Finding of the body of St Mark

Tintoretto's Finding of the Body of Saint Mark, painted around 1562–66 and now in the Pinacoteca di Brera, is among the most technically astonishing paintings of the Italian Renaissance — a vast canvas (396 × 400 cm) in which the interior of an Alexandrian building creates one of the most radical perspectival experiments in sixteenth-century painting. The scene depicts the miraculous discovery of Saint Mark's relics in Alexandria by Venetian merchants in the ninth century — the founding event of Venice's special claim to apostolic heritage that justified building the Basilica of San Marco to house the evangelist's body. Tintoretto's composition places the dramatic moment of the saint's miraculous intervention (Saint Mark appearing to identify his own body among the other corpses) at the end of a cavernous corridor that recedes with almost vertiginous depth into the right side of the composition. The Brera acquired this work through the Napoleonic suppression of the Scuola Grande di San Marco, the confraternity for which it was painted, in one of the most significant instances of the wholesale movement of Italian civic and religious art into public museums that characterized the early nineteenth century.

The dramatic perspectival arcade creates extraordinary spatial depth, with the supernatural light from the saint's body illuminating the darkened crypt in a composition of remarkable theatrical power.