A Hand by Antonio Rizzo and the Double Caritas Scheme of the Tron Tomb

Abstract

The tomb of Doge Nicolò Tron (d. 1473) in the church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice, erected during the last quarter of the fifteenth century, has a good claim to being the first of the large wall-filling tomb structures which became the fashion for high-ranking burials in Venice (Fig. 1).1 The tomb has, however, evoked widely divergent reactions. Critical opinion of the work ranges from “the most grandiose of Venetian funerary monuments of the Renaissance”2 to “an arid effort to impress by sheer size and multiplicity of detail.”3 But both positive and negative judgments stress largeness of scale as the major factor of interest. Rarely have the innovations of the tomb been closely looked at: the establishment of a new unity between wall surface and monument,4 the combination of architecture and sculpture to give a number of well-defined levels in a progressively upward movement which operates both formally and iconographically,5 and the important reinterpretation of certain earlier conventions of tomb sculpture, such as the double representation of the deceased.6