When a saint's name becomes a building

Two saints are named in this title and neither one is in the picture as a person. Santi Giovanni e Paolo is a Venetian church, and the Scuola di San Marco is the building beside it — a confraternity house carrying the name of the evangelist. This is the end state of the naming system: the attribute names the saint, the saint names the dedication, the dedication names the street, and eventually the word is an address that no one reads as a person.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the view to 1725 and gives the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Dresden, Germany as its location. The dimensions are 125.1 x 165.1 cm, a broad horizontal — the format a facade requires when it has to be met head on. It is filed under Landscapes, City and Architectural, with Baroque as the style and Italian as the nationality; the measured colour family is yellow.

No religious category at all

The subject categories on this entry contain no religious heading. That is the correct filing: the picture's subject is masonry and a square. What it preserves of the saints is their names, cut into a building, which is a different kind of survival from a wheel or a set of keys but the same mechanism — a sign standing in for a person who is not there.