La nascita di san Giovanni Battista

Tintoretto set this holy birth in what looks like a busy Venetian household of his own day, around 1554. The story is the arrival of John the Baptist, but the sacred part is almost crowded out by ordinary life. Elizabeth rests in a curtained bed while a ring of women takes charge, one of them holding the swaddled baby to nurse, and Mary steps in among them in a pink robe. The father, Zechariah, struck dumb until the child is named, watches quietly from the shadows behind. Down in the foreground Tintoretto drops in the things you would actually find on a Venetian floor, a cat and a few hens, painted with the same quick, slashing strokes as the silk and the flesh. The painting reached the Russian imperial collection in 1772.