Vittore Carpaccio

(b Venice, ?1460–6; d Venice, 1525–6).

His name is associated above all with the cycles of lively and festive narrative paintings that he executed for several of the Venetian scuole, or devotional confraternities. He also seems to have enjoyed a considerable reputation as a portrait painter. While evidently owing much in both these fields to his older contemporaries, Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio quickly evolved a readily recognizable style of his own which is marked by a taste for decorative splendour and picturesque anecdote. His altarpieces and smaller devotional works are generally less successful, particularly after about 1510, when he seems to have suffered a crisis of confidence in the face of the radical innovations of younger artists such as Giorgione and Titian.

1. Life and commissions.

Vittore was the son of Pietro Scarpazza, a Venetian furrier. A will made by his uncle in 1472 naming Vittore as a beneficiary has been used as evidence that the painter had reached the age of 15 by that date and therefore that he must have been born before 1457. But under Venetian law, a child could be named as a future, if not immediate, beneficiary of a testamentary bequest and the stylistic evidence of his work indicates that Vittore may have been born as late as 1465. This later birthdate is supported rather than contradicted by a document of 1486, which records him still living in his father’s house.

Carpaccio’s earliest dated work is the Arrival of St Ursula at Cologne (1490; Venice, Accad.), the first of nine canvases executed for the Scuola di S Orsola and depicting the life of the confraternity’s patron saint. Other paintings in the cycle are dated 1491, 1493 and 1495. Almost certainly earlier than 1490 is the Salvator Mundi with Four Apostles (Florence, ex-Contini–Bonacossi priv. col.), in which the artist’s signature uniquely appears in its Venetian form of ‘Vetor Scarpazo’. The stylistic evidence of these and of other putative early works, some of them controversial attributions, provides the only source of knowledge of Carpaccio’s artistic training and has been interpreted in a number of different ways. The traditional view that he was a pupil of the Bellini brothers was first challenged by Molmenti and Ludwig, who proposed Lazzaro Bastiani as his master. Emphasis has also been placed on the formative influences of Antonello da Messina, Ferrarese painting, Giovanni Bellini and Jacometto Veneziano. Gentile Bellini also seems a likely candidate, while the inclusion of Roman motifs in the St Ursula cycle, combined with apparent echoes of the art of Perugino, has led to speculation that Carpaccio paid an early visit to Rome (Zampetti, 1966 monograph).

From the 1490s onwards, Carpaccio regularly inscribed his most important works with dates and signatures, and a number of documents also survive that refer to lost works and to other aspects of his professional career. In 1508 he served as a member of a committee convened to evaluate the recently completed frescoes by Giorgione on the Fondaco de’ Tedeschi and in 1511 he corresponded with Francesco Gonzaga, Marchese of Mantua, in the hope of persuading him to buy a large canvas referred to as ‘uno Jerusalem’ (presumably a religious subject with a background townscape identifiable as that of Jerusalem). Among Carpaccio’s most important dated altarpieces, most of which were painted in his later career, are St Thomas Aquinas Enthroned (1507; Stuttgart, Staatsgal.), the Presentation of Christ in the Temple (1510; Venice, Accad.) and the Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand (1515; Venice, Accad.). These three works were all painted for churches in Venice; but from about 1510 Carpaccio worked increasingly for provincial customers, sending altarpieces to destinations such as Treviso, Capodistria (now Koper, Slovenia), Pirano (near Trieste), Brescia and Pozzale di Cadore in the Dolomites.

