The Relic of the Holy Cross is offered to the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista

This is the opening chapter of a story the rest of the room tells in miracles. In 1369 a chancellor of the Kingdom of Cyprus gave the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, a Venetian lay confraternity, a fragment said to come from the True Cross. That relic made the brotherhood famous, and over the next century it was credited with cures and wonders around the city. In the 1490s the Scuola commissioned a set of large canvases recording those miracles and handed them to the best painters in Venice, among them Gentile Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio. Lazzaro Bastiani painted this one, dated 1494, showing the moment the relic itself is presented and received, the gift that everything else depended on. When Napoleon suppressed the confraternities, the whole cycle passed into public hands, which is how these canvases, made to hang together, came to line the walls here.