User:Beepboop327/Scuole Grandi of Venice

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Scuola Nuova della Misericordia - showroom on the ground floor.

The Scuole Grandi (literally "Great Schools", plural of: Scuola Grande) were confraternity or sodality institutions in Venice, Italy. They were founded as early as the 13th century as charitable and religious organizations for the laity.[1] By the mid-sixteenth century, six distinguished confraternities made up the Scuole Grandi: Scuola di Santa Maria della Carità, San Marco, San Giovanni Evangelista, Santa Maria della Misericordia, San Rocco, and San Teodoro.[2] The Scuole Grandi had an important presence in Venetian religious life, and by the end of the fifteenth century, the Scuole began to engage in more civic purposes.[3] These institutions had a capital role in the history and development of music. Inside these Scuole were born at the beginning of 16th century the first groups of bowed instrument players named "Violoni".[4]

Scuole Grandi membership, which ranged from five to six-hundred members each,[5] was open to all citizens, regardless of occupation. Common practices of Scuole Grandi members were organized processions, festivities, distribution of money, food and clothing to poorer members, and more.[6] The Scuole Grandi were not subject to authority of the Church like that of other confraternities, and were instead subject to the authority of the Venetian state.[5] The scuola governing boards to some extent reflect the Venetian civic government itself.[5]

The Scuole Grandi built a number of monumental buildings which housed famous works of Venetian art. The architecture of the main buildings reflected aspects of the Doge's Palace's great halls, and each contained the general two-story building layout of three rooms: the androne, salone, and albergo.[5][7] The Scuole Grandi had many famous painters commission art pieces throughout the buildings, including Gentile Bellini, Jacopo Tintoretto, Jacopo Bellini, Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni d'Alemagna, and Carpaccio.[5][8]

History[edit]

The Founding of the Scuole[edit]

Confraternities have been around since ancient times but only began to grow throughout Italy in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.[2] As a result of political tensions, the plague outbreak, and fear, the practice of self-flagellation during penitential processions became a part of a new public movement throughout Italian cities during the mid-thirteenth century.[2] Although there is no form of documentation that these processions reached Venice, it is assumed to have sparked the formation of the Venetian confraternities that would eventually become the Scuole Grandi.[2]

Founded as early as the thirteenth century, the scuole were devotional institutions that each had a patron saint and provided mutual assistance to individuals and families in need.[3] There were two main categories for these confraternities in Venice: with over two hundred in the Scuole Piccole and only six in the Scuole Grandi.[5] The first three of the Scuole Grandi were the Scuola di Santa Maria della Carità in 1260, the Scuola di San Marco in 1260, and the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista in 1261.[2] The fourth scuola Santa Maria della Misericordia was founded in 1308 due to high demand for membership.[2] Lastly, the Scuola di San Rocco had joined the Scuole Grandi in 1480 and the Scuola di San Teodoro followed in 1552.[2]

During the 15th century, the five scuole grandi had established a large religious presence in Venetian life.[5] Members held procession marches and performed flagellant rituals.[5] By the end of the 15th century, the initial religious role of the Scuole Grandi began to shift to a more civic purpose.[3] By the time that the Scuola di San Rocco joined, public flagellant practices had ceased.[3] The Scuole began to move from their penitential religious origins and transition into respectable and wealthy social institutions that served as important patrons of art and architecture in Venice.[5]

Music[edit]

Rituals and ceremonies for different events throughout the year were established by the Scuole Grandi, in which music was an essential part of the common devotions in these churches, funerals, and processions.[2] These institutions had a capital role in the history and development of music,[2] and the 14th century was characterized by the use of instruments.[2] Elaborate processions continued throughout the sixteenth century, and musical floats carrying musicians were parts of the celebration.[2] In order to satisfy musical needs of the Church, the Scuola hired the mansionari di coro, priests who would perform and sing liturgical chants and hymns.[2]

Before the 15th century, instrumentalists were rarely found in the Scuole Grandi, however there were traces that trumpet players and other instrumentalists had been invited for some occasions.[2] 1500-1650 was the most active period for musicians of the scuole grandi. Wind bands, ensembles of stringed instruments, and an ensemble of bowed instruments were employed.[2] The institution's role of music was not just for honoring God and the saints, and souls of dead brothers, but expanded to bringing honor to the scuola. [2] Born at the beginning of 16th century the first groups of bowed instrument players named "Violoni".[4]

Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista

List of Scuole Grandi[edit]

By 1552, there were six Scuole Grandi:

The Scuola Grande dei Carmini was the last of its kind to be recognized as a Scuola Grande in 1767 by the Council of Ten.

