Finding of the body of St Mark

The painting belongs to a series of large canvases dedicated to Saint Mark, the patron saint of Venice, which Tintoretto painted for Tommaso Rangone, the grand guardian of the Scuola Grande di San Marco, to narrate the arrival of the saint's body in the city. Its traditional title refers to a discovery, yet the episode it appears to show is the miracles of Saint Mark in the church of Boucolis in Alexandria, as some scholars have pointed out. The confusion goes back at least to 1648, when Carlo Ridolfi described the scene as the moment of lifting the saint's body.

The saint stands with his feet on the ground, unlike other post-mortem scenes in which he seems to fly, which suits his role as a healer and miracle worker. He cures a sick person, raises a dead man and drives demons from a half-naked, contorted man in the right foreground, above whom wisps of smoke drift. At the centre, an elderly man kneels in acknowledgement of the miracles; he is identified with a portrait of Tommaso Rangone.

The composition shows Tintoretto's fondness for dramatic effects of perspective and light. The floor tiles, the wall tombs and the rays of light coming out of the crypt in the background heighten the foreshortening, while shadows and bright patches seem to undermine the orderly logic of the space. Some areas look unfinished, since the floor tiles and cornices can still be made out through clothing and figures. Alongside its companion piece showing the transfer of the saint's body to Venice, the work presents a space in which several levels of reality coexist.

Painter

Jacopo Tintoretto

Date

1562

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

396 × 400 cm

Museum

Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

Movement

Mannerism, Venetian school

Genre

religious art

Depicts

Mark the Evangelist

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