Scuola Grande di San Rocco

A lay confraternity founded in 1478 around the relics of Saint Roch, protector against plague, built itself the richest hall in Venice and filled it with Jacopo Tintoretto's largest pictorial enterprise: more than sixty canvases, painted over roughly twenty-four years, that the confraternity's own site dares to set beside Rome's Sistine Chapel.

Why it matters

The Scuola was born in 1478 as a scuola dei Battuti dedicated to the plague-healing Saint Roch, and when the confraternity acquired the saint's body in 1485, pilgrim alms during epidemic years made it the richest Venetian confraternity of the sixteenth century. That wealth bought a building campaign started in 1517 under proto Pietro Bon, continued by Sante Lombardo from 1524 and by Antonio Abbondi, known as Scarpagnino, from 1527. What made the Scuola immortal, though, was the wager of May 1564: asked to submit sketches for a ceiling alongside Veronese, Salviati and Zuccari, Tintoretto instead delivered a finished oval of Saint Roch in glory, and when challenged answered that this was simply his way of drawing — and that he would donate it if unpaid. The confraternity accepted the gift on 22 June 1564 and bound the painter to the building for the rest of his career.

What to notice

Work through the rooms in narrative order. The Sala dell'Albergo, seat of the Scuola's government, carries the Passion cycle begun with the monumental Crucifixion of 1565 and completed between 1566 and early 1567, its entrance wall reading unusually from right to left — Christ before Pilate, Ecce Homo over the door, the Ascent to Calvary. Above, in the Sala Capitolare, the ceiling's three great teleri — the Brazen Serpent, Moses striking the rock, the Gathering of the Manna — were finished by November 1577, after which Tintoretto contracted to deliver three wall paintings a year for the feast of 16 August in exchange for an annual lifetime stipend of 100 ducats; the room's thirty-three canvases were complete by the summer of 1581, and the altarpiece of Saint Roche appearing followed in 1588, painted with his son Domenico. Note the staircase of 1550 designed by Scarpagnino, with a Treasury added by Giorgio Fossati in the eighteenth century, and the campo facade's eight detached columns, a suggestion apparently owed to Jacopo Sansovino.

Context and history

The building took over forty years and three protos. Disagreements over raising the ground-floor hall ended Pietro Bon's involvement in 1520; Sante Lombardo roofed the Lower Hall and completed the canal-facing facade; Scarpagnino added the campo-front windows and the imperial staircase approved in 1545 before his death in 1549; Giangiacomo de' Grigi signed the works off on 9 September 1560. The eighteenth century added Fossati's staircase treasury, and between 1882 and 1885 Pietro Saccardo renewed the Upper Hall flooring. Politically the Scuola holds a singular record: it is the only one of the ancient Scuole Grandi to have survived the fall of the Republic, its Napoleonic suppression decree of 1806 having been revoked, and it still owns the Scuola, the church and the Scoletta. Pope Pius VI had granted it the title of Archconfraternity in 1789. Today it counts more than three hundred members and continues its ancient charitable duties.