San Marco salva un saraceno

In the 1560s Tommaso Rangone, a wealthy physician who headed the confraternity of Saint Mark in Venice, commissioned Tintoretto to paint the saint's miracles for the meeting hall. This is one of them. A Saracen sailor, thrown into a raging sea, has prayed to Saint Mark and promised to convert if he lives, and the saint dives from the sky to pull him from the waves. Tintoretto builds the whole scene out of the storm: green water heaving up, bodies twisting, a ship breaking apart in the spray. Rangone had himself worked into the picture, the old man with the white beard among the sailors, so his own likeness would sit forever inside the miracle he paid to have painted.