The coolness of their welcome infuriated the painter, conscious as he was that he had done a great thing, and he demanded the work back; but fortunately there were a few good judges to see it first, and their enthusiasm carried the day.

Very swiftly the picture became a wonder of the city.

Thus has it always been with the great innovators in art, except that Tintoretto's triumph was more speedy: they have almost invariably been condemned first.
An interesting derivative detail of the work is the gateway at the back over which the sculptured figures recline, for these obviously were suggested by casts, which we know Tintoretto to have possessed, of Michael Angelo's tombs in S.Lorenzo's sacristy at Florence.

Every individual in the picture is alive and breathing, but none more remarkably so than the woman on the left with a child in her arms and her knee momentarily resting on a slope of the pillar.

No doubt some of the crowd are drawn, after the fashion of the time, from public men in Venice; but I know not if they can now be identified.
Another legend of S.Mark which, by the way, should have its Venetian pictorial rendering, tells how a man who was working on the Campanile fell, and as he fell had the presence of mind to cry "S.