Jacopo Tintoretto
Saint Mark Saving a Saracen from Shipwreck
1562-66
Oil on canvas, 398 x 337 cm.
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice
The painting illustrates an episode in the Golden Legend's account of St. Mark's miracles. A Saracen sailor, cast adrift in a storm, prays to St. Mark for deliverance, promising that he will convert if rescued. Thereupon "a man all shining appeared to him, which took him out of the water and remitted him again into the ship."
The phrase "all shining" has led the painter to a meditation on being "saved." The brilliant light that falls on the sailor comes from behind St. Mark and thus is ascribed to God himself. That God and not man is the sole author of salvation is also suggested by the contrast between the bright light in the upper right and the dark water in the bottom left. In that water one sailor cannot be saved by the man in yellow, because he is already dead, and the other sailor cannot be saved because the man in red refuses help. Both the red and yellow figures are old men with identically long beards, most likely to associate them with the "old man" of St. Paul's letters, a metaphor for the life "corrupted according to the desire of error" that his congregants lived before they "learned Christ."1
Read more about images of St. Mark.
Photo: this page at Wikimedia Commons.
