Orsola e i cavalieri. Rappresentazioni di una santa tra Venezia e l'Impero (secoli XIV-XVI)

Taking Ludovico Zorzi’s posthumous book Carpaccio e la rappresentazione di Sant’Orsola (1988) as a starting point, the essay resumes the analysis of the relationships between urban spaces, figuration, spectacle, and civic ritual in Renaissance Venice. The focus of the research shifts from the hypothesis of the transposition of a spectacle in painting to the reconstruction of the intertwining and conflicts between personal and family prestige of the Venetian aristocracy and the values of civic religion. The role of secular and devotional associations in the management of places, representations, and symbolic fields is investigated by creating new combination of known documents and taking on new perspectives and acquisitions. Rethought considering the spaces and cults of the new saints linked to the Dominican order, Carpaccio’s canvases renew the knightly declinations of the oligarchy’s protagonism in devotion and diplomacy. In the light of recent studies on the spread of the cult of Ursula in the second half of the 15th-century Europe, the pictorial narration of the saint’s travels and martyrdom reinvents symbols and factors of Venetian devotion and politics at a crucial moment in the conflicts with the Empire and the confrontation with the cities of the dominio di Terraferma, i.e., the mainland territories governed by the Republic of Venice.