INTRODUCTION

The Renaissance – a world in movement – emerges in vivid colors in VittoreCarpaccio’s The Legend of St Ursula. Carpaccio completed this stunningnarrative, displayed in a cycle of nine panels, in the 1490s. This was a watershed moment in European history. Ottoman power was expanding in the eastern Mediterranean, with the Turks overrunning many of Venice’s strongholds. To Venetians, developments in the west were no less unsettling. The Portuguese had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope in the late 1480s, a feat that would soon open up a direct sea route to the lucrative spice markets of the Indies, and news of Columbus’s voyages and his discovery of yet another new route to the Indies (or so it was widely believed at the time) first reached Venice while Carpaccio was working on the Ursula cycle.