圣马可广场的游行

Gentile Bellini finished this enormous canvas in 1496 for a Venetian religious brotherhood, the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, which owned a treasured relic said to be a piece of the True Cross. The picture is meant to record a miracle. During a procession decades earlier, in 1444, a merchant knelt and prayed to the passing relic for his dying son, and the boy is said to have recovered. But that miracle is almost impossible to spot. Bellini has pushed it into a small clutch of kneeling figures and given the whole rest of the square to Venice itself. St Mark's Basilica fills the background in gleaming detail, its mosaics and domes recorded as they looked in 1496, before later rebuilding, so the painting doubles as a precise portrait of the square more than five centuries ago. Ranks of white-robed brothers and Venetian dignitaries file across the foreground in careful order. The real subject is the city: wealthy, devout, and supremely well governed, exactly as Venice liked to see itself.