Vendramin family

The reliquary of the True Cross shown on the altar in the National Gallery Titian, which still exists, was connected with a miracle in 1370-82 depicted by Vittorio Carpaccio, Gentile Bellini and other artists.

When accidentally dropped into a canal during a congested procession it did not sink but hovered over the water, evading others trying to help, until an earlier Andrea Vendramin (grandfather of the Doge) dived in and retrieved it.

[12] Both the large Bellini painting, The Miracle of the True Cross near San Lorenzo Bridge, of 1496–1500,[2], and the Carpaccio of 1494, are now in the Accademia museum.

In the first half of the sixteenth century Gabriele Vendramin was a notable patron of artists and the owner of one of the most significant collections in Venice.

The high-living heirs came to a lawsuit over the collection, when agents of Albrecht V of Bavaria, led by Jacopo Strada, were negotiating over acquiring it in toto.

The important paintings in the collection when it was in the hands of a younger Andrea Vendramin (c. 1565-1629) in 1627 were documented in an album of pen-and-ink drawings[21] before they were purchased in Venice after his death by the Dutch merchant and connoisseur Jan Reynst and passed to the Reynst Collection in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century; at least one of his Italian paintings was among those presented to Charles II of England in 1660, as part of the diplomatic gesture called the "Dutch Gift".

[35] All the main Venetian theatres were owned by important patrician families; combining business with pleasure in the Italian city— perhaps even the European city— with the most crowded and competitive theatrical culture.

When most opera in Europe was still being put on by courts, "economic prospects and a desire for exhibitionistic display", as well a decline in their traditional overseas trading, attracted the best Venetian families to invest in the theatre during the 17th century.

[37] In the age of Carlo Goldoni, the greatest Venetian dramatist, only the San Luca and the Malibran still put on spoken drama, and his desertion of the Grimani for the Vendramins at San Luca in 1752 was a major event in the theatrical history of the period, ushering in perhaps his finest period, in which as well as his comedies, he played a significant role in the development of the opera buffa.

[38] The Vendramins, who had considerable direct involvement in the management of the theatre, had a sometimes uneasy relationship with him, arguing over money and the style of his plays, until he left for Paris in 1761, as a result of a dispute with his rival, Carlo Gozzi.