Miracle of the Relic of the Cross at the Ponte di Rialto  

by Vittore Carpaccio  

1496

 A description of this painting is included in Marcel Proust's book, The Fugitive.

"Carpaccio, as it happens, who was the painter we visited most readily when I was not working in St Mark's, almost succeeded one day in reviving my love of Albertine. I was seeing for the first time The Patriarch of Grado Exorcising a Demoniac [aka The Healing of a Madman aka Miracle of the Relic of the Cross at the Ponte di Rialto]. I looked at the marvellous rose-pink and violet sky and the tall encrusted chimneys silhouetted against it, their flared stacks, blossoming like red tulips, reminiscent of so many Whistlers of Venice.

Then my eyes traveled from the old wooden Rialto 

to that fifteenth-century Ponte Vecchio with its marble palaces decorated with gilded capitals, 

and returned to the canal on which the boats are maneuvered by adolescents in pink jackets and plumed torques...

 Finally, before leaving the picture, my eyes came back to the shore, swarming with the everyday Venetian life of the period. I looked at the barber wiping his razor [unidentified]
at the negro humping his barrel

at the Muslims conversing,

at the noblemen in wide-sleeved brocade and damask robes and hats of cerise velvet, and suddenly I felt a slight gnawing at my heart.

On the back of one of the Compagni della Calza identifiable from the emblem, embroidered in gold and pearls on their sleeves or their collars, of the merry confraternity to which they were affiliate, 

I had just recognised the cloak which Albertine had put on to come with me to Versailles in an open carriage on the evening when I so little suspected that scarcely fifteen hours separated me from the moment of her departure from my house.

Always ready for anything, when I had asked her to come out with me on that melancholy evening which she was to describe in her last letter as "doubly crepuscular in that dusk was falling and we were about to part," she had flung over her shoulders a Fortuny cloak which she had taken away with her next day and which I had never thought of since.

It was from this Carpaccio picture that that inspired son Venice had taken it, it was from the shoulders of this Compagno della Calza that he had removed it in order to drape it over the shoulder of so many Parisian women who were certainly unaware, as I had been until then, that the model for it existed in a group of noblemen in the foreground of the Patriarch of Grado in a room in the Academia in Venice.

I had recognised it down to the last detail, and, that cloak having restored to me as I looked at it the eyes and the heart of him who had set out that evening with Albertine for Versailles, I was overcome for a few moments by a vague feeling of desire and melancholy."