Miracle of the Relic of the Holy Cross in Campo San Lio

In the 1490s the great Venetian confraternities were competing to fill their halls with painted stories, and the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista set nine of the city's painters, Gentile Bellini and the young Carpaccio among them, to picture the miracles of a splinter of the True Cross it treasured. This canvas is Mansueti's contribution. It records an event said to have happened in 1474. At a funeral by the church of San Lio, the reliquary holding the fragment suddenly grew so heavy that it could not be carried over the threshold, because the dead man had doubted its power while he lived. A plainer cross was carried in its place, and the relic stayed behind with the parish priest. Mansueti spreads the whole story across a real Venetian square, tiled and corniced down to the last window, and fills it with citizens in the everyday dress of the 1490s.