Presentation of Jesus in the temple

Look at the steps below the altar and you'll find a small wooden barrel resting there. It isn't decoration. Tintoretto painted this scene in the mid-1550s for the Scuola dei Bottari, the confraternity of Venice's barrel-makers, and that little cask is their signature, worked quietly into a holy moment. The subject is the infant Christ brought to the Temple, where the old man Simeon takes him in his arms. In these years Tintoretto was building his name by taking on commissions from the city's craft guilds and their scuole, the lay brotherhoods that ran much of Venetian charity and pride. He sets the figures on a steep flight of steps and pushes them back into shadow, so the light seems to arrive from somewhere above the altar itself.