Santa María Egipciaca

Mary of Egypt was remembered as a penitent who spent decades alone in the wilderness, and Tintoretto paints her almost swallowed by it. The small figure sits by a stream while trees and broken ground fill most of the enormous canvas, more than four metres wide. He made it in the 1580s, in his sixties, as the last part of a job that had taken him more than 20 years, covering the walls and ceilings of this Venetian confraternity's hall, a brotherhood devoted to Saint Roch, protector against plague. These ground-floor scenes were the final push, quieter and dimmer than the ones he had painted upstairs. Even the saint's name is unsure here, and scholars still argue whether the woman in the landscape is Mary of Egypt or Mary Magdalene.