In a red robe and blue mantle, he holds out a round loaf.
Bible in art · Matthew
The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes
Tintoretto · ca. 1545–50
The Met, New York
Tintoretto painted this very long canvas in Venice around 1545–50, when he was about thirty. Pictures of this shape were made to hang along the wall of a church or of the meeting hall of a confraternity, so that people could walk along them and follow the story.
In the middle Jesus hands bread to a disciple; two fish lie at his feet. The crowd fills the green hills behind, while in front Venetian women in silk and pearls rest with their children as if at a picnic.
From the text
- Only five loaves of bread and two fish (Matthew 14:17)
- “He directed the crowds to sit down on the grass” (Matthew 14:19)
- He broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples (Matthew 14:19)
- About five thousand men, in addition to women and children (Matthew 14:21)
The artist’s own
- Women in the dresses and jewels of sixteenth-century Venice
- A landscape of rolling green hills instead of “a desolate place”
- The crowd fading into pale sketchy figures towards the horizon
Details
Jesus
A disciple
A bearded man bends forward to take the bread from his hand.
More bread
A man at Jesus’ other side holds a dish piled with loaves.
Two fish
The fish lie on the ground near Jesus’ feet.
Sitting on the grass
Groups of people sit on the green slopes, waiting to be fed.
Venetian dress
A woman in a shimmering silver gown sits with a child at her shoulder.
Jacopo Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti), Italian, Venice 1518/19–1594 Venice. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Francis L. Leland Fund, 1913; acc. 13.75) · Oil on canvas · Public Domain — The Met Open Access (CC0). The Met Collection API record: "isPublicDomain": true; The Met marks such works on its website "with the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) icon".