The Jews in the Desert

The Jews in the Desert, painted in 1593 and now in the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, belongs to the final campaign of Tintoretto's work for Palladio's great Benedictine church — a series of large canvases (including the Last Supper and the Stoning of Stephen) that was essentially completed in the final year of his life. At over 3.5 meters tall and nearly 6 meters wide, the painting demonstrates that the seventy-five-year-old Tintoretto retained the compositional ambition and physical capacity for monumental work that had defined his entire career. The subject — the Israelites gathering manna in the desert, the same Old Testament subject he had treated at San Rocco in 1577 — takes on a different character in the San Giorgio context: where the San Rocco version emphasized the typological connection to the Eucharist in Counter-Reformation theological terms, this final version is more expansive and atmospheric, the vast crowd distributed across an open landscape with a freedom of spatial organization that reflects sixty years of accumulated mastery. The two versions of the same subject, separated by sixteen years and held in different Venetian buildings, provide an instructive comparison of his middle and late styles.

The composition stretches across a vast landscape populated with numerous figures, rendered with the sketchy, flickering brushwork of Tintoretto's final period. Light plays across the scene in patches, creating an almost supernatural atmosphere.