The Sacred and Profane with Carpaccio in Renaissance Venice

TEFAF Meet the Experts are interactive conversations around works of art presented at TEFAF. We hope these conversations encourage visitors to further engage with the incredible objects at the fair and learn from our vast network of knowledgeable experts. Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1460 - 1525/1526) was a pupil of Giovanni Bellini. He is best known for his magnificent series of large-scale paintings depicting life in Venice and Ottoman Asia in the 1490s. He also famously gave his name to the raw beef served in Harry’s Bar on the occasion of the 1963 Carpaccio exhibition in Venice. In this Meet the Experts conversation, our expert, Nicholas Hall will be presenting to the public, for the first time in 35 years, an early panel by Vittore Carpaccio. This panel shows the artist adapting the Bellinesque convention of a Madonna and Child, but having them accompanied by two female saints. These saints, who are clearly modeled on contemporary aristocratic Venetian ladies, could have been attendants to St. Ursula in the cycle of paintings describing her life, now in the Academia, Venice. This panel will be included in the monographic exhibition devoted to Carpaccio to be held in the National Gallery of Art, Washington in November 2022.