Il corpo di san Marco portato via dai cristiani

The story behind this is Venice's founding legend of itself. In the year 828 two Venetian merchants took the body of Saint Mark the Evangelist from his tomb in Alexandria, then under Muslim rule, and smuggled it out of the city hidden in a basket under slabs of pork the guards would not want to search. Back home the relic turned Venice into a place of pilgrimage and gave the city its patron and its emblem, the winged lion. Tintoretto, Venice's own painter, came back to the saint's story many times for the confraternity that bore his name. He stages the theft as a rush of movement and torchlight, the disciples hauling the pale body out of the dark while the figures around them scatter.