Orsola e l’annuncio del martirio. Un sogno di donna nella pittura veneziana del Rinascimento

In 1495, Vittore Carpaccio painted the famous "Dream of Saint Ursula" for the Scuola di Sant'Orsola in Venice, a work that became celebrated and about which much has been written. However, no scholar had ever noted that the Venetian painter's invention represents an "unicum" in the European iconographic tradition of the Renaissance. Already in Jacopo da Varagine's Legenda aurea, Ursula is described as a kind of captain, capable of coordinating armies, moving ships, and organizing military exercises to promote that indispensable holy war to which she was called. Yet this source does not speak of Ursula's dream: the dreamer in the Dominican friar's text and more generally in the hagiographic tradition is a man, Pope Cyriac. The essay proposes to interpret Carpaccio's invention, no doubt the result of a reinterpretation of the "Dream of Pope Cyriac" by Thomas of Modena, as a clever way of attributing to Orsola, a woman, the same virtues of a miles christianus like St. George. It is a kind of anticipation in figure of that debate on the excellence of the female sex, which will play such a part in the pictorial inventions of the following century, laying the foundations for the birth of a real strand of female redemption.