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Mark enters the painting like a diver, head down, invisible to the crowd. No saint in Italy had ever arrived at this speed.

Jacopo Robusti was the son of a cloth dyer, a tintore, and Venice never let him forget it: the name he worked under his whole life, Tintoretto, means the little dyer's boy. The story his first biographer tells is that Titian took him in as a student and expelled him within days, seeing the drawings; whether from jealousy or temperament, master and boy were enemies ever after. Shut out of the establishment, he trained himself, and on his studio wall he wrote the program: the drawing of Michelangelo and the color of Titian. He got his first great public stage in 1548, when the Scuola Grande di San Marco, one of the rich confraternities that ran charitable Venice, wanted a miracle of its patron saint for the meeting hall. Tintoretto was about 30. The legend he was given was tame enough on paper: a servant who went to venerate the relics of St Mark against his master's orders is condemned to have his eyes put out and his legs broken, and the instruments shatter in the executioners' hands. Every other painter in Italy would have put the saint on a cloud, blessing from a respectful altitude. Tintoretto threw him out of the sky headfirst, upside down, foreshortened like a diver a yard above the crowd, robes on fire with light, invisible to everyone in the painting and unmissable to everyone outside it. Below him the slave lies on the ground at the exact center, painted with the glowing nude solidity of a fallen sculpture, while a turbaned executioner holds up a shattered hammer to the judge with the expression of a workman whose tools have failed him inexplicably. The confraternity brothers quarreled over the picture; some found it indecorous, too violent, too new, and the aggravated painter took it back for a time before the faction that understood what they had prevailed. From that canvas forward the commissions never stopped. Venice nicknamed him Il Furioso for the speed; when the Scuola di San Rocco held a competition for a ceiling sketch years later, Tintoretto skipped the sketch, painted the finished picture, had it secretly installed, and then donated it outright, knowing the statutes forbade refusing a gift. The other competitors went home. The Miracle of the Slave hangs now in the Accademia, a few minutes' walk from where it scandalized its first committee, and it keeps the quality that upset them: it is a painting arriving at speed, brakes off. Ruskin, three centuries on, stood in front of it and gave up the argument: beyond all analysis, he wrote, and above all praise.