The Jews in the Desert

These were among the last things Tintoretto ever painted. He was in his mid-seventies, running a busy Venetian workshop with his son, and he died in 1594, the year after finishing this. It was made for the presbytery of San Giorgio Maggiore, the white church Palladio had just built on its own island across the water from the Piazza San Marco. The scene is the Israelites in the desert, gathering the manna that fell from heaven to feed them. It hangs opposite his Last Supper, and the pairing is deliberate: the bread God sends in the wilderness set against the bread Christ breaks at the table. The paint is thin and dark, lit by sudden flashes, the loose, hurried touch of a very old master no longer much interested in finish.