According to a literary tradition attested since the Fourteenth Century, when Attila arrived in Italy in 452 were
destroyed many cities in the Veneto, but Treviso was saved thanks to Bishop Elviando, who persuaded the people
to submit to the enemy trough his ambassadors Gilberto and Solomon. In 1564 Pomponio Amalteo painted
this scene on the inside of Porta Altinia in Treviso, finally destroyed during a bombing in 1944. In 1866 the
italian art historian Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle wrote some considerations on the paintings of the Porta
Altinia in the notebook on his trip in Veneto and, in 1876, he spoke again on the same subject.
In 1587 the painter Ludwig Toeput, inspired by the local scholar Giovanni Bonifacio, represented the same
episode on the façade of the Palazzo del Consiglio. Later, in the Eighteenth Century, Giacomo Belloni from
Oderzo, commissioned by Bishop Francesco Paolo Giustiniani, reproduced the scene in a room of his Palace.
A sort of curse seems to have hit these paintings condemning them to death. However, descriptions of local
scholars and art historians of the Nineteenth Century testify to the vitality of the legend.
