Probatica Piscina

To understand this crowded, shadowy canvas, stand where it hangs. This is the upper hall of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, the meeting house of a Venetian brotherhood dedicated to Saint Roch, the saint people prayed to against plague. And plague is the point. Between 1575 and 1577 an outbreak killed something like a third of Venice, the old Titian among the dead. Tintoretto painted this a year or two after, around 1579, for men who had just lived through that. The subject fits them exactly. It is the pool of Bethesda from John's gospel, where crowds of the sick, the blind and the lame lay waiting for the water to stir and heal the first one in. Tintoretto fills the hall with those bodies, packed under a great vaulted portico in his late, flickering light, while Christ moves among them to raise a man who had waited there for years.