Agents of Liberation

Agents of Liberation Commentary by Roger Ferlo Bible Passage This gigantic oil painting, completed in 1549, is one of the early masterpieces of the sixteenth-century artist Jacopo Robusti, known as Tintoretto (1518–1604). It hangs high up to one side of the altar in the Church of San Rocco in Venice, behind which the saint’s body lies interred. Perhaps the first depiction in Western art of bubonic plague, which would rage through the city several times in Tintoretto’s long lifetime, the work soon became famous. El Greco (1541–1614), active in Spain in the next generation, called it ‘the greatest painting in the world’ (Marias and Riello 2017: 295–96). No wonder. The innovation of its deep visual perspective (what is happening in that dark, off-centre corridor at the rear?) is set off by at least two mysterious sources of brilliant, focused light. The open space at the bottom of the canvas leads the viewer’s eye, as if on a sacred pathway, toward the central figure of the saint reaching out to embrace a single sufferer. Bathed in light, the pair is portrayed in a pose reminiscent of a Pietà, preternaturally still in the midst of a swirling mass of sufferers and healers. Tintoretto depicts these surrounding figures with startling physicality as they crowd the canvas on either side. Like the pilgrim in the church gazing up at this painting, standing just a few feet from the grave of the saint himself, each figure in the painting, whether sufferer or caregiver, bends its gaze toward the scene of healing at the centre. San Rocco or Saint Roch (c.1346–c.79) was revered in Venice as both a victim and a healer. Once himself a victim of the plague, isolated and outcast like the Samaritan in Luke’s story, he was often depicted pointing to the sore—the ‘bubo’—visible on his naked thigh. Healed of his illness and rescued from his self-imposed isolation, San Rocco in Tintoretto’s vision is a Christ-like victim become Christ-like healer, after the example of Jesus in Luke 17:11–19. He bravely enters the prison-like ‘pest house’ as an agent of liberation—liberation both from the horrible disease that threatened to destroy the city, and from the cruel social quarantine that the city’s fear and ignorance forced upon its hapless victims. References Echols, Robert and Frederick Ilchman. 2018. ‘Almost a Prophet: The Art of Tintoretto’, in Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice, ed. by Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art), pp. 1–35 Marias, Fernando and José Riello. 2017. El Greco, Il miracolo della naturalezza. Il pensiero artistico di El Greco attraverso le note a margine a Vitruvio e Vasari (Rome: Castelvecchi)