The Arrest of St Mark
Giovanni Mansueti (documented 1485–1527)
1499
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Giovanni Mansueti was one of the many gifted artists active in Venice in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century who were overwhelmingly influenced by the art of Giovanni Bellini. At the same time, Mansueti had a highly distinctive and instantly recognizable style of his own, though by the time of his death the rise of such artists as Giorgione and Titian meant it had become almost stubbornly old-fashioned.
The present large panel is one of the finest works he ever executed. It is prominently signed on one piece of paper, and less obviously dated 1499 on another, amidst a list of names of the officers of the commissioning body. In Venetian painting of the period, it belongs to a very particular genre that involved the colourful and exotic presentation of religious subjects in narrative cycles. Such works were commissioned by what were called Scuole (literally ‘schools’, actually trade guilds and religious or national brotherhoods), and most such pictures adorned their meeting rooms and offices, which may explain their secularizing tendencies. As it happens, this depiction of the arrest of St Mark the evangelist and patron saint of Venice is known to have been one of a series of four paintings – two of the three others were by Cima da Conegliano (in Berlin) and Lattanzio da Rimini (lost) – which flanked an Annunciation by Cima da Conegliano (Hermitage, St Petersburg) in the chapel of the Guild of the Silk-Weavers in the Venetian church of the Crociferi (now the Gesuiti, reconstructed by the Jesuits following the suppression of the Crociferi in 1656). The painting’s brilliant and richly hued display of exotic bearded orientals combines with the boldly diagonal architectural depth to make for a delightfully energetic effect. The prominent leopard isolated from the general ‘mêlée’ in the otherwise deliberately empty foreground is a typical Mansueti touch.
- Material/technique
- tempera with oil glazes on panel, cradled
- Measurements
- 164 × 146 cm, weight: c. 130.0 kg incl. frame and glazing
- Acquisition
- acquired in 1890 by Prince Johann II von Liechtenstein
- Currently exhibited
- Garden Palace, permanent presentation
- Artists/makers/authors
- Giovanni Mansueti
- Inventory number
- GE 857
- Signature/inscriptions content only available in German
- auf einem Cartellino bez.: IOANES DEMA / N SVETIS / .P.
- Provenance
- acquired in 1890 by Prince Johann II von Liechtenstein
- Iconography
- The Capture of Mark
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