DescriptionThis dissertation examines the art and architecture commissioned for the religious complex of San Giorgio in Braida in Verona between 1441 and 1668 and demonstrates that it embodied the visual corporate identity formulated by the Congregation of Secular Canons at San Giorgio in Alga, their mother church in Venice. The Congregation was a major player in the pre-Tridentine reform movements of northern Italy and its iconographic program was part of its strategy to reform the clergy and monastic life in general. Using new archival findings and San Giorgio in Braida’s artistic patrimony as primary evidence, I unravel and explain the Secular Canons’ considered identity. I then demonstrate that the Congregation adapted it as it matured and reacted to major religious, political and artistic changes that rippled across the Veneto between the Congregation’s founding in 1402 and its suppression in 1668. This dissertation also examines the modes of patronage used by the Canons at San Giorgio in Braida, and by extension, the system of patronage used by the Congregation as a whole. Eventually every commission at all eleven of its religious houses was underpinned by this iconographic program, which had the effect of binding the Canons and their surroundings both spiritually and visually. Though some of the Canons’ churches have been the focus of specific research, this is the first to investigate the whole Congregation as a single, thoughtful commissioner of art.