Baptême du Christ

This is late Tintoretto, painted around 1580 for the Venetian church of San Silvestro, where it still stands as an altarpiece rather than hanging in a museum. By then he was the dominant painter in Venice and worked fast, building his scenes out of deep shadow pierced by sudden light. Here almost everything is dark, a heavy stormy landscape, and the light falls on the two figures at the center, Christ bent in the water while John the Baptist pours it over his head. Water fills the whole background, which is the point of the subject. He painted the Baptism more than once across his long career in the city, and this version has stayed put in San Silvestro for more than four centuries.