It has sometimes been suggested that Carpaccio was the preferred artist of a particular social or cultural group, such as the lunghi faction within the ruling Venetian patriciate (so-called because their families had held power for many generations), or of leading Venetian humanists and intellectuals. But a survey of all the artist’s known employers shows that, on the contrary, he never enjoyed the consistent support of any one type of patron and that his association with the ruling classes was sporadic. For all his talents as a narrative painter, he worked only briefly on the great history cycle in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Doge’s Palace, assisting Giovanni Bellini in 1507. Perhaps even more surprisingly, he only ever painted one work for a scuola grande, contributing, in 1494, a canvas to the Miracles of the True Cross cycle for the Scuola Grande di S Giovanni Evangelista (Venice, Accad.). On at least two occasions he lost competitions for commissions held by the Scuola Grande della Carità to lesser artists. His four independent narrative cycles were all painted for scuole piccole; and although in the case of the Scuola di S Orsola at least some of the canvases were paid for and presumably also supervised by the patrician Loredan family, his employers at the scuole of the Schiavoni, the Albanesi and S Stefano consisted chiefly of tradesmen, artisans, sailors and the like. The donors of Carpaccio’s metropolitan altarpieces were of a similarly varied social standing, ranging from the patrician Sanuto family, to the citizen families of Ottoboni and Licinio, to a confraternity of artisans such as the Scuola dei Tessitori di Lana (wool-weavers). Beyond Venice, Carpaccio is known to have had contacts with members of princely families of the Italian mainland: the Portrait of a Young Knight (1510; Madrid, Mus. Thyssen-Bornemisza) has been associated with the della Rovere of Urbino (or with the Aragonese dynasty at Naples). However, most of Carpaccio’s mainland commissions came from clients of a much lower social status, such as the devotional confraternity in Udine who commissioned the Blood of the Redeemer (1496; Udine, Mus. Civ.), or the parish church of Grumello de’ Zanchi near Bergamo (dismembered polyptych in situ).

2. Work.

(i) Narrative cycles.

Vittore Carpaccio: Departure of St Ursula, oil on canvas, 2.80?6.11...The canvases painted in the mid-1490s for the Scuola di S Orsola already show Carpaccio at his best. In the largest of the series, the Departure of St Ursula (1495; Venice, Accad.), the scene on the right is typically one of pageantry and ceremony, with gaily dressed figures set against a townscape teeming with incident. Although supposedly set in 4th-century Brittany, the scene is clearly meant to evoke the splendour of late 15th-century Venice, with marble-encrusted palaces rising from the waves, floating domes and bell-towers, ships at anchor, festive processions, displays of rich fabrics and shimmering reflections. In the scene on the left, set in pagan England, the backdrop is even more exotic. Here Carpaccio is known to have based his architectural designs on woodcuts showing views of buildings in the eastern Mediterranean, apparently with the intention of creating an appropriately outlandish setting. He is evidently in full command of the laws of geometric perspective and plots the recession into depth with logic and consistency; yet the effect of deep space is counteracted by the frieze-like treatment of the figure composition, and especially by the highly decorative use of colour, which creates a pattern of reds and greens that decisively reasserts the picture plane.

By the 1490s such features were conventional in Venetian cyclical narrative painting, as was the group portrait in the lower left corner, which presumably represents the current office-holders in the confraternity. Important precedents for Carpaccio’s approach to narrative painting were the cycle of Old Testament scenes painted in the 1460s and 1470s by various artists for the Scuola Grande di S Marco (destr. by fire in 1485), and the prestigious history cycle in the Doge’s Palace (destr. by fire in 1577), with its many scenes of pageantry and of ambassadorial reception and departure. With the unfortunate loss of both these cycles, it is not easy to assess either the originality of Carpaccio’s contribution to the type or his artistic relationship to its leading practitioner, Gentile Bellini. What does seem clear, however, is that the St Ursula cycle is characterized by a spirit of poetic fantasy that eluded the more soberly literal Gentile, and that with his feeling for the expressive qualities of light, Carpaccio had as much in common with Giovanni Bellini as with Gentile.

In the six or seven years during which Carpaccio was engaged on the St Ursula cycle, his art matured rapidly. In the Arrival of St Ursula at Cologne (1490; Venice, Accad.) the treatment of light and atmosphere is still comparatively primitive, and the ostentatious but naive use of perspective foreshortening recalls the work of Jacopo Bellini. In the Reception of the Ambassadors (c. 1496; Venice, Accad.) the balance between effects of spatial recession and flat decoration has become much more subtle and harmonious: virtuoso feats of trompe l’oeil illusionism in the foreground and effects of distance achieved through atmospheric softening do not disrupt the orderly pattern of shapes and colours whose arrangement reasserts the two-dimensional nature of the canvas.

