The Rough Guide to Venice and the Veneto

Bragadin himself had his ears cut off in an assault that proved to be a foretaste
of days of torture. His eventual execution was appalling – chained to a stake
on the public scaffold, he was slowly flayed alive in front of the Pasha. His
skin, stuffed with straw, was then mounted on a cow and paraded through the
streets, prior to being hung from the bowsprit of the admiral’s galley for the
return voyage to Constantinople. Later the skin was brought back to Venice,
and today it sits in that urn high up on the wall.
Giovanni Bellini’s painting for the first altar went up in smoke some years
ago, but his marvellous polyptych of SS Vincent Ferrer, Christopher and Sebastian
(on the second altar) has come through the centuries in magnificent fettle,
although it has lost the image of God the Father that used to be in the lunette.
The oozing effigy reclining below is of Tommaso Caraffini, confessor and
biographer of Saint Catherine of Siena).
central castello
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Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo
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