master’s style.
At the end of last month, after years of cross-country collaboration between the ministries of the Italian Province of Saint Anthony of Padua, friars from the Church of St. Francis in Pirano and the governments of Italy and Slovenia, the 16th-century masterpiece was eventually returned to Pirano. The artwork’s return coincided with a visit from Italian President Sergio Mattarella to Slovenia on September 10-11, which further highlights the spirit of collaboration between the governments and religious institutions of the two countries.
To celebrate the return, the mayor of Pirano is inviting both locals and visitors to come to the Church of Saint Francis and admire an artwork considered a pillar of local art history.
