The Coronation of the Virgin, known as Paradise

Tintoretto worked at speed with a loaded brush on a dark ground, letting the underlayer show through so that highlights read as flickers of light rather than solid form. Look at the way a shoulder or a raised arm is described in two or three strokes. The whole conception is theatrical, a heavenly ceiling seen from below and stretched into a horizontal field, and the artist is known to have built small wax models and hung them in boxes to study these tumbling foreshortenings. The canvas is a modello, a full colour presentation sketch, so it preserves the freedom of invention that a finished commission would have tightened.

The project behind it was the replacement of the fire damaged decoration of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Doge's Palace in Venice, and a competition was held around 1582. Tintoretto's studio eventually won and produced the finished work, roughly twenty two metres wide and long described as the largest old master painting in the world. This Louvre canvas is the surviving proposal for it, which means you are looking at the seed of that vast Venetian wall in a form small enough to hang beside the Mona Lisa.

Did You Know? This is the trial version for the Doge's Palace Paradise in Venice, a canvas about twenty two metres wide that is often called the largest old master painting ever made.