Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista

Many canvases adorn the walls with the pictorial cycle Life of San Giovanni Evangelista, while a large panel in the ceiling represents the Apocalypse.

The oratory inside the Scuola Grande is the place where the relic of the Holy Cross has been kept since the fourteenth century, the object of the community’s cult over the centuries, as well as the inspiration for Bellini’s large canvases.

The Sala dell’Albergo retains its sixteenth-century layout and is accompanied by four large canvases by Palma il Giovane, painted between 1581 and 1582. In the sixteenth century Titian painted the Vision of St. John the Evangelist for the ceiling which is now in the National Gallery in Washington.

A number of Italian Renaissance artists including Pietro Perugino, Vittore Carpaccio, Gentile Bellini, Giovanni Mansueti and Lazzaro Bastiani, were commissioned to paint a number of canvasses for the Oratory of the Cross. Each one showed episodes of the story of the Relic of the Cross. Following the Napoleonic suppression these became government property and in 1820 were moved to the Gallerie dell’Accademia where they can be seen today.