The pictorial sophistication of the later St Ursula scenes is preserved in at least some of the canvases that Carpaccio painted for the Scuola di S Giorgio degli Schiavoni between 1502 and about 1508. This series, which today enjoys the distinction of being the only Venetian narrative cycle of the early Renaissance to survive in its original building, comprises four separate groups of scenes rather than a continuous narrative, as at the Scuola di S Orsola. The individual compositions are accordingly conceived less in a frieze-like than in a centripetal manner, while the narratives are treated with greater simplicity and clarity, particularly in the three scenes of the Life of St Jerome. In keeping with the smaller scale of the canvases, the mood is more intimate and the scene of St Jerome Leading the Lion into the Monastery conveys a sense of humour all too rare in Italian Renaissance painting. The colour has become deeper and more glowing than in the St Ursula cycle, perhaps partly in response to the contemporary work of Giorgione, and this gives an appropriate warmth and richness to the exotic environment in the three scenes from the Life of St George. For information about Islamic buildings and costumes, Carpaccio drew extensively on woodcuts published in Bernhard von Breydenbach’s account of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land (Mainz, 1486) as a means of lending his stories verisimilitude, while at the same time freely rearranging his borrowings according to his own poetic invention.

The last of the Scuola degli Schiavoni series, St Tryphonius Exorcizing the Demon (c. 1507–8), shows a loss of inspiration compared with the St Jerome and St George scenes, appearing almost like a pastiche of the opening scenes of the St Ursula cycle. Comparable tendencies towards slack and mechanical draughtsmanship, hard and dull colour and self-repetition are already to be found in the six canvases of the Scuola degli Albanesi cycle (c. 1500–10; dispersed among Venice, Ca’ d’Oro and Correr; Bergamo, Gal. Acad. Carrara; Milan, Brera). The explanation in both cases may be that Carpaccio was already making extensive use of workshop assistance. However, the decline in his art was not consistent from this time onwards, and all four of the canvases for the Scuola di S Stefano (1511–20; dispersed among Paris, Louvre; Berlin, Gemäldegal.; Milan, Brera; Stuttgart, Staatsgal.) are superior in invention and execution to those of the Albanesi. The Stoning of St Stephen (1520; Stuttgart, Staatsgal.) may even be interpreted as a brave attempt by the artist to revolutionize his style in accordance with 16th-century ideals: the figures are large in relation to the picture field and organized into more compact groups than in his earlier cycles, while the landscape is conceived in terms of loose and cursive rhythms rather than step-by-step spatial recession. But Carpaccio was only moderately successful in his attempt to modernize himself: his actors lack the mobile fluency and heroic dimension of the High Renaissance figure style, and their draperies are very stiff and angular. Furthermore, his art had largely lost the very qualities that made the earlier cycles so appealing: the picturesque details, the vividness of anecdote, the mood of festive gaiety. The Stoning is not only stylistically archaic for its date—by 1520 Titian had already completed his Assumption of the Virgin (Venice, S Maria Gloriosa dei Frari) and at least one of his mythologies for the Duke of Ferrara—but it also compares unfavourably with Carpaccio’s own work of two or three decades earlier.

(ii) Devotional works and portraits.

In the field of large-scale public works, Carpaccio’s talents were undeniably best suited to narrative painting, and even at the height of his powers, he was much less successful as a painter of altarpieces. Models for his most ambitious works of this type would have been provided by the altarpieces of Giovanni Bellini, but Carpaccio lacked Bellini’s ability to combine gentle dignity with calm grandeur. The wit and inventiveness with which the narrative scenes of St Ursula’s life on earth are portrayed make the representation of her apotheosis in the accompanying altarpiece (1491; Venice, Accad.) appear dull and contrived by comparison; the figures seem artificially inflated rather than truly grandiose, and the symmetry of their grouping monotonous rather than impressively solemn. Carpaccio’s metropolitan altarpieces of the first decade of the 16th century are somewhat more effective, but it is unfortunate that he received most of his altarpiece commissions in the last 15 years of his life, during the very period when his creative powers were in decline.

