Jacopo Tintoretto, Raising of the Brazen Serpent,  1575

The backstory to Tintoretto's piece comes from Numbers 21:6-9. The Jewish people were wandering about the desert, slandered against God. God, not a fan of being slandered, sent to plague the Jews "fiery serpents." The serpents bit and killed many a slanderous Jew until they had enough of dying by snakebite. They went to Moses, and Moses went to God. God commanded Moses to forge a bronze snake and stick it up on a pole, and anyone who gazed upon the snake would live.

Tintoretto plays with intense light-dark contrast, which also serves to draw the eye to the focal point of the painting - the healing of the damned. The upper portion features dramatically poised angels. The lines follow the edge of the clouds down to the feet of the hanging angel, forming a downward triangle towards the slightly off-center centerpiece. The lower half serves also to point to the bright miracle. The path of writhing bodies and discolored corpses surges upward, and Tintoretto creates a gradually increasing brightness along this path, further enforcing its motion.

Yet for all the stress Tintoretto lays on this point, it still only composes a mere fraction of the piece. The darkness far outweighs the light, and the corpses outnumber the living. Though God chooses to offer salvation for the afflicted, Tintoretto reminds us that God also chose to afflict them in the first place.