The Madonna and Child with Saints Roch and John the Evangelist

Saint Roch, the pilgrim who tended plague victims and became one of Venice's protectors against the disease, kneels in prayer on one side of this altarpiece, while Saint John the Evangelist stands tall on the other and the Virgin and Child sit enthroned between them. Giuseppe Angeli painted the large canvas in the early 1770s, and it is thought he made it for the Scuola Grande della Carità, one of the city's lay confraternities. A small cross set into the marble throne is that brotherhood's emblem. The Carità's old building still stands: it is the very complex that later became the Gallerie dell'Accademia, so the picture now hangs close to where it was first meant to be seen. Angeli gives the scene the clear, even light and the calm, upright figures of his later years, when he was teaching at the Venetian academy of painting. Putti tumble around the throne, the one restless note in an otherwise still and orderly group.