Portrait of the Vendramin Family

The object everyone in this picture is turned toward is a crystal reliquary holding a splinter said to be from the cross of Christ. It belonged to a Venetian confraternity, and an ancestor of this family, an earlier Andrea Vendramin, had received it on the group's behalf back in 1369. A generation later that same relic supposedly fell into a canal during a procession and floated on the water until, of all the men who dived for it, only a Vendramin could bring it up. So the family had a personal claim on it. Titian, working in the early 1540s, gives them his largest group portrait, and by Venetian custom paints only the men, the two grown brothers and the seven sons, gathered on the steps of the altar that holds their relic.