After Jacopo Tintoretto, The Miracle of Saint Mark

This painting illustrates a story from the Golden Legend. The servant of a knight of Provence disobeyed his master’s command that he was not to venerate the relics of Saint Mark, and was ordered to be stretched on the rack and have his legs broken. He lies naked on the ground surrounded by his torturers and a crowd of onlookers. Saint Mark, clutching his Gospel, swoops headfirst into the scene from above and miraculously causes the torturers‘ hammers and axes to break against the servant’s body.

This picture, which is painted on paper stuck on to canvas, is a much smaller copy of Jacopo Tintoretto’s The Miracle of Saint Mark, painted for the Scuola di San Marco (Confraternity of Saint Mark) in Venice in 1547/8. Tintoretto’s The Miracle of Saint Mark is regarded as one of his greatest paintings and is one of the most celebrated works on public view in Venice.

Analysis of the pigments in the National Gallery’s copy shows that it cannot have been painted earlier than the eighteenth century, and was probably painted later. Several British painters who travelled to continental Europe after the 1815 Battle of Waterloo were interested in Tintoretto’s work.

The National Gallery’s catalogue first described this painting as ’perhaps by William Etty (in Venice 1832)‘. Etty (1787–1849) was an English artist best known for his paintings of historical subjects. In Italy he was called the ’English Tintoret' and his most ambitious composition, executed only as a sketch, was inspired by Tintoretto’s dynamic narratives and dramatic lighting. In his sketchbook he listed Tintoretto’s The Miracle of Saint Mark as first of the paintings worthy of special attention in Venice. However, the National Gallery’s picture does not look like William Etty’s technique and it is more likely to be the work of a talented amateur painter.

The picture may have been painted by its first recorded owner, Blanche Lindsay (1844–1912). She was the granddaughter of the great financier Nathan Meyer Rothschild, and a relative of Alfred Charles de Rothschild, who was a Trustee of the National Gallery. She first visited Italy in 1864 on her honeymoon and started copying old master paintings there. Her husband, Sir Coutts Lindsay (1824–1913) was a painter and founded the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, at which Blanche exhibited watercolour paintings. She bequeathed the paintings from her drawing room, including this one, to the National Gallery in her will.