The meetinghouse of the Scuola Grande di San Marco possessed the most extravagant façade of any confraternity in Venice. At the same time, however, its sculptural decoration contained more references to charity than were found on any other scuola’s meetinghouse. This essay posits that the profusion of images relating to charity on the façade of the Scuola Grande di San Marco represented a deliberate choice aimed at tempering the impact of the façade’s own material splendour.

1. Confraternitas
2. Early Modern
3. medieval

Original publication: Buonanno, Lorenzo G. “A Charitable ‘Façade’? The Sculptural Decoration of the Scuola Grande di San Marco.” Confraternitas 21 (2): 2011. 6-16. DOI: 10.33137/confrat.v21i2.14704. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Confraternitas. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Confraternitas under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see creativecommons.org/licenses/.