Jacopo Tintoretto

In May 1564 the confraternity of San Rocco in Venice invited several established painters, Tintoretto among them, to submit sketches for a ceiling painting, with the winner picked by a vote of the membership. Tintoretto did not submit a sketch. Working through the night, he had a full-size canvas of Saint Roch in Glory painted and installed directly into the ceiling frame before the other competitors even arrived to present their designs.

When the confraternity's board objected that this was not what had been asked for, Tintoretto answered that this was, in fact, his sketch, finished, and offered it to the Scuola as a gift, since its own charter obliged it to accept any donation made to its patron saint. Cornered by their own bylaws, the board kept the painting, and kept Tintoretto too.

He spent the next two decades, from 1564 into the late 1580s, filling the building's walls and ceilings with more than 50 canvases on the lives of Christ and of Saint Roch, paid a fixed annual salary rather than by commission, which let him treat the whole building as one continuous project instead of separate jobs. Tintoretto died in Venice in 1594, not long after finishing the cycle's last painting, a vast Paradise for the Doge's Palace, then the largest oil painting ever made on canvas.