"Narrative Painting in Venetian Confraternities: Gentile Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio"

The emergence of large-scale cyclical narrative paintings in late 15th-century Venice was a conscious response to contemporary fresco cycles by central Italian painters such as Ghirlandaio, Lippi, and Perugino. Yet, while central Italian frescoes usually decorated churches or chapels in central Italy, in Italy, narrative paintings decorated the walls of lay confraternities known as “scuole.” The two most-sought-after pictorial storytellers of early Renaissance Venice were Gentile Bellini (once thought to be the brother of Giovanni) and Vittore Carpaccio.