active around 1490 -1525/1526 · Venice told in light

Processions, sacred legends and details of the lagoon make Vittore Carpaccio the great pictorial storyteller of the Venetian Renaissance.

Vittore Carpaccio was probably born in Venice around 1460 -1465 and died in 1525 or 1526. His real name, Scarpazza, was Latinized as Carpathius in several signatures. No doubt trained in Lazzaro Bastiani's entourage, he mainly assimilated the light, color and space of Giovanni Bellini. His career flourished in the service of the scuole, secular brotherhoods who commissioned vast narrative cycles for their rooms. Between 1490 and 1495, the Stories of Saint Ursula imposed his talent as a director. The Dream of Saint Ursula suspends the action: an angel crosses a Venetian room in which each piece of furniture, plant and ray of light contributes to the silence. In the Ambassadors or the Departure of the engaged couple, architecture, crowds, costumes and ships on the contrary construct a rich history, readable even in its secondary episodes. Carpaccio willingly transposes ancient legends into the Venice of his time. Saint George slaying the dragon thus becomes a heroic spectacle of almost theatrical precision, while the cycles of Saint Jerome and the Albanians mix devotion, exoticism and urban observation. Two Venetian Ladies and The Hunt on the Lagoon, fragments now separated from the same ensemble, combine domestic expectation with the distant activities of the lagoon. Dogs, birds, fabrics, vases and tiny gestures acquire strength narrative. In his last years, Carpaccio also worked for the cities of the Adriatic and painted altarpieces and devotional paintings. Her perspective sometimes remains deliberately fabulous: she does not copy the city, she organizes it like a scene where everyday life makes the marvelous credible. The "Vittore Carpaccio" selection notably compares The Dream of Saint Ursula and Saint George slaying the dragon. His reading favors light.

Carpaccio tells the sacred with the things of the world: a window, a costume, a dog or a gondola become the silent actors of the story.