758 deborah howard
known as the scuole grandi, are unique to Venice in their functions as
well as their architectural form.51 These institutions struck a precarious
balance between charity and display in their blending of secular and
religious typologies.52 The huge assembly room furnished with an altar
resembled the interior of a church or large chapel, though raised on the
piano nobile like the portego of a palace. At the Scuola Nuova della Mise-
ricordia, this room even borrowed the vast dimensions of the Great Coun-
cil Chamber in the Doge’s Palace.53 The smaller meeting room known as
the albergo, for use by the banca or governing body, combined aspects of
the monastic chapter house and the palace camera. Intense competition
between the institutions encouraged continual cross-referencing, leading
both to conformity and difference. The tension between benevolence and
ostentation, as well as the regular rotation of officers, complicated their
patronage of art and architecture.
Other typologies fostered conformity with examples outside Venice
rather than within. In the case of the male religious orders, each mon-
astery or friary formed part of an international network of institutions
governed by shared religious aspirations and linked by continual personal
and verbal communication.54 The religious orders provided a vital conduit
for the absorption of new ideas from outside the city. Nevertheless, the
51 Brian Pullan first analyzed the social functions of the scuole in his seminal work, Rich
and Poor in Renaissance Venice (Oxford, 1971); brief histories of the important scuole are
charted in the catalogue of Brown’s Venetian narrative painting. Sohm, The Scuola Grande
di San Marco, gives a useful account of the architectural functions of the Scuola grande
on pp. 50–79.
52 See the chapter on the “Scuole grandi” in Manfredo Tafuri, Venezia e il Rinascimento:
Religione, scienza, architettura (Turin, 1985), pp. 125–54; in English as Venice and the
Renaissance, trans. Jessica Levine (Cambridge, Mass./London, 1989), pp. 81–101.
53 Deborah Howard, “La Scuola Grande della Misericordia di Venezia,” in Fabbri, ed.,
La Scuola Grande, pp. 13–70, on p. 41.
54 The study of the architecture of the religious orders is still patchy. No parallel exists
for the early modern period to Herbert Dellwing’s studies of the mendicant orders in
the Veneto: Studien zur Baukunst der Bettelorden im Veneto: die Gotik der monumentalen
Gewölbebasiliken (Berlin, 1970) and Die Kirchenbaukunst des späten Mittelalters in Venetien
(Worms, 1990). A valuable contribution on the Observant Franciscans is Antonio Foscari
and Manfredo Tafuri, L’armonia e i conflitti: La chiesa di San Francesco della Vigna nella
Venezia del ’500 (Turin, 1983). Even such well-studied orders as the Jesuits have been
relatively little explored in the case of Venice. See Mario Zanardi, “I ‘domicilia’ o centri
operativi della Compagnia di Gesù: Venezia,” in Mario Zanardi, ed., I Gesuiti e Venezia:
Momenti e problemi di storia veneziana della Compagnia di Gesù (Padua, 1994), pp.
97–153; Howard, Venice Disputed, pp. 109–10. Much valuable information on the Counter
Reformation orders, though not specifically concerning architecture, is to be found in
William L. Barcham, The Religious Paintings of Giambattista Tiepolo: Piety and Tradition in
Eighteenth-Century Venice (Oxford, 1989).