Religious lay confraternities in Venice were called scuole. They weren’t ‘schools’, but brotherhoods of men–sometimes organized professionally, sometimes nationally, sometimes because of a particular devotion to a relic or saint–that gathered in meeting houses. The wealthiest of these scuole commissioned paintings for their meeting houses, some of which, like the Scuola of San Rocco, were sumptuously decorated. At the end of the 15th century the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, which had a famous relic of the True Cross, had a team of painters do images that showed the relic’s history and miraculous intercessions. This is a detail of one of the paintings, The Miracle at St Lido, by Mansueti. In all the paintings portraits of the scuola members appear, preternaturally realistic and individualized, such as these ones here.