News & Stories

“The Board of Directors of Save Venice is proud to salute the scholarly brilliance and commitment to Venetian art of one of our own. We are delighted to announce that we have dedicated the conservation of Vittore Carpaccio’s masterpieces in the Scuola Dalmata di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni to the art historian and Carpaccio expert Professor Patricia Fortini Brown. Her landmark 1988 book on Venetian narrative painting transformed our understanding of Carpaccio and his contemporaries. She has since made a measurable impact on the field through many publications on Venice, training generations of young scholars, and nearly two decades of service to Save Venice.”
-Frederick Ilchman, Save Venice Chairman

Patricia Fortini Brown, Professor Emerita of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University, has served on the Board of Directors and the Projects Committee of Save Venice since 2004. Her books include Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (1988); Venice & Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past (1996); Art & Life in Renaissance Venice (1997); Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture and the Family (2004); and Bloodlines and Blood Feuds in Venice and its Empire (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). She is also the editor of Save Venice’s forthcoming publication Carpaccio in Venice: A Guide which will offer an overview of all of the artist’s works preserved in the city and discussed for the first time in light of recent restoration campaigns and new research.

Professor Fortini Brown’s method combines sensitive readings of individual works of art with a deep exploration of Venetian society and institutions. She is greatly admired for her skill as a prose stylist, and her writing brings to life the Venetian Renaissance for a wide audience. In the 2019 edition of Save Venice’s newsletter, she sets the stage for Carpaccio’s achievement at the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni: “The master storyteller of his time Vittore Carpaccio was the preeminent exponent of the eyewitness style of narrative painting. Full of circumstantial detail, nearly all such paintings were made for religious lay confraternities called scuole, a uniquely Venetian institution whose members included both noble and commoner, whether rich or poor. “