Vittore Carpaccio: Meditation on the Passion of Christ, oil and...As a painter of devotional subjects, Carpaccio was much more comfortable when working on a relatively small scale or on pictures intended for an informal, domestic setting. The Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist (Frankfurt am Main, Städel. Kstinst.) has an anecdotal charm that has much in common with the narrative cycles and constitutes a highly personal contribution to the well-established genre of the half-length Virgin and Child. In another vein, the Meditation on the Passion of Christ (New York, Met.) reveals an ability to communicate feelings of religious seriousness rarely found in his larger, more public works. This has been associated with the spiritual climate emanating from the circle of reforming clerics in Venice that centred around the personality of Paolo Giustinian (Perocco, 1960).

Carpaccio’s devotional works vary in dimension, style and quality according to their subject-matter and typology, and probably also according to the type of client who commissioned them. They are consequently often very difficult to date, despite the fact that the comparatively large number of dated works by the artist ought to provide a clear chronological framework. The Meditation on the Passion, for example, is sometimes regarded as an early work of c. 1490 (Hartt, 1940; Lauts, 1962) and sometimes (and probably more plausibly) as a late work of c. 1510. Similarly, the polyptych in Zara (Zadar, S Anastasia) has been seen as early (Longhi, 1932, 1946; Pallucchini, 1961; Zampetti, 1966 monograph), middle (Pignatti, 1955; Perocco, 1960; Lauts, 1962), late (Tietze, 1944) and even as a work executed piecemeal in all three phases (Muraro, 1966).

Carpaccio’s fame as a portrait painter is attested in general terms by Vasari, and more specifically by three separate contemporary sources, which refer to portraits by him of certain eminent men and women of letters. None of these can be identified with extant works of art, and most modern attributions remain controversial. Nevertheless, the number of individually characterized heads, including obvious group portraits, that appear in the narrative cycles, together with a number of fine portrait drawings, make the testimony of the sources entirely credible. One of the characteristics most admired by the Tuscan poet Girolama Corsi Ramos in Carpaccio’s portrait of her was that it made her ‘seem about to speak’. In other words, the artist must have consciously departed from the characteristically reticent and timeless type of portraiture practised by Giovanni Bellini, and in this respect his portraits may have constituted an important link between those of Antonello da Messina and Giorgione. For most of his portraits Carpaccio would have adopted the standard bust-length, three-quarter view formula, but in the highly original Portrait of a Young Knight (see fig. above) the figure is seen in full-length against a richly detailed landscape background. To account for this exceptional arrangement, it has been suggested that this was a posthumous portrait, in which the sitter is commemorated in the full-length pose often adopted for funerary effigies, especially for warriors (Goffen, 1983). In any case, Carpaccio deserves credit here for producing what is probably the first independent full-length portrait in Italian painting, a type that was later developed by Titian.

3. Working methods and technique.

Information about the composition and running of Carpaccio’s workshop has to be inferred from visual and biographical evidence since there are no documents or early sources. The weaknesses of the Albanesi cycle suggest that by about 1500 Carpaccio employed at least one trained assistant in addition to the customary shop apprentice. The date is probably too early to allow an identification of this assistant with either of his sons, but it is normally assumed that they provided extensive assistance in the artist’s later years.

Many of Carpaccio’s works are executed on the traditional panel support, but to a greater extent than most of his contemporaries he also made frequent use of canvas, a support that only became normal in Venetian painting during the course of the 16th century. This was a direct consequence of his activity as a painter of narrative cycles, a context in which Jacopo and Gentile Bellini had already employed canvas for some decades. Carpaccio, however, was a pioneer in the use of canvas for altarpieces (as in the Apotheosis of St Ursula), and in exploiting its physical properties for new expressive ends. His priming is normally very thin, scarcely covering the rough weave, and his handling of the new medium of oil paint is often sketchy and suggestive. Bold touches of pure colour anticipate the pictorialism of Giorgione and Titian. While Carpaccio’s technique lacked the careful, methodical craftsmanship of his contemporaries Giovanni Bellini and Cima, at its best it expressed a greater vivacity and spontaneity; at its worst it can look undisciplined and even incompetent. Analysis of the pigments has shown that Carpaccio moved from a relatively restricted palette in early works such as the St Ursula cycle to a much richer one in a latish work such as the Presentation in the Temple (1510; Venice, Accad.), perhaps with the aim of rivalling the chromatic effects of his younger contemporaries.

