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Europe 1300 - 1800
Course: Europe 1300 - 1800 > Unit 4
Lesson 9: Venice- Greek painters in renaissance Venice
- The Renaissance Synagogues of Venice
- Giorgione, The Tempest
- Giorgione, The Tempest
- Giorgione, Three Philosophers
- Giorgione, the Adoration of the Shepherds
- Bellini and Titian, the Feast of the Gods
- Titian, Pastoral Concert
- Titian, Noli me Tangere
- Titian, Assumption of the Virgin
- Titian, Madonna of the Pesaro Family
- Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne
- Titian, Isabella d’Este (Isabella in Black)
- Titian, two portraits of Pietro Aretino
- Titian, Venus of Urbino
- Titian, Venus of Urbino
- Titian's Venus of Urbino
- Titian, Christ Crowned with Thorns
- Titian, Pieta
- Correggio, Jupiter and Io
- Correggio, Assumption of the Virgin
- Veronese, The Family of Darius Before Alexander
- Veronese, the Dream of Saint Helena
- Paolo Veronese. Feast in the House of Levi
- Transcript of the trial of Veronese
- Tintoretto, the Miracle of the Slave
- Tintoretto, The Finding of the Body of Saint Mark
- Tintoretto, the Origin of the Milky Way
- Tintoretto, Last Supper
- Palladio, La Rotonda
- Palladio, Teatro Olimpico
- The Renaissance in Venice in the 1500s
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Tintoretto, The Finding of the Body of Saint Mark
Jacopo 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. Created by Steven Zucker and Beth Harris.
Want to join the conversation?
- I heard a story that St. Mark's body was smuggled out of Alexandria in a basket full of pork products, so that the Islamic customs officers inspecting the outgoing merchandise would not examine the smugglers' things too closely. Is this true?(3 votes)
- That's lax, is what it is; as a Muslim (which I am) I would take my customs job very seriously and investigate the swine as well as- or more intensively- than the halal- because people like to exploit a "weakness". Afterward, asking God for forgiveness but it may not be necessary as the purpose of my job is "to remove an obstruction from the path" by finding contraband.(8 votes)
- How do we know the man on the left is Saint Mark? Is there a special mark or symbol that would distinguish him from another saint?(4 votes)
- Living St. Mark is usually depicted with a Bible or scroll, as he was a contributor to the Gospel. I'm guessing in this case, though, the recorded word of the author is the reason we know.(5 votes)
- It says atthat St. Mark's body was in possession of Islamic countries. How did it come to be there? 1:20(3 votes)
- Large swaths of the former Roman Empire - North Africa, the Levant, etc. - were conquered by the Islamic empires. The earliest Christians were active in regions that are today predominantly Muslim.(3 votes)
- Who are they removing from the second tomb? Do we know?(3 votes)
- At, Dr. Harris points out that, "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." Do we know who they are? Do we know if they have any relationship to St. Mark or the grave robbers? St. Mark is apparently trying to get the grave robbers to cease their desecration, but he seems not to notice the woman and her attackers. Are they just part of the scenery's atmosphere? 3:18(1 vote)
- Well, the theme of this painting is for sure elusive. If I understood it correctly, in Gombrich's The Story of Art he wrote that the dead body appeared miraculously and the "ghost" of St. Mark made himself visible just to point that the body has been found and they should stop the search. This way it maybe makes a little bit more sense....but then the open tomb with bright light shining inside doesn't really make sense.(1 vote)
- One thing I don't get is why Saint Mark telling them not to take the bodies? Wouldn't the Saint want them taken back to Venice?(1 vote)
- It is that Mark is telling then to not open other graves(1 vote)
- At, it is mentioned that this has a rushing, exaggerated perspective. I can certainly see that perspective in action, much like it is in action in Tintoretto's Last Supper, but I wonder what gives it the rushing effect of the perspective? What quality makes Tintoretto's paintings so much more dynamic in perspective than other single-point perspective paintings? 0:51(1 vote)
Video transcript
(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)