A recent monograph has greatly expanded our knowledge of the Dominican church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, but its important sacristy was inevitably dealt with in a cursory manner. With regard to the sacristy, it remains necessary to reconcile a ‘pending account’ with the large canvas illustrating Honorius III Approving the Rule of St. Dominic in 1216 (Plate 5) by the painter Leandro Bassano (d.1622), second son of Jacopo da Ponte. The iconography of the scene dates back to the Middle Ages, showing Pope Honorius III's formal approval in 1216 of Domingo di Guzmán's's rule. In the canvas, however, the founder is accompanied by seven Dominican fathers and the ceremony takes place in the presence of eighteen cardinals, whoflank the pope in two groups, with a procession of Swiss guards and the masters of ceremonies. One of them is delivering a dispatch, the contents of which are unclear, but, as this chapter will argue, it could allude to dramatic contemporary events in which members of the order were inevitably involved, namely the interdict placed on Venice by the pope in 1606 and its ultimate revocation a year later.

In his description of Bassano's canvas, Carlo Ridolfi recorded that the painter ‘portrayed from life some Cardinals and Fathers then residing in that convent’. The image therefore forms a sort of tableau vivant that has not yet received adequate scholarly attention, especially considering its historical significance in documenting an important episode in the problematic relationship between the preaching fathers, the Venetian government, the papacy, and other European states, such as France and Spain.