Group of Soldiers and Men in Oriental Costume

This little scene is a survivor. It is a fragment, cut at some point from a much larger panel whose subject nobody has been able to identify. What is left is a knot of figures pressed together: soldiers you can read as Roman, because a standard among them carries the letters S P Q R, the old shorthand for the Senate and People of Rome, standing beside men in rich Eastern dress with turbans and patterned robes. Carpaccio worked in a Venice that traded constantly with the Ottoman and Mamluk east, and he collected such costumes the way other painters collected drawings, so that a crowd scene set in the ancient or biblical world could be furnished with clothes and faces he had actually seen on the quays. Where the rest of the painting went, and what these men were gathered to witness, is lost.