Page of The Discovery of St Marks Body by TINTORETTO in the Web Gallery of Art, a searchable image collection and database of European paintings and sculptures (1100-1850)

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The Discovery of St Mark's Body

1562-66
Oil on canvas, 400 x 400 cm
Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

This painting was executed for the hall of the Scuola Grande di S. Marco with three other canvases (now in the Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice).

A masterpiece of Tintoretto's full maturity, this painting is a profound expression of his originality. It creates a lyric spectacle out of extreme disquietude. In fact, it expresses a visionary notion that borders on the hallucination, and in this way the scene of the stealing of the body becomes a meteoric display. A memorable image is created that has the impact of a clap of thunder at a witches' ritual.

The scene shows the saint appearing on the left and reacting to the finding of his own body. The corpse at the saint's feet is to take place of his body in the sarcophagus. The kneeling figure in the centre is the donor of the canvas, Tommaso Rangoni, who was called "the scholar of Ravenna." On the right, to balance the composition, a victim of the plague, a possessed man and a woman invoke the help of the saint.

Tintoretto has adopted here and carried further the expressive means of Tuscan and Roman Mannerism. There is the explosive perspective (note how the peak of the visual pyramid coincides with the raised hand of the saint performing the miracle). There are the dynamic crossing of the compositional diagonals, the nervous contortion and the bold foreshortening of the figures. Then there is the light from various sources that erupts from the tombs or spreads from the mouth of the long hall, like a nocturne in the porticoes of St Mark's. It prints rainbow along the bays, leaving an impression of instability and obsession. Finally there is the macabre element of the tomb-robbing scene and the anxiety of the jumble of figures in the foreground. Unreality reaches a peak in the pictorial rendering. The disintegration of the colour, an inheritance from Titian's late work, is seen in the dissociation of the brushstrokes from the material and their flickering, like a multitude of flames, against a somber and blurred surface.