Die Vision des heiligen Nikolaus

You would not expect a Tintoretto here. This altarpiece hangs not in Venice but in Novo Mesto, a town in what is now Slovenia, above the high altar of its chapter church. The reason is administrative: in the 1580s the Patriarchate of Aquileia still reached across the top of the Adriatic and far inland, and its head was a Venetian, Giovanni Grimani. When a fire gutted the church in 1576, Grimani ordered the new altarpiece, around 1582, from Tintoretto, then running one of the busiest workshops in Venice. He set the town's patron, Saint Nicholas, beside two early martyrs of Aquileia, Hermagoras and Fortunatus, put to death for their faith around the year 305.