Evidence for the Confraternity of S. Pietro Martire at San Zanipolo, Venice
[Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Universities Art Association of Canada,
Montréal, QC, on 19 October 2001.]
In recent years there has been a growing interest in the role of confraternities as
manifestations of popular lay piety in the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance -- and
for art historians this has been manifested in an interest in the role of these institutions as
patrons of the arts, as well as in the use which they made of the visual arts in constructing
their identity and also in defining their devotional space. A full history of religious
confraternities and the arts has yet to be written, although a growing number of case
studies are now available, and a collection of these was recently published as an
anthology, entitled Confraternities and the Visual Arts in Italy: Ritual, Spectacle, Image,
edited by Barbara Wisch and Diane Cole Ahl (Cambridge University Press, 2000). This
volume comprises some 11 papers, and it comes as something of a surprise to find that
none of these are related to the city of Venice. I say “something of a surprise”, because
in Venice the confraternities enjoyed enormous prestige, and were a major vehicle for the
expression of religious devotion, particularly on a public level, and apparently on all
social levels. One need only think of Gentile Bellini's Procession in the Piazza San
Marco, of 1496, now in the Accademia Gallery but originally painted for the Scuola di S.
Giovanni Evangelista, which depicts the procession of that confraternity with their
miracle-working relic of the True Cross. At the funeral of Doge Leonardo Loredan in
1521, some 120 confraternities or scuole, as the Venetians called them, were represented
in the procession, and the great historian of the Venetian church, Silvio Tramontin, has
described these institutions as “il tessuto connetivo della pietà veneziana”. The scuole
brought together groups under various auspices. For example, they could be based on
devotion to a particular saint -- a plague saint like San Rocco, perhaps -- or they could be
more narrowly based, perhaps limited to practitioners of a specific trade, the scuole
minori degli arti e mestieri, or to members of a certain national group present in the city:
the Milanese, the Slavs, and so on. All had a particular locus which provided a
geographic focus for their meetings and devotional rituals. For many, this would simply
be an altar in a church, but wealthier confraternities could and did have their own
buildings -- and, unlike most other Italian cities, in Venice a great many of these have
survived. It is these alberghi, as they were called, which, perhaps more than the city’s
parish churches, served to establish Venice’s ecclesiastical geography. Most historians of
Venetian art are familiar with the largest and most dominant of the confraternities: the
scuole grandi, for example of St Mark, adjacent to San Zanipolo, or San Rocco, whose
perhaps most famous member, Jacopo Robusti, il Tintoretto, left an extraordinarily rich
legacy of paintings decorating the walls of its piano nobile. Many Venetian
confraternities commissioned extensive cycles of mural paintings, among the better
known of which are the cycles by Vittore Carpaccio for S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni (the
confraternity of the Slavs from the Dalmatian coast) and for S. Orsola, the latter now in
the Accademia since the confraternity itself was suppressed, like the others, in the early
19th century under Napoleon. These have, of course, been studied in an important book
by Patricia Fortini Brown: Venetian narrative painting in the age of Carpaccio (Yale
University Press, 1988). Other scuole have left only their buildings, but these often bear
some reminiscence of their original members, or at least of their dedication, in the
decoration of their façade: for example, the confraternity building of St Martin, adjoining
the church of San Martino. While the larger and wealthier confraternities might have
their own separate structures, many of the slightly less wealthy groups made do with a
space attached to the wall of a church, of the sort which we find here. This paper will
begin to explore the history of one such attached room – the confraternity building
nestled in the south-west corner of the great Dominican church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo
(San Zanipolo, as the Venetians call it), immediately adjacent to the famous monument
by Verrocchio to Bartolomeo Colleone. This small space, today used occasionally for
exhibitions, lectures, and other parish functions, is currently known as the Sala di San
Tomasso d’Aquino (in other words, Thomas Aquinas, an important Dominican
theologian from the 13th century), but this dedication appears to be comparatively recent.
Can we decipher its earlier history? Vediamo.
It was the arrival of the Dominicans in Venice and other Italian cities in the first half of
the 13th century which prompted the foundation of many if not most of the early religious
confraternities. Even more so than their Franciscan rivals, the Dominicans sought to
promote lay religious devotions on an organized basis, presumably in order to circumvent
the rise and spread of heresy. Members of a confraternity would usually gather once a
week for devotions, hymn singing, and to hear a sermon. In addition, of course, they
would undertake works of charity as well as public spectacles in which their faith was
manifested. Often they would commission a large painting to function as the focus for
their devotions, for example the Rucellai Madonna, painted by Duccio for the Society of
the Most Holy Virgin Mary, one of Florence's most venerable confraternities, founded in
1244, which met in the church of S. Maria Novella.
The existence of confraternities can also be documented in Venice from the second half
of the 13th century: for example, the Scuola Grande della Carità was founded in the year
1260. San Zanipolo is not known to have housed a confraternity before 1300, in July of
which year the Scuola di Sant’Orsola was founded. Its albergo no longer exists as such,
a victim of the Napoleonic suppression, but it formerly adjoined the apse of the church,
where its foundations, partially now reincorporated in another structure, were
rediscovered in an excavation in 1928. The years immediately after the 1430
consecration of San Zanipolo seem to have been particularly rich for the construction of
new confraternity buildings: for example it was on July 29, 1437, that the Dominican
prior granted land on the north side for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, and in this
instance the building does survive, although the structure which we see today is slightly
later, rebuilt after a devastating fire in 1485.
