Jacopo Tintoretto's altarpiece of St Agnes at the Madonna dell'Orto in Venice and the memorialisation of Cardinal Contarini

• Autores: Michael Douglas Scott
• Localización: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, ISSN 0075-4390, Nº 60, 1997, págs. 130-163
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The writer discusses the altarpiece of St. Agnes painted by the 16th-century Italian artist Jacopo Tintoretto for the Contarini chapel at the church of the Madonna dell'Orto in Venice. The chapel is the final burial place of the Venetian statesman and church reformer Cardinal Gasparo Contarini and is dedicated to St. Agnes. The altarpiece—one of a new generation of mid-16th-century narrative altarpieces in Venice that stress the exemplary conduct of saints—depicts three important events from the legend of St. Agnes: the demand of the prefect that St. Agnes worship Vesta, the revestment of St. Agnes, and St. Agnes's revival of Licinius. The iconographical focus and centerpiece of the space, it makes the complex issue of salvation concrete and vivid by dramatizing it as a visual narrative to be understood within the context of the chapel's function as a monument to the cardinal.