Venezia: la festa di San Rocco

Every 16 August, Venice marked the feast of Saint Roch, the saint credited with helping end the terrible plague of 1576, which killed roughly a third of the city and, that same summer, the aged Titian. On the feast day the doge crossed the city to hear Mass at the church of San Rocco, where the saint's relics were kept, and Canaletto painted one such morning around 1735. The doge leaves in a gold, ermine-lined robe, most likely the newly elected Alvise Pisani. Look at the men filing out behind the dignitaries: many carry small posies of flowers. Those nosegays were once held to cover the stench of disease, and here, more than 150 years on, they survive as a quiet piece of plague memory. Behind it all rises the carved white front of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, the confraternity the whole day honoured.