Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni
Ground-floor hall of narrative Renaissance canvases painted for a Dalmatian sailors' guild, walls unchanged since fifteen oh seven.
This guide to the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice centers on a small white dog caught mid-step in one of nine canvases Vittore Carpaccio painted between 1502 and 1507 for a guild of Dalmatian sailors called the Schiavoni. It tells the story behind that startled dog: the scholar Augustine, writing to his friend Jerome without knowing Jerome had just died, and the sudden light that filled his study as he wrote. It also follows how this scuola, founded in 1451 for mutual aid among sailors the city barely noticed, survived Napoleon's dissolution of almost every confraternity like it. Look for the little dog, still watching for a light of his own.
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