Membership and responsibilities[edit]

Each of the Scuole Grandi comprised of between five and six hundred members.[5] The Scuole Grandi emphasized their role as "forces for civic unity, as institutions that brought together all classes of Venetian society, by placing at the top of their lists of disciplinary rules a prohibition against treason or anything that might be against the interests of Venice."[2] Unlike the trade guilds or the numerous scuole piccole, the Scuole Grandi included persons of many occupations, although citizenship was required.[3] Unlike the rigidly aristocratic Venetian governmental Great Council of Venice, which for centuries only admitted a restricted number of noble families, membership in the Scuole Grandi was open to all citizens, and did not permit nobles to gain director roles. Citizens could include persons in the third generation of residency in the island republic, or persons who had paid taxes in Venice for fifteen years.[6]

The Scuole Grandi proved to be one of the few outlets for non-noble Venetian citizens to control powerful institutions.[6] Their activities grew to encompass the organization of processions, sponsoring festivities, distribution of money, food and clothing to poorer members, provision of dowries to daughters, burial of paupers, and the supervision of hospitals.[6] Members would meet as a general body three times a year: "on the third Sunday in Lent, the second Sunday in August, and the Sunday before Christmas."[2]

Procession in St. Mark's Square (Gentile Bellini, 1496)

During the Middle Age, each scuole had its own regulation, named capitulare or mariegola.[6] The Scuole Grandi received funding from taxes that each member paid and donations from wealthy brothers.Their autonomy was lost during the Renaissance when the institutions were subjected to a specific Magistracy that ruled the office of the leaders and oversaw the drafting of Capitulars[9] After a process of secularization, charities lost their Christian identity and were absorbed into the Venetian structure of the State,[10] that encompassed an exhibiting unity-order among the social classes of the Republic, as it is depicted in the Procession in St. Mark's Square (Gentile Bellini, 1496).[11]

While Venice deleted the Middle Age ius commune from its hierarchy of the sources of law,[12] Grandi Scuole were divided into two opposite classes, and started to securitize their immobiliar investments under the central direction of private banks,[10] even if within the bounds of their history redistribution rules. The Poverty Laws approved in 1528-29 entrusted from the State to the Grandi Scuole system all the charitable and social activities, like: handouts, drugs, burials of needy persons, hospices for widows and children, food and lodging for pilgrims, brotherhood for prisoners.[6] The Serenissima kept for itself a residual role in social justice, uniquely related to those forms of poverty that may become a negative element for the new order of the aristocratic Republic.[10][13]

Despite the Scuole Grandi's religious purpose in providing mutual assistance and charity to members, they were not subject to church authority in which the other confraternities were, and were instead subject to authority of the Venetian state.[5] Each scuola's governing board operated with a Guardian Grande serving at the head of a small group of elected officers.[5] In 1582, Francesco Sansovino, a Venetian author, addressed the strongly civic and patriotic nature of the Scuole Grandi as a mirror "of the civic government itself since the citizens had, as it were, their own republics, in which to gain rank and honour according to their merits".[5]

Structure and Physical Layout[edit]

Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista
Salone Maggiore of Scuola Grande di San Rocco (Venice)

The Scuole Grandi were regulated by the Procurators of Venice, who set forth a complex balance of elected offices, mirroring the structures of the republic.[6] Paying members could vote in the larger Capitolo, which in turn elected 16 members to a supervisory Banca: a chief officer, Vicario (first deputy), Guardian da Mattin (director of processions), a scribe and twelve officers known as the Degani (two for each sestiere). A second board, known as the Zonta was meant to examine the accounts of the Banca.[6]

Meeting houses consisted of three main rooms: typically the main building consisted of an androne, or a large meeting hall for the provision of charity on the ground floor; the upper floor contained the salone used for meeting of the Capitolo and an adjoining smaller room, the albergo, used for meetings of the Banca and Zonta.[5][7] They often had an affiliated hospital and church. The Scuola often sheltered relics, commissioned famous works of art, or patronized musicians and composers. In terms of architecture, there is a clear distinction between the three main rooms: the albergo had windows with triangular pediments and laid at right angles in relation to the two other halls that lay on the same axis.[5] Painted narrative cycles were a defining characteristic of the two rooms on the upper floor.[5] The architecture takes inspiration from that of the Doge's Palace and its great halls.[7]

Scuola Grande di San Marco façade

Scuola di San Marco[edit]

After a fire at the end of the 15th century, the meeting house of the Scuola di San Marco had been rebuilt. The ornate façade was designed by Pietro Lombardo and Giovanni Buroia.[8] A pair of lions are seen guarding the façade, and scenes of St. Mark's life are shown at the albergo's entrance.[8] The two doors are bordered by sculpted reliefs. As "perspective construction designed to fool the eye, the reliefs create trompe the l'oeil semblance of three-dimensional space."[8]

Scuola Grande di San Rocco

The Scuola di San Rocco (pictured on right) has a two story colonnade and a series of engaged paintings by Jacopo Tintoretto throughout the entire building for catechesis.[7]

Artists of the Scuole Grandi of Venice[edit]

Narrative Paintings of the Scuole (The Teleri)[edit]

St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria (Gentile Bellini, 1507)
Four Fathers of the Church Triptych (Vivarini and d'Alemagna)

In Venice, the Scuole played a major role in art patronage through the commission of narrative painting cycles (teleri), which became a standard practice that adorned the Scuole's meeting houses.[3] Although religion is the main subject of narrative paintings, they contain secular and patriotic connotations within them.[5]

