St Mary Magdalen

To understand this picture you have to know the building. The Scuola Grande di San Rocco was the hall of a Venetian brotherhood devoted to Saint Roch, the saint people prayed to against plague, and Venice had good reason to pray. The epidemic of 1575 to 1577 killed something like a third of the city, the old painter Titian among them. Tintoretto spent much of his life decorating this scuola, and by the 1580s, now near 70, he was filling the shadowy ground-floor hall. His Magdalen is not the usual close-up penitent. She sits small at the edge of a huge, dark landscape, half-swallowed by trees, with a strange pale light breaking low behind her. The figure is almost the least of it. Most of the canvas is night.