Il monumento funebre di Francesco Dandolo nella sala del capitolo ai Frari

The funerary monument of doge Francesco Dandolo (d. 31 October 1339) is in many respects unique in the context of the Venetian lagoon. Its original location, the Chapter House of the Frari, was converted for the use of the Archivio di Stato in the Napoleonic period, after the Franciscan friary had been suppressed. The structure of the monument – consisting of an arched recess, a painted lunette and a sarcophagus decorated with sculptural reliefs – adopts the typology of the wall-tomb with figural lunette established in Venice in the second half of the thirteenth century. This multi-media tomb presents many new aspects (among which, for instance, the insertion of a painted panel into the space of the recess); yet at the same time, it reveals contradictory elements which seem to suggest interventions of different dates in the overall structure. Indeed, the painted icon, a masterpiece of the maturity of Paolo Veneziano showing Saints Francis and Elizabeth presenting the doge and dogaressa to the Virgin, is datable to 1339-40, that is to say, very soon after the death of the doge. It fulfils the wishes of his testament, which provided for the fitting out of the tomb, and named his wife Elisabetta as one of his executors. By contrast, the sarcophagus, with its bas-relief scene of the Dormition of the Virgin, two angels on the corners, and symbols of the evangelists Mark and John on the ends, reveals a more archaic figural language, which cannot be dated later than the second decade of the century. Thus the stone casket is not the work of a rather old-fashioned workshop, as suggested in the literature, but in reality an example of re-use by patrons who still considered it – especially in terms of the subject matter – perfectly adequate for its function and appropriate to the message which the ducal family and the friars wished to communicate.