Le Jugement dernier

Madonna dell'Orto was Tintoretto's parish church, a short walk from his house on the northern edge of Venice, and in the early 1560s he filled its choir with two enormous canvases. This is one of them, a Last Judgment nearly 15 metres high, the whole wall turned into a churning cataract of the dead. The saved rise in calm ranks toward Christ at the top. Below, the damned are swept down in a tumbling flood of bodies. He worked at speed and on a scale few painters would attempt, and by early accounts asked the church only to cover the cost of his materials. Tintoretto was buried in this same church when he died in 1594, laid with his family in the chapel to the right of the choir.