Benedetto Rusconi
1460–1525 · Republic of Venice · Italian Renaissance, Venetian painting
The story
Around 1500 a Venetian lay brotherhood, the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, set about decorating its hall with huge canvases telling the miracles of its most treasured possession, a splinter of the True Cross given to it in 1369. The commission went to the leading painters of the city: Gentile Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio, Lazzaro Bastiani. Among those names stands Benedetto Rusconi, known as Benedetto Diana, holding his own in the finest company Venice could assemble.
His panel for the cycle, the Miracle of the Relic of the Holy Cross, now hangs in the Gallerie dell'Accademia a few rooms from Carpaccio's Saint Ursula scenes. Diana worked in the manner of Giovanni Bellini, the family that set the tone for Venetian painting, and specialised in calm, richly coloured altarpieces of the Madonna and Child among saints.
He was born around 1460 and died in 1525, a Venetian all his life. When the brotherhood's paintings were pulled from their oratory during the Napoleonic suppressions in 1806, Diana's canvas travelled with the rest to the Accademia, where it arrived in 1820.
