WEBVTT

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(piano music)

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Male voiceover: We're in the Brera
in Milan and we're looking at

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an enormous painting by Tintoretto, but
this is only one of a series of paintings

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on the subject of Saint Mark,
the single most important
Saint for the city of Venice.

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Female voiceover: This was commissioned
for the Scuola of Saint Mark

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or the confraternity of Saint Mark
in Venice by a man named Rangone.

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Male voiceover: And he can be seen in
the middle of the painting kneeling

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in that fabulous gold brocade.

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Female voiceover: Gesturing
down to the body of Saint Mark.

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Now, this whole painting takes
place creepily in a cemetery.

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Male voiceover: (laughing) It is creepy.

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Female voiceover: It's really
creepy. It's really dark.

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Male voiceover: (laughing)
Well it's a night scene.

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Female voiceover: And
it's lit by a candle.

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So, you have this vast architectural
space created by this rushing,

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exaggerated perspective.

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Male voiceover: But before we get
lost in the painting, let's talk about

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what's actually taking
place, what's happening here.

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Female voiceover: Okay.

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Male voiceover: So this is the story of
the finding of the body of Saint Mark.

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Saint Mark had died and was buried
in Alexandria that is in Egypt,

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and the story goes that in the 9th
century the Venetian merchants went

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to retrieve the body.

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Female voiceover: These Venetian merchants
went to find the body of Saint Mark

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to bring it back to Christendom from
Islamic Egypt, from Islamic Alexandria.

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Male voiceover: We have
this perspectival space.

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It draws our eye all the way to
the back, to that dark back wall,

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and there we see a number of figures
both in shadow and silhouette

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finding the body of Saint Mark in
a tomb brilliantly illuminated,

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and you can see the
stone has been picked up.

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Female voiceover: We have
a continuous narrative.

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We have scene two in the foreground
on the left where we see the body

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of Saint Mark foreshortened, splayed
out on the ground on top of a carpet.

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Male voiceover: Painted with a wonderful
looseness that also reminds me of

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Mantegna's dead Christ with a wild
foreshortening and the way that we look

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up the body from the
feet up towards the head.

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Female voiceover: You see the texture
of the oil paint and very dark outlines

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and very stark illumination on that body.

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Male voiceover: You also see
Tintoretto's patron, the man
who paid for these paintings

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who seems to be gesturing toward the body
of Saint Mark in a very protective way.

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Female voiceover: In a
way that makes us sense

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that figure does not belong to this time.

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He's not a 9th century Venetian.

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He's a 16th century Venetian.

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Male voiceover: There's a kind
of collapsing of time, of space.

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It's a very complicated image.

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Not only was the body found
in the back of the painting,

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and then we see the body in
the front of the painting

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but then we see this very noble
figure in red and blue who stands

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up just to the left of
this yellow, dead body

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and that is also Saint Mark.

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Female voiceover: Miraculously alive,
making this grand gesture to stop

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the raiding of the tombs that's
taking place to the right

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where we see yet another body
being removed from a tomb.

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Male voiceover: Okay. So if we look
at the architecture you can see

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again this wonderfully recessive
space with all of these arches

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and to the right of those arches we
can see there's a series of tombs

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that are attached to the walls and in one
close to us a figure is gently lowering

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one of these corpses.

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So, there's a kind of
desecration at the same time

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that there's a kind of honoring.

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Female voiceover: Finally, on the
lower right we see two figures who

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are possessed by demons who seem
to be grabbing the body of a woman

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who's moving out of the canvas towards us.

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Male voiceover: And we haven't
even talked about the thing

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that makes this painting
most remarkable, in my eyes,

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which is the radical use of
light, of color, of space.

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I've never seen a painter
this early that has taken

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such license with the
traditions of painting.

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Female voiceover: The space rushes back.

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The body of Saint Mark
is heroic and elongated.

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The contrast of light and
dark are dramatic and intense.

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It's as though all the tools of
the Renaissance are being used

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for expressive purpose.

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Male voiceover: Look at the
way that this produces an image

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that is so different from anything
that we would expect from say Raphael.

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Instead, this is a world
of mystery where only

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the faintest delineation of form is given.

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Female voiceover: So here we are
in the 1560s after the Reformation,

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after the Council of Trent.

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This is Mannerism.

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All of the balance and harmony that
we expect from the high Renaissance

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when we think about artists like Raphael.

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We have the opposite here.

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We have a composition that's coming
apart, that's stretching at its seams.

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We can see here decades of Venetian
artists' experience with oil paint.

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Belleni in the late 15th century,
Titian, and here brought to a height

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of painterliness, of real visibility
of brushwork by Tintoretto.

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(piano music)