Critics and Collectors of Carpaccio from Vasari to the Fall of the Republic

This essays has investigated the critical reception of the art of Vittore Carpaccio and the circulation of his works in the art market from his lifetime to the end of the eighteenth century. In the brief profile devoted to the painter, Vasari instigated a narrow view of Carpaccio as a narrative painter par excellence, which inevitably obscured other achievements of his career and of his entire corpus. New documentary references, together with a revision of the sources (from Vasari to Zanetti), allows us to shed more light on these aspects, focusing on several points like the connoisseurship of Carpaccio’s drawings during the Baroque age or the role attributed to the painter as “one of the leading founders of the Venetian school in the age of Enlightenment.