Ecce Homo

Tintoretto spent much of his life decorating one Venetian building, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, the meeting house of a lay confraternity. This Ecce Homo belongs to the Passion scenes he painted for its Albergo room in the mid-1560s. The title is the Latin for the words Pilate spoke, behold the man, as he showed the beaten and bound Christ to the crowd in the hope it would satisfy them. Tintoretto stages it steeply and in low light, figures lunging out of shadow, the kind of theatrical dark he was known for. On this wall the Passion runs out of order: Christ before Pilate on the far right, this scene over the door, the road to Calvary on the left. He worked here, on and off, for more than 20 years.