O Milagre da Santa Cruz na Ponte de Rialto

This was painted around 1496 for the meeting hall of a Venetian confraternity, the Scuola of Saint John the Evangelist, one of nine large canvases telling the miracles worked by a fragment of the True Cross the brotherhood owned. The supposed miracle, a madman being healed by the relic, is happening up on a balcony to the left, and almost nobody in the picture is looking at it. What Carpaccio really gives you is Venice itself in his own day. There's the old Rialto bridge, the wooden one with a drawbridge in the middle that could lift to let tall ships through, long before the stone bridge we know now. Gondoliers work the Grand Canal in their tall black boats, chimneys shaped like upturned bells line the rooftops, laundry and carpets hang from the windows. It's one of the most exact portraits we have of the medieval city, painted right before that wooden bridge collapsed and was rebuilt.