The Scuola Grande di San Rocco is an ornate building in Venice. It’s a 16th-century art museum featuring works by the dramatic Renaissance artist Jacopo Tintoretto. “Scuola” means school. “Schools” in Venice were actually social institutions between the 1400s and 1700s. The “Schools” were similar to modern trade unions: corporations, associations of people doing the same job. There were six “Scuole Grandi”, or Great Schools, that were devoted to providing charity or welfare.
Tintoretto, the painter, worked here in three different periods, distributed over a period of twenty years. It all began in 1564, when the Grande Scuola di San Rocco launched a contest for the decoration of the reception halls with large canvases dedicated to the Passion of Christ.
Everyone wanted the commission to paint this building dedicated to St Roch, patron saint of the plague-stricken, so Tintoretto cheated: instead of producing sketches like his rivals, he gifted a splendid ceiling panel of the saint, knowing it couldn’t be refused or matched by other artists. This painting still crowns the Sala dell’Albergo, upstairs, and Tintoretto’s work completely covers the walls and ceilings of all the main halls.
The only reason we thought to go see this art was because the guest speaker in Art History gave a talk on American writer Henry James (1843 – 1916). His first visit to Venice in 1869 transfixed him and he ended up visiting the Scuola di San Rocco enchanted by Tintoretto’s paintings.
So here is the catch:
Henry James was captivated by Venice for forty years. The city is the setting for some of his more notable shorter fiction, namely The Aspern Papers, and for a substantial section of his novel, The Wings of the Dove. As well as providing inspiration for his fiction, James opens his collection Italian Hours with several essays on Venice. Even though Italian Hours explores almost twenty cities, the section on Venice constitutes about a quarter of the book’s length. The Aspern Papers (1888) was mentioned so many times in this lecture that I looked for the book in the library here. Since I am taking a break from my book club back home, I may have to jump into Henry James!
2020 Vision of Venice 