Comitatus 43 (2012) 133–146. PASSIVE VIRTUE AND ACTIVE VALOR: CARPACCIO’S TWO LADIES ON AN ALTANA ABOVE A HUNT Lisa Boutin Vitela * Abstract: The work of painter Vittore Carpaccio throws new light on the gender ideals pervasive in Venetian society during the late fifteenth century. Recent conservation re- search has revealed that the artist’s most famous work, a rare domestic panel depicting two sumptuously attired women seated on a rooftop terrace or altana (Museo Correr, Venice) was, in fact, only the lower half of a painting whose upper portion depicted men hunting on the Venetian lagoon (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles). Yet scholars have continued to address the separated panels as if they each constituted an artistic whole, rather than addressing the complexities of the recomposed panel’s iconography. In this article, the entire painting is analyzed as a construction of contemporary notions of gen- der difference. The image is read as an accurate depiction of aspects of Venetian life, while also serving as an allegory of courtship through the representation of female pas- sivity and virtue in contrast to male aggression in the midst of the hunt. Key Words: Vittore Carpaccio, Two Venetian Ladies, Two Courtesans, Hunting on the Lagoon, early modern material culture, Renaissance Venice, Renaissance body, Renaissance gender roles, Renaissance courtship, gendered spaces. Historians feel that Vittore Carpaccio’s narrative paintings provide glimpses of late fifteenth-century Venetian life. His paintings fre- quently included details of furniture and clothing that scholars have concluded to be accurate representations. Carpaccio’s narrative paint- ings for Venetian scuole (confraternities) are frequently selected to illustrate home interiors and material culture of the Venetian Renaissance. 1 His most famous painting, Two Venetian Ladies in the Museo Correr in Venice, is less straightforward, however, than his paintings for the confraternities. In order to unravel this mysterious painting of two ladies seated on a rooftop terrace or altana, scholars have attempted to identify the ladies’ identities and the subject matter * Department of Art & Design, Fine Arts Division, Cerritos College, 11110 Alondra Boulevard, Norwalk, CA 90650. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Renaissance Conference of Southern California at the Huntington Library in March 2007. I am grateful to conference participants for their helpful feedback. I thank Joanna Woods- Marsden for generously reviewing numerous drafts of this article and the staff of the paintings department at the J. Paul Getty Museum for permitting access to object files. 1 Carpaccio’s cycles for the scuola di Sant’Orsula and the scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni have been frequently used to illustrate Venetian domestic interiors. See the essays by Ronda Kasl, “Holy Households: Art and Devotion in Renaissance Venice,” Giovanni Bellini and the Art of Devotion, ed. Ronda Kasl (Indianapolis 2004) 58; and Jeremy Warren, “Bronzes” At Home in Renaissance Italy, ed. Marta Ajmar-Wollheim and Flora Dennis (London 2006) 294–305.