Four Camaldolese Saints

On the small island of San Michele, between Venice and Murano, there stood for centuries a monastery of the Camaldolese, a Benedictine order whose monks dressed in white. Its library made it a place of learning, and around 1450 one of its monks, Fra Mauro, drew there the great map of the world now kept in Venice's Biblioteca Marciana.

This small altarpiece by Giandomenico Tiepolo was painted for the monastery's church and shows four saints of the order. The museum notes how the white of their habits spreads across almost the whole canvas, and it sees in the heads something close to a group of caricatures, a sacred picture made by a painter who had absorbed the sceptical spirit of the late 18th century. The monastery itself was suppressed in 1810, under Napoleonic rule, and the island is now Venice's cemetery.