The comparative freedom of Carpaccio’s pictorial technique was nevertheless combined with a traditional dependence on preliminary drawing as a means of working out his compositions and defining form. Scientific analysis has revealed sharp incisions into the gesso ground of architectural orthogonals and the outlines of figures. More drawings by Carpaccio survive than by any other Venetian painter before the later 16th century. Most of them can be related to paintings, and they appear to reflect all the main stages in the preparatory process, ranging from rapid, very free sketches corresponding to early compositional ideas, to more careful compositional studies in which effects of space and light are worked out, to detailed studies from life of individual figures and heads. In compositional studies, such as the preparatory drawing (London, BM) for St Augustine in his Study) in the Scuola degli Schiavoni, Carpaccio reveals his essentially 15th-century habits of mind by concentrating on generating, by means of geometric perspective, a lucid three-dimensional space, into which his figure is later inserted. At the same time, by making frequent use of ink washes and of coloured (normally blue) papers, he used drawing in a characteristically Venetian fashion to suggest pictorial effects that would be fully realized only in the medium of paint.

In addition to their preparatory function, Carpaccio’s drawings, especially the detailed figure studies, also served as records to be preserved in the workshop for use in subsequent commissions. This habit of reusing old designs was shared by most of his contemporaries, including Giovanni Bellini, but after about 1510 Carpaccio tended to indulge in it excessively, and this certainly contributed towards the mechanical dullness that prevails in so many of his later works.

4. Critical reception and posthumous reputation.

Despite the artistic decline of his later years, which must have been perfectly apparent to any discerning contemporary, Carpaccio was consistently regarded by subsequent generations as the most important of Giovanni Bellini’s Venetian contemporaries. Daniele Barbaro speaks of him respectfully in his treatise on perspective (Daly Davis, 1980), and Vasari chose the biography of Carpaccio as the broad umbrella under which miscellaneous lesser north Italian painters of the 14th and 15th centuries could shelter. But for Vasari, followed by the main Venetian sources, Carpaccio himself stood very much in the shadow of the Bellini brothers, and it was not until John Ruskin’s passionate reappraisal of his work in the 1860s that Carpaccio emerged as a fully autonomous artistic personality. Ruskin was attracted by the wealth of detail in Carpaccio’s paintings, which he regarded as the outward manifestation of a touchingly sincere Christian reverence and sense of morality. In a characteristic overstatement he declared Carpaccio’s message to be ‘the sweetest, because the truest, of all that Venice was born to utter’ (Fors Clavigera, Letter 71, 4 Oct 1876). Ruskin’s often misplaced eloquence nonetheless aroused a greater general interest in the artist, and this in turn led to the detailed documentary study by Molmenti and Ludwig (1906), which provided the essential factual basis for all subsequent research. Molmenti and Ludwig shared the later 19th-century view of Carpaccio as essentially a genre painter, concerned with chronicling the people and events of his time; but, in the 1930s, critics of the Cubist generation such as Roberto Longhi and Giuseppe Fiocco emphasized the very different qualities that they saw as part of the heritage of Piero della Francesca and Antonello da Messina: crystalline perspectival space, reduction of forms to simple volumes rounded with light, clarity of formal structure, emotional impassiveness. A great variety of different approaches to Carpaccio were adopted by the many critics and historians who contributed to the discussion of his art at the time of, and immediately after, the comprehensive exhibition of his works held in the Doge’s Palace in 1963. (Grove Art online, accessed 1/14/14)