"The picture is like a book, more absolutely true than any chronicle, representing not only the looks and customs of the occasion, but the very scene. How eagerly the people must have traced it out when it first was made public, finding out in every group some known faces, some image all the more interesting because it was met in the flesh every day! Is that perhaps Zuan Bellini himself, with his hair standing out round his face, talking to his companions about the passing procession, pointing out the curious effects of light and shade upon the crimson capes and berettas, and watching while the line defiles with its glimmer of candles and sound of psalms against the majestic shadow of the houses?" The fragment of the True Cross which performs, in this first painting, the miracle of a great cure, was presented to the Brotherhood of the Scuola di San Giovanni Evangelista by the Grand Chancellor of Cyprus, who had in turn received it from the Patriarch of Constantinople. This relic had performed so many wonders that the Confraternity felt the importance of recording them, so to speak, on these enormous canvases, that all the world might see and believe. A second picture commemorates an occasion when the sacred relic was carried in procession to the Church of San Lorenzo, and when on the bridge near the church it was dropped into the canal. Many persons among the profane crowd which followed the procession leaped into the water, and are seen in the picture swimming about in search of the relic. Some boats also have come near for the same purpose; but not until Andrea Vendramini, the {359} chief warden of the Scuola, descended into the canal in his full habit, could the precious object be found. For him it floated upright, because, as the tradition teaches, of his being granted this great privilege by miraculous favor.