Procession in St. Mark's Square (Gentile Bellini, 1496)
Crucifixion (Jacopo Tintoretto) - Scuola Grande diSan Rocco
Miracle of the Holy Cross at Rialto (Vittore Carpaccio)

Gentile Bellini

The Procession in St. Mark's Square, was a commissioned painting by the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista in 1507 as a part of the Venetian narrative cycles representing the miracles of the True Cross.[8] The painting portrays the miracle of a merchant whose critically injured child had been miraculously healed when the man knelt before the relic of the True Cross.[3] In the foreground, members of the confraternity are visibly marching dressed in white robes, and the procurators and senators are dressed in red robes.[3] The painting shows the annual feast-day of St. Mark (April 25) and exhibits the importance of ceremonial life and acts of devotion through the power of order and ritual.[8]

In 1504, Gentile Bellini was commissioned by the Scuole di San Marco to paint St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria, which was finished by Giovanni Bellini following the artist's death.[3] The painting is dedicated to the scuole's patron saint and shows St. Mark preaching from a podium to scuola brothers and Arabs. [3]

Jacopo Bellini[edit]

Jacopo Bellini, a notable Italian painter, spent the last decade of his life painting narrative painting cycles for the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista and San Marco.[5]

Jacopo Tintoretto[edit]

Jacopo Tintoretto, Gentile Bellini collaborated with Tintoretto on a number of narrative cycles for the Scuole.[5] Tintoretto is responsible for decorating the three main rooms of the Scuola di San Rocco, having decorated the piano nobile with scenes from the Old and New Testament free of charge, then joining the scuola and devoting his life to its decorative embellishment.[8] Around 1564-67 began Tintoretto's creation of the Crucifixion, which serves as the principal painting in the albergo of the Scuola di San Rocco.[5]

Antonio Vivarini and Giovanni d'Alemagna[edit]

Antonio Vivarini of Murano and Giovanni d'Alemagna collaboratively completed a number of altarpieces, including one of their most significant achievements: The Four Fathers of the Church tryptych.[8][5] Painted for the albergo of the Scuola Grande della Carità in 1446, the work honors the Virgin as the confraternity's patron saint[5] and serves as one of the earliest Venetian paintings to have survived on canvas.[8] The work is characterized by Gothic ornament, with "a coherent box-space enclosed by walls on three sides, the depth ... measured by the placing of saints and angels along orthogonals."[5]

Vittore Carpaccio[edit]

Vittore Carpaccio was responsible for painting one of the narrative paintings expressing the miracles of the True Cross in the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista in the 1490s.[8] The painting displays a possessed man who is healed near the Rialto bridge and the palace of the Patriarch of Grado.[8]


References[edit]

  1. ^ Guidarelli, Gianmario (2011-04-15). "Le Scuole Grandi veneziane nel xv e xvi secolo: reti assistenziali, patrimoni immobiliari e strategie di governo". Mélanges de l’École française de Rome - Moyen Âge (in Italian) (123–1): 59–81. doi:10.4000/mefrm.664. ISSN 1123-9883.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Glixon, Jonathan (2003-04-17). Honoring God and the City. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195134896.003.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-513489-6.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j "Devotional confraternities (scuole) in Renaissance Venice – Smarthistory". smarthistory.org. Retrieved 2020-11-17.
  4. ^ a b Pio, Stefano. Viol and Lute Makers of Venice 1490-1630. pp. Chap. III.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w Humfrey, Peter, 1947- (1995). Painting in Renaissance Venice. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-06247-8. OCLC 31132099.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h "Scuole Grandi of Venice". Images of Venice by Ian Coulling. 2020-05-29. Retrieved 2020-11-18.
  7. ^ a b c d Kleine, Holger,. The drama of space : spatial sequences and compositions in architecture. Reisenberger, Julian,. Berlin. ISBN 3-0356-0435-5. OCLC 1163608548.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  8. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Brown, Patricia Fortini (1997). Art and Life in Renaissance Venice. New York: Prentice Hall: Harry N. Abrams. pp. 1–100.
  9. ^ "History of the Scuole Grandi of Venice Italy". Archived from the original on May 23, 2019.
  10. ^ a b c Manfredo Tafuri (1995). Venice and the Renaissance. MIT Press. ISBN 9780262700542. OCLC 19123670. Archived from the original on May 23, 2019.
  11. ^ Lorenza Smith. "Devotional confraternities (scuole) in Renaissance Venice". Smarthistory. Archived from the original on May 23, 2019.
  12. ^ Laura Ikins Stern (Apr 2004). "Politics and Law in Renaissance Florence and Venice". The American Journal of Legal History. 46 (2). Oxford University Press: 209–234. doi:10.2307/3692441. JSTOR 3692441.
  13. ^ Gianmario Guidarelli (Feb 20, 2013). "The Scuole Grandi in Venice (xv-xvi century): organization; real estates and governmental strategies". Mélanges de l'École Française de Rome - Moyen Âge. 123 (in Italian) (1): 59–81. doi:10.4000/mefrm.664. Archived from the original on June 2, 2018.
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