The Ten Thousand Martyrs of Mount Ararat

The subject is grim, and Carpaccio reached for Dante to give it shape. The legend told of thousands of Roman soldiers converted to Christ after an angel appeared to them, then put to death in a mass crucifixion on Mount Ararat. To picture that mountain he seems to have borrowed the Purgatory of Dante's Divine Comedy: the martyrs wind up a spiralling path toward the summit, and above them heaven opens as rings of light, one set inside the next. He signed and dated the altarpiece in 1515 for a marble altar in the Venetian church of Sant'Antonio di Castello. The trees on the slope are hung with the crucified, so many that the eye keeps finding more of them among the branches.