Call for the Saint

LONG before Caravaggio set brush to canvas to paint The Martyrdom of St Ursula (‘The sinner who painted saints’, page XX), Vittore Carpaccio (1465–1525) had completed an entire cycle on the legend of the 4thcentury British princess. The work had likely been commissioned by the

Loredan family of Venice in

Italy, who had distinguished themselves in fighting against the Ottomans, for the chapel of the School of St Ursula, a confraternity of which they were patrons. The nine wall paintings, completed in 1497–98, illustrate the legend of the martyr, from the arrival of Conan Meriadoc’s ambassadors at the court of Ursula’s father, Dionotus of Dumnonia—to her pilgrimage to Rome ahead of her wedding, accompanied by 11,000 virgins, and the moment when the Huns (remarkably reminiscent of the Ottomans in Carpaccio’s work) kill her and her companions. In the final, glorious scene, St Ursula basks in the presence of God ( pictured). The story of the princess saint has been retold and tweaked many times—she was British or Breton, the virgins were 11 or 11,000—and so have Carpaccio’s paintings: misguided attempts at restoration in earlier centuries saw them covered with damaging glues and varnishes and the order in which they were displayed (at Venice’s Gallerie dell’accademia, where they were moved after Napoleon shut the School of St Ursula in 1806) was repeatedly altered. After lengthy conservation work, which took several years and an average of about 250 hours for every 10sq ft, they were reinstalled in June 2019.