Gallerie dell'Accademia: Venetian painting, room by room

Bellini's large altarpiece for the church of San Giobbe shows the Virgin enthroned among saints in a painted chapel of gold mosaic. It is the moment Venetian painting learns to build space with light and color.

Nine large canvases painted by Vittore Carpaccio for the Scuola di Sant'Orsola, a confraternity under the patronage of the Loredan family. Ships, ambassadors and bedrooms turn a medieval legend into a portrait of late fifteenth-century Venice.

Painted from 1496 for the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista by Gentile Bellini, Carpaccio and others, these canvases include Gentile's Procession in St Mark's Square, a precious record of the Piazza and the Basilica as they looked around 1500.

A small panel painted around 1506–1508 for the Venetian patrician Gabriele Vendramin, and still without an agreed meaning: a soldier, a nursing mother, a flash of lightning over a city. X-rays show that Giorgione first painted another female figure where the young man now stands. Nearby hangs his Old Woman (La Vecchia).

Painted in 1534–1538 for the Sala dell'Albergo of the Scuola della Carità, it still hangs in the room it was made for: one of the rare chances to see a Titian in its original setting. Elsewhere in the galleries is his late, dramatic Pietà.

Saint Mark plunges headfirst from the sky to free a slave condemned to torture. The canvas, completed in 1548 for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, was the young Tintoretto's first major public success; you can follow him further at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco near the Frari.

Painted in 1573 as a Last Supper for the refectory of the Dominicans at Santi Giovanni e Paolo, it drew Veronese before the Inquisition for its crowd of servants, dwarves and soldiers. Rather than repaint it, he changed the title. Its size alone, more than twelve meters wide, stops you in your tracks.