Giovanni di Niccolò Mansueti

In the Venice of the 1490s the great confraternities, the scuole, competed to line their meeting halls with vast painted canvases telling the stories of their holy relics. Giovanni Mansueti was one of the painters they hired. He had trained under Gentile Bellini, the city's official narrative painter, and he worked in that same crowded, documentary manner.

For the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista he joined a team that included Bellini and the younger Vittore Carpaccio on a cycle showing the miracles of a fragment of the True Cross the confraternity owned. Mansueti's contribution survives in the Gallerie dell'Accademia, where his scene of a miraculous healing sets the sacred event inside a precise Venetian square, its buildings tiled and inlaid down to the last cornice.

That was his signature. He filled a religious story with dozens of contemporary Venetians in their real clothes, ranged across a stage of recognisable architecture, so the picture doubles as a record of how the city looked around 1500. He kept painting these large narrative canvases, along with smaller devotional panels, for Venice's confraternities and churches until his death in 1527. In the Accademia scene the crowd around the miracle wears the everyday dress of Venetian citizens and officials, a snapshot of the trading city he lived in.