Restored in 2002 with funding from Young Friends of Save Venice, Boston Chapter.

Jacopo Tintoretto’s painting of the Birth of Saint John the Baptist is located in the Chapel of Sant’Atanasio, which was originally part of the old Gothic church on the site; it was later converted into a side chapel of the Renaissance church, and its present configuration dates to 1595.

The busy scene takes place in a bedroom, where the new mother rests on the bed to the right as a group of young women, possibly midwives, attend to the newborn in the foreground. A cloudburst filled with heavenly light and angels in flight appears in the upper left portion of the composition, heralding the holiness of the event. Along the right-hand margin of the canvas, an old man looks on in reverence: this is Zacharias, the father of the Saint John the Baptist and the saint to whom the church of San Zaccaria is dedicated. He is the only figure who seems to witness the angelic apparition, suggesting that this may be the moment when his speech was restored following the naming of his son.

Although this canvas is called the Birth of Saint John the Baptist in sixteenth-century sources, recent authors have vacillated between the traditional identification and the alternative theme of the Birth of the Virgin. Both subjects were often depicted in the Renaissance, and each followed an almost identical iconographic format. One mysterious detail emerged during the painting’s restoration that might seem to support an alternate interpretation: to the right of the trio of women holding the baby, a partially painted cat appeared to eye the black fowl perched on the copper basin. The cat, sometimes considered to be a symbol of a diabolical presence, is often contrasted with the figure of the Virgin Mary. Halfway through rendering the feline, Tintoretto changed his mind and painted it out. In any case, whether this detail was intended to be symbolic or simply decorative remains undetermined.

The work was restored by conservators from the Capovilla Pruneri restoration firm, with the guidance of project director Sandro Sponza of the Superintendency of Fine Arts of Venice.

For select projects, conservation dossiers in Italian containing limited textual and photographic documentation may be available for consultation by appointment at the Venice office of Save Venice and the Rosand Library & Study Center. For inquiries, please contact us at venice@savevenice.org.

Jacopo Tintoretto (c. 1518/19–1594)
Birth of Saint John the Baptist
Late 1550s, oil on canvas
271 x 204 cm

Frederick Ilchman, “Two Altarpieces of John the Baptist by Jacopo Tintoretto” (2004)

Dalla Costa, Thomas, Robert Echols, and Frederick Ilchman, eds. Tintoretto in Venice: A Guide. Venice: Marsilio, 2018.

Echols, Robert and Frederick Ilchman. Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018.