Presentation in the Temple

This one stands apart from the Ursula story-scenes. It is a church altarpiece, painted around 1510 for San Giobbe in Venice. It shows the moment, 40 days after the birth, when the infant Christ is brought to the temple and the old priest Simeon takes him in his arms. Carpaccio set the scene under a domed apse lined with coloured marble and gold mosaic, a grand imagined interior rather than any real building. At the foot of the group three small angels sit making music, one of them tuning a lute right beside the slip of paper on which the painter wrote his name. The picture stayed on its altar for three centuries until 1810, when Napoleon's officials suppressed the convent and it was moved to the Accademia, where it hangs today.