The Venetian Church of the Madonna of the Garden (the Madonna dell’Orto) lies
at the northern edge of the district of Cannaregio, close to where the built environment meets the lagoon. A magnificent painting dominates the wall of the church’s
chancel. Jacopo Tintoretto’s Last Judgement (c.1562) is a distinctive, Venetian
variation on a common Catholic-Reformation theme [Image I.1]. Here, the
moment of judgement arrives as a cascading flood. The waters sweep away
the living and the dead. Angels lift the faithful from the waves. Divine temporality
and the dynamics of salvation are realized through the forces of the natural world.
This is a powerful image for a city which was renowned for its distinctive
construction ‘in the middle of the sea’.¹ Venice’s location has attracted the awe and
affection of observers for centuries but it also inflicts a heavy physical toll on the city’s
infrastructure, from the intense strain of floods to the incremental changes wrought
by humidity and the movement of the tides.² In the period in which Tintoretto’s
painting was created, the condition of the natural environment was imbued with
additional force and meaning.³ The environment was believed to reflect and shape
moral conditions and concerns. What the topographical singularity of Venice made
evident was true of cities across the early modern world: in order to understand the
strengths and challenges of a place—political, economic, religious, social and
medical—it was essential to recognize the particularities of the environment.⁴