800 wolfgang wolters
the flag indicates that Pesaro stood on the papal side as a commander;
the prominent position of St Peter must have unsettled Venetian patriots.
titian’s composition and the significant presence of the patron became
exemplary for many patrons and artists.
in the second decade, other painters also gave up the conventions of
the sacra conversazione. On the high altarpiece for S. Giovanni crisostomo
(1510–11), Sebastiano del Piombo (c.1485/86–1547) painted the seated saint
turned to the side in front of a massive structure and pillar. Giovanni
Bellini “answered” with his Diletti Altar in the same church (1513) by plac-
ing the saints in the center, meditating high on a cliff in the landscape.
With titian’s Martyrdom of St Peter for the altar of the Scuola by the same
name in SS. Giovanni e Paolo (about 1528–30), large-scale, dramatically
acting figures from a saint’s legend became the protagonists of an altar-
piece. With that, in Venice, the future belonged to narrative altarpieces
(the “history paintings”). it is probable that many congregation members
and some patrons paid less attention to the artistic quality of the paint-
ings and more to a comparison with the material and the wealth of neigh-
boring altars, the position of the altar in the church, or the presence of
contemporaries in the picture.
ceiling painting was a task of growing importance. Ornamental decora-
tion of the surfaces around fabricated openings in the blue sky (S. Samuele
choir) was prized in the late 15th century. in 1559, cristoforo and Stefano
rosa of Brescia fabricated a space surrounded by pillars and empty of fig-
ures on the ceiling of the anteroom of the library of the Procurator’s pal-
ace and placed titian’s Wisdom in the central field. While Paolo Veronese,
Giambattista Zelotti, and Giambattista Ponchino depicted their figures
from a low-angle view, moving in the blue sky above the viewer, special-
ists of quadratura painting fabricated inhabited or uninhabited spaces
that could open up to the heavens. the rosa brothers’ painting of the flat
ceiling and the walls of the nave in the Madonna dell’Orto (1556; destroyed
1864) was a spectacular masterwork of the Quadraturisti. the extension of
the painting space beyond flat ceilings and on vaults remained a task for
painters and art writers (cristoforo Sorte, 1580, and Giuseppe Viola Zanini,
1629). Flat ceilings of wood or stucco, in the fields or settings of which can-
vas paintings were installed, were customary in the 16th century. Looking
at such works as illustrations in books or on a computer monitor distorts
the view of these ceiling paintings. Only on location, within the spatial
context, and viewed from below at an angle, does the task of the painter
become clear and comprehensible: the design of a composition in which