So you are a young college student, American, on your first whistle-stop tour of Europe. You have fought through the multitudes in front of the Mona Lisa and “Las Meninas,” tried to concentrate on the Sistine Chapel ceiling as the tour groups jostle you. But when you wash up here in the lagoon, and make your way to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco — a 16th-century clubhouse for middle-class Venetians — you step into something you’d forgotten: silence.

Inside there are fewer than a dozen people, and all around you, in the half-light, are some of the boldest paintings of the Italian Renaissance, depicting the life of Christ with a directness you have never seen before. You gasp before the burly bodies that loom amid shearing bolts of white and divine blasts of amber. You walk out of San Rocco half an hour later, and the light outside seems too bright. Everything you thought you knew about painting is wrong.