Apparition of the Virgin to Saint Bonaventure

The Franciscans finished a new church in Venice dedicated to Saint Bonaventure in 1602, and this is the picture that went above its high altar. Bonaventure was a Franciscan friar and theologian of the 13th century, later made a cardinal, and Leandro shows him gazing up at the Virgin and Child, who appear to him in a burst of light. At his side the painter lingers over the ordinary, a shelf of books with each volume set down in careful detail, the studious clutter that marks him as a scholar. Leandro signed this one with the word Eques, Latin for knight, the honour the Doge of Venice had granted him. When its church later closed, the altarpiece moved to the friary of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, and it entered the Accademia in 1883.