The Presentation of the Ring

The Fisherman Presenting the Ring to Doge Gradenigo is a 1534 oil-on-canvas painting by the Venetian Renaissance painter Paris Bordone (1495–1570). It was painted in Venice for the confraternity of San Marco in 1540. The painting treats the legend behind the tempest that struck Venice on 15 February 1340. It depicts a gondolier returning the ring of Saint Mark to the Doge Bartolomeo Gradenigo.

The legend states that one night, while the gondolier was sleeping in his gondola, waiting for custom along the canal of S. Giorgio Maggiore, three mysterious individuals jumped into his boat and bade him to take them to the Lido di Venezia. One of the three persons appeared to have the beard of an apostle and the figure of a high dignitary of the Church. The two others, by a certain sound as of armour rubbing beneath their mantles, revealed themselves as men-at-arms. The gondolier turned his prow towards the Lido and began to row; but the lagoon, so tranquil at their departure, began to chop and swell strangely. The waves gleamed with sinister lights; monstrous apparitions were outlined menacingly around the barque, to the great terror of the gondolier. Hideous spirits of evil and devils half-man half-fish seemed to be swimming from the Lido towards Venice, making the waves emit thousands of sparks and exciting the tempest with whistling and fiendish laughter in the storm. The appearance of the shining swords of the two knights and the extended hand of the saintly personage made them recoil and vanish in sulphurous explosions.

The battle lasted for a long time. New demons succeeded the others however; the victory remained with the personages in the boat, who were taken back to the landing of the Piazzetta. The gondolier scarcely knew what to think of their strange conduct; until, as they were about to separate, the oldest of the group, suddenly causing his nimbus to shine out again, said to the gondolier:

...
Wikipedia