Tintoretto, The Finding of the Body of Saint Mark, c. 1562-66

Tintoretto, The Finding of the Body of Saint Mark, c. 1562-66, oil on canvas, 396 x 400 cm (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan)

Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker

(piano music)

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

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

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

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

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

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

in that fabulous gold brocade.

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

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

Male voiceover: (laughing) It is creepy.

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

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

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

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

exaggerated perspective.

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

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

Female voiceover: Okay.

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

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

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

to retrieve the body.

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

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

Male voiceover: We have
this perspectival space.

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

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

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

and you can see the
stone has been picked up.

Female voiceover: We have
a continuous narrative.

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

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

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

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

up the body from the
feet up towards the head.

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

and very stark illumination on that body.

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

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

Female voiceover: In a
way that makes us sense

that figure does not belong to this time.

He's not a 9th century Venetian.

He's a 16th century Venetian.

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

It's a very complicated image.

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

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

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

up just to the left of
this yellow, dead body

and that is also Saint Mark.

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

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

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

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

again this wonderfully recessive
space with all of these arches

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

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

one of these corpses.

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

that there's a kind of honoring.

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

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

who's moving out of the canvas towards us.

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

that makes this painting
most remarkable, in my eyes,

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

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

such license with the
traditions of painting.

Female voiceover: The space rushes back.

The body of Saint Mark
is heroic and elongated.

The contrast of light and
dark are dramatic and intense.

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

for expressive purpose.

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

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

Instead, this is a world
of mystery where only

the faintest delineation of form is given.

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

after the Council of Trent.

This is Mannerism.

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

when we think about artists like Raphael.

We have the opposite here.

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

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

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

of painterliness, of real visibility
of brushwork by Tintoretto.

(piano music)