Vittore Carpaccio

Carpaccio was Venice's great storyteller in paint. In the 1490s a confraternity, one of the city's lay religious clubs, hired him to fill their meeting hall with the legend of Saint Ursula, a British princess who, the story went, sailed on a vast pilgrimage and was massacred with her companions at Cologne. He gave them nine large canvases.

What makes them hold you is that he set an ancient legend in the Venice around him. The harbours bristle with the masts of Venetian galleys, the ambassadors wear the clothes of his own day, and the scene where an angel wakes Ursula is really a portrait of a comfortable Venetian bedroom, with slippers by the bed and light from a window. His real subject was the texture of that world.

The cycle now hangs together in the Accademia gallery in Venice. Carpaccio kept working into the new century, but as younger men like Giorgione changed Venetian painting, his careful, crowded manner fell out of fashion, and the date of his death, around 1525 or 1526, went unrecorded at the time.