Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice, an exhibit at the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., November 2022–February 2023.
IT’S A KILLING ground and has its greeter, the emaciated torso of an ashen corpse that seems propped up on the earth like a ventriloquist’s dummy, mouth agape as if astonished to find itself there. And it’s not alone. Nearby lie human and animal skulls and jawbones, a horror-show memento mori to remind us, if we need reminding, that all things come to this, and that it’s better to be quick, like the snakes and lizards squirming on the ground, than dead. There’s semi-fresh meat, too: a dead maiden’s ripped bodice reveals her breasts, while her lower body dissolves to shredded blackened flesh. The bodily debris offers unvoiced testimony to what’s happened.
What’s happened in this spectacular glittering painting, by the sixteenthcentury Venetian Vittore Carpaccio, is that the pagan Libyan city of Silene has been besieged by a dragon that demands the sacrificial tribute of youths, one of whom, the king’s daughter, stands alive and anxious behind the hero. The St. George legend is a powerful subject for painters. In Vitale da Bologna’s brilliant, brutal version, dragon and hero a gorgeous one. The display of human remains reminds us that those predations, of the monstrous holding hostage an established human moral order, happened yesterday somewhere, tomorrow maybe here.