An important record of the confraternities made prior to the Napoleonic suppressions
may be found in Flaminio Corner’s Notizie storiche delle chiese e monasteri di Venezia e
Torcello, first published in 1758. He records three confraternities which had their own
spaces attached to the structure of San Zanipolo. The first was that of St Ursula, with its
Carpaccio cycle; the second, which he records as having been founded in 1546, was
dedicated to Mary, and had as the focus of its devotions a Byzantine icon brought from
the east in 1349 by Paolo Morosini, still housed in the church; and the third, he says, was
dedicated to three great Dominican luminaries, St Peter Martyr (d. 1252), St Vincent
Ferrer (d. 1419), and St Catherine of Siena (d. 1380). It is interesting to note that relics of
all three of these saints were, in the 18th century, housed in the altar of the sacristy: an
entire uncorrupted foot of Catherine of Siena, an uncorrupted finger of Peter Martyr, and
part of a finger of Vincent Ferrer. Corner doesn’t specify the location of this
confraternity’s space. Could it be our building?
The answer is an unequivocal “Yes”, and the evidence is provided by the images and
inscriptions carved on two door frames, one no longer in use, but still in place on the
external walls of the albergo. The first frame is on the west wall of the albergo, seen
here. At the top it bears an inscription with the date 1444, requesting the blessing of
"omnipotente Dio", "la Vergine Maria", and "il precioxo mister San Piero Martire". On
the sides of the frame are two carved images depicting a saint, holding a martyr's palm,
and with an instrument resembling a meat cleaver embedded in his skull. Given the
inscription, there is no difficulty in identifying him as Peter of Verona, better known as St
Peter Martyr, the Dominican preacher who was brutally murdered on the road between
Como and Milano in 1252, and canonized almost immediately in the following year. As
a passionate founder of confraternities himself, including the Florentine Society of Mary
mentioned earlier, he is an obvious choice for the dedication of this particular scuola,
particularly as it is attached to a Dominican church. This identification is further
confirmed by the second door frame, on the south flank of the albergo, where the same
figure is repeated, this time with an accompanying inscription that removes any possible
lingering doubt regarding his identity. But in this second instance, Peter Martyr appears
on only one side of the frame. On the other side is a different figure, identified as "San
Vincenzo". This is another important Dominican preacher, St Vincent Ferrer, a Spaniard,
who died in 1419 and was canonized in 1455. Once again there is a longer inscription at
the top, bearing the date 1574, and thus some 130 years later than the first, and this
records that the two societies, of Peter Martyr and Vincent Ferrer, had joined together in
the year 1565. No mention is made in either inscription of St Catherine of Siena, so
perhaps her name was added only at a later date, but presumably before Flamino Corner
compiled his inventory in the mid 18th century. Thus, we can perhaps reconstruct
something of the history of this structure. Probably erected in the second quarter of the
15th century, at a time when the spaces adjacent to San Zanipolo were beginning to be
filled with the alberghi of different scuole, the initial dedication was probably to Mary
and St Peter Martyr. A century later, this confraternity had joined together with that of St
Vincent Ferrer, and the new joint dedication is reflected in the second doorway of 1574.
What makes this slightly more interesting than a simple footnote of history is the possible
relationship between the location of this albergo and the dedication and decoration of
altars within the church itself. Can it be a coincidence that the altar on the other side of
the wall, so to speak, in the south aisle of the church, is dedicated to Vincent Ferrer, and
bears the well-known altarpiece depicting this saint, generally attributed to Giovanni
Bellini, and in the predella his miracles? Presumably not. This leads in turn to two
further thoughts. Also in S. Zanipolo today is a 17th-century copy by Nicolo Cassana of
The Martyrdom of St Peter Martyr by Titian, the original of 1530 having been destroyed
in the fire which consumed the Rosary Chapel in 1867. The Cassana copy, over the altar
today dedicated to Peter Martyr, is directly opposite that of Vincent Ferrer, in the
corresponding bay of the north aisle. One wonders whether the south aisle altar’s
original dedication was also to Peter Martyr, and whether this was shifted when his cult
began to be supplanted by that of the more contemporary Spaniard. And finally, in light
of the 1444 date of the first door frame, it is interesting to note that there exist today a
series of small panels illustrating scenes from the life of Peter Martyr, attributed to
Antonio Vivarini, and dated by Peter Humfrey to circa 1443. These are now scattered
among a variety of public and private collections in Berlin, Milan and New York, but all
are of identical size and shape. Although there is no information whatsoever about their
provenance, is it too far fetched to suggest that they once formed part of what was
perhaps the first altarpiece dedicated to Peter Martyr in San Zanipolo – in other words,
prior to Titian’s? The proposed dating would certainly be exactly right.
As you will have long since taken note, I am posing more questions than I am answering.
But I feel convinced that there is a relationship between the dedication of altars and the
location of adjacent confraternity spaces. We don’t yet know enough about the latter, but
I suspect that it’s not because the information doesn’t survive. Rather it has simply not
been recorded. I have searched the literature on San Zanipolo in vain for any mention of
the doorframes with their inscriptions and carved reliefs. In a city which can boast of
enormous artistic riches, such mundane items may seem trivial – but I suggest that they
can provide valuable clues leading to a better understanding of how religious space
worked in late medieval and Renaissance Venice, the study of which I hope someday to
pursue.
John Osborne
Queen's University at Kingston