Saint Augustine healing the lame

Light is the undisputed protagonist of this large painting, which once hung in the Godi chapel (later Porto Godi) in the church of San Michele in Vicenza, dedicated to Saint Augustine and destroyed in 1812.

In this work Tintoretto chose to illustrate an episode from the saint’s life taken from a little known passage in the Golden Legend. Saint Augustine, shown with his bishop’s mitre and crook, comes suddenly down from heaven, appearing to a crowd of cripples who lie bent on the ground, prostrate under the weight of their sickness, waiting to be miraculously cured. The heavy, physically accentuated figures of the sick and the beggars observe the prodigious event, almost dazzled by the intense, unnatural light emanating from a whirling cloud that envelops the saint, becoming almost one with his purple cloak. Farther into the background, theatrically closed by the façade of an indistinct religious building, the bodies of the sick, contorted by fatigue and by suffering, become more and more diaphanous and impalpable due to the powerful light, which makes our visual perception hazy.

The young artist – at that time about thirty – thus managed to create, by painting almost in monochrome with a few touches of colour, a work that is one of the most successful representations of the “dramatic sense of light in Veneto painting, in a search for new effects and colours” (Villa).