On the opposite wall are three more winners, these relating to Saint Jerome. The first is the funniest: He and his lion arrive at a desert monastery, where the lion strikes panic among the monks. The monks flee in all directions, despite the saint's obvious reassurances that the animal is blind as a bat and hasn't a tooth in his head. Then comes the death of Saint Jerome, followed by Saint Augustine in his study. What, you may ask, has this to do with Jerome? Simply that the two knew each other well, and Augustine tells in his Confessions of how one day when he was writing to his friend, he had a sudden divine revelation telling him that Jerome was dead. This is the subject of the picture, but once again the fascination is in the detail. Here is the study not of a fifth-century saint but of a well-to-do early-sixteenth-century Venetian churchman. Look at the furniture, the bookshelf, the little cabinet of wonders, the altar with miter and crosier—and of course at everybody's favorite little dog, gazing questioningly up at his master, or perhaps seeing the vision himself.

We then threaded our way through to the Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo, which boasts no fewer than three showstoppers. The first is the great church itself, begun in the thirteenth century by the Dominicans, who still occupy it today. Virtually unadorned on the outside, it has an interior that impresses, above all, with its immensity. A favorite burial place for doges, the church has some remarkable tombs—particularly in the apse—and a few good pictures, of which Giovanni Bellini's early polyptych of Saint Vincent Ferrer is the best (though not a patch on his painting in San Zaccaria). The Chapel of the Rosary, in the far northeastern corner, was largely destroyed by fire in the nineteenth century, but there are some splendid Veroneses—imported later from another church—on the ceiling, and a row of quite astonishing wood carvings on the side stalls. Perhaps because of its proximity to the cemetery island of San Michele (and also, let's face it, to the hospital), this is the great funeral church of Venice; I well remember the tremendous send-off that was given to Igor Stravinsky in 1971. He died in New York, but his body was taken to Venice for burial on San Michele, next to his friend Diaghilev.

You emerge into the sunshine and there, immediately on your right, is the dazzling School of San Marco—the principal hospital of Venice and surely the world's most beautiful working hospital. Behind that magical facade, it runs back all the way to the Fondamenta Nuove—the north shore of the city—but the facade is what counts. The style is early Renaissance: Those inlaid panels of colored marble unmistakably date the building to the last quarter of the fifteenth century. I particularly love the agonizingly foreshortened Lions of St. Mark flanking the main door; their two separate perspectives leave the viewer cross-eyed.