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In memory of David McTavish, mentor and friend
The little Franciscan church of San Niccolò ai Frari - otherwise known as San Niccolò della Lattuga, or San Nicoletto - may have been the smallest of the 34 Venetian conventual churches closed by Napoleonic decree in 1806, but in its pictorial decoration it was unquestionably one of the richest.1 All the main seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources, including Ridolfi, Martinioni, Boschini and Zanetti2, record not only the celebrated high altarpiece by Titian [Fig. 1], dating from the early 1520s, but also a rather large number of canvases dating from half a century later by Veronese and his workshop, Palma Giovane, and Paolo Fiammingo (see Appendix). In 1770 the Titian was sold, and the closing of the church was quickly followed by the dispersal of all its other works of art, and by the later demolition of the building. Some of these works, notably Titian's Virgin and Child in Glory with Six Saints and Veronese's paintings for the ceiling, have been widely studied and are very well known. Most of the others, however, have remained relatively neglected, and in some cases are virtually unpublished. Furthermore, it is not fully realised that the twenty or so paintings executed under the supervision of Veronese comprised a coherent cycle on the theme of the Redemption, thereby representing an important early response to the Tridentine reaffirmation of the valuable role of sacred images in providing the laity with inspiring lessons in the Catholic faith. The reasons for the relative neglect of the cycle are obvious: not only have the constituent paintings been widely dispersed and in some cases are lost, but the destruction of the church itself with little visual record has made it very difficult to visualise the paintings in situ, and to understand their original physical and iconographic relationships. What follows is an attempt to reconstruct and interpret this severely compromised ensemble. For this it is also necessary to attempt to reconstruct the church itself, and to provide an outline of its known history.3 Essential for this purpose, in addition to early printed sources, has been the huge corpus of documents relating to San Nicoletto assembled by the late Father Antonio Sartori OFM.4
The Foundation
The story of the foundation...