The Siege of Asola

Tintoretto was only in his mid-20s when he painted this crowded battle scene, around 1544, and the fight it shows was already a generation old. In 1516 the small town of Asola, on the mainland west of Venice, had been besieged by the armies of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, and had held out for the Venetian Republic. A Venetian noble family commissioned the picture decades later, not as a news report but as a matter of family honour; a relative had fought in the defence, and they wanted it kept in view. So the young painter reconstructed a battle he had never seen: armoured horsemen colliding in the foreground, the banner of Asola carried among them, the fortress town itself holding firm on its hill in the distance behind the smoke.