Famed above all for his cycles of narrative and religious paintings, Vittore Carpaccio (1460/66 – 1525/26) depicted Venice’s grandeur and splendour, transposing sacred stories into everyday life, in scenarios rich in details, combining the observation of the urban setting with the poetic and fantastic. The subject of a renewed interest in historiography, thanks also to recent discoveries, attributions and restorations, Carpaccio has not been the subject of a monographic exhibition since 1963, the year of the historic exhibition in the Palazzo Ducale. The exhibition is being organised in co-production with The National Gallery of Washington and will trace the development of Carpacciesque painting in both thematic and chronological terms from an updated perspective, through religious cycles and genre paintings and a substantial nucleus of drawings, revealing his fruitful imagination, the punctiliousness of his technique and his interest in nature, perspective and the effects of light.

With important loans from European and US museum collections and private collections, the Venetian stage of the exhibition will reconstruct the artist’s development from youth to artistic maturity, recomposing narrative cycles now dispersed and suggesting city itineraries for visitors to the lagoon; in the follow-up stage in Washington – the first American exhibition of Carpaccio – an exceptional feature will be the works commissioned by the brotherhoods, preserved in Venice and presented after recent restorations that have revealed many new details.