This is the second painting from Belgrade that I have sneaked into my current stream of piffle today, but that is the delight of this blog. It is not always full of excitement. This is Saint Roch, a sixteenth-century oil painting on a wooden panel by the Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio. Roch is shown as a remarkably youthful pilgrim, holding his long staff and raising his other hand in what appears to be a blessing. According to tradition, he travelled through Italy caring for victims of the plague, contracted the disease himself and subsequently became a saint invoked for protection against it. It seems like quite a complex arrangement to me.
Saint Roch is usually depicted displaying the plague wound on his thigh and accompanied by the dog that brought him food, although neither is evident here, so perhaps the dog had been given the day off. I was quite reliant on the museum label to tell me who this was, as my knowledge of saints is not entirely impeccable.
Far more interesting to me, however, is that the artist’s name acquired an unexpected second life in 1950 when Giuseppe Cipriani of Harry’s Bar in Venice named his new dish of thinly sliced raw beef after him, as its red colouring reminded him of Carpaccio’s paintings. The vivid red clothing in this work makes that decision slightly easier to understand, although the saint himself looks unlikely to approve of becoming indirectly associated with an uncooked starter. Plague protection, a surviving panel from a Renaissance polyptych and culinary immortality seemed sufficient to justify sneaking another painting into the blog proceedings.