Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni

By the 15th century, the Slavic community in Castello was so sizeable that its religious confraternity was dedicated not to one, but three patron saints: George, Tryphone and Jerome of Dalmatia. This building was constructed in the 16th century, and the Renaissance interiors remain more or less intact. Venice’s Dalmatian community was so influential that the virtuoso painter Vittore Carpaccio himself painted the 1502–07 cycle of the lives of the saints on the ground floor. Though he never left Venice, Carpaccio clearly did his research: his scenes with Dalmatian backdrops are so minutely detailed that some Slavic visitors claim to recognise the locations as their home region. Carpaccio’s imagined worlds are so convincing that in his images of St George with the dragon, the dragon looks like something that might be hauled in with the day’s catch at the Pescaria. Carpaccio took any opportunity to load his paintbrush with red for glistening gore, so scattered about before the dragon are remnants of its victims – sundry limbs, bones and the half-eaten corpse of a young woman.