A Venetian Master Reconsidered
Fig. 1. Miracle of the Possessed Boy at Rialto by Vittore Carpaccio (1460–before June 1526), c. 1494–c. 1496. Oil on canvas, 12 feet 4 inches by 12 feet 10 3/8 inches. Photograph by Sailko on Wikimedia Commons. Few painters have experienced as great a fluctuation in their posthumous fortunes as Vittore Carpaccio, the subject of a current exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Even in his own time, despite being highly successful and prolific, he never commanded the same reverence as Bellini, Titian, or Veronese. And for most of the next five centuries, following his death in about 1525, he has continued to fall far short of their renown. But in the last decades of the nineteenth century Carpaccio had his moment, and it was quite a moment. John Ruskin declared that his early depiction of Two Women on a Balcony—the first work one encounters in the Washington show—was nothing less than “the best picture in the world” (Fig. 3). Henry James, who rarely agreed with Ruskin on anything, claimed that it would be “ridiculous” to speak of Venice “without making [Carpaccio] almost the refrain.” And Marcel Proust mentioned the artist no fewer than thirteen times in In Search of Lost Time. But that moment passed and Carpaccio, though still admired today by specialists, has largely sunk back into that obscurity from which the present exhibition aspires to rescue him. Mounted in coordination with the Museo Correr in Venice and curated by Peter Humfrey, an esteemed scholar of Renaissance Venetian art, the Washington show contains nearly a hundred paintings and drawings, and it will include even more when it opens in March at the Palazzo Ducale in Venice. Carpaccio’s work reveals an important difference between the Renaissance painters
