Le Sermon de saint Étienne

Carpaccio painted this in 1514 as one of five scenes on the life of Saint Stephen for a Venetian confraternity, the wool-workers' guild of Santo Stefano. Stephen preaches in Jerusalem, but Carpaccio had never seen the place, so he built an imaginary East out of parts, mixing turbaned figures, classical ruins, Byzantine domes, and a distant tower drawn from the shores near Constantinople. Venetian gentlemen in their own clothes stand in the crowd beside them. The whole cycle hung together for nearly 300 years until Napoleon's suppression of religious houses broke it up in 1806. The panels scattered across Europe, to Milan, Berlin, Stuttgart, and here to the Louvre, and one of the five has never been found.