Vision of Saint Eleutherius

This altarpiece was made around 1565 for a church in Vicenza dedicated to Saint Eleutherius, an early bishop of Rome, and it works as two pictures stacked together. Up top, in a burst of light, Christ blesses the saint among angels, while Eleutherius in turn blesses a crowd of worshippers below. Those worshippers are not anonymous. They are members of the confraternities who paid for the painting, and the armed men in the lower part belong to the guild of bombardiers, the town's gunners, shown here in their own church beside their patron saint. Bassano worked the composition out carefully in drawings that still survive in Darmstadt and Montpellier. When Napoleon's officials suppressed religious houses across the Veneto, the picture was moved to Venice and entered the Accademia in 1829.