Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni

The room is small, dim and panelled in dark wood, and the paintings run in a single band around the walls just above head height. This is the meeting hall of the Schiavoni, the Dalmatians from the far side of the Adriatic who worked in Venice as sailors and traders. Their confraternity was approved in 1451 by the Council of Ten, the Venetian Republic's powerful security council, and it still has its home in this building in the Castello district.

Between 1502 and 1507 the brotherhood paid Vittore Carpaccio, a Venetian painter of crowded storytelling scenes, to paint the lives of its patron saints George, Tryphon and Jerome, along with two scenes from the Gospels. The nine canvases were meant for the upper hall. When the building was rebuilt in 1551 they came down to this ground-floor room, and they have stayed here ever since, one of the rare Venetian painting cycles still in the building it was made for.

The most famous of them is Saint George and the Dragon. The knight charges in on horseback, his lance driven through the dragon's head, and the ground between them is strewn with the remains of earlier victims, bones and half-eaten bodies painted with unsettling care.

Across the room, Saint Augustine sits in his study with his pen raised, turning towards a window full of light. According to the legend, at that moment he heard the voice of Saint Jerome, who had just died far away. At his feet a small white dog sits up and watches him.