In Tintoretto's Miracle of the Slave, (link here) there is a large central green robed and turbaned figure holding the evidence of a 'failed hammer assault', which forms the lower half of a compositional S shape - the top half being St.Mark who appears flying in and hovering above the slave as a symbol of the miracle unseen by the crowd. This green robed figure with a turban on is one half of a very clever "pictorial trick"; he is standing logically and spatially on the ground approximately a metre and a half into the depicted space. The dying slave himself lies on the floor to this figure's left and helps lead the eye into the heart of the painting, with extreme foreshortening. If we follow this body we arrive at a leaning helmeted figure in a caramel orange robe. The other side of the tall green robed central figure, almost exactly on a plane with this orange figure, is a bearded man looking to the right of the painting, as if in conversation with the disbelievers of the miracle, in the right half of the painting as a whole. Following the logic of the space depicted, we can surmise that these two adjacent figures: bearded man and orange-robed man, are a further metre behind the green robed central one. Yet! and, here is the trick, Tintoretto has very subtly painted the bearded man's head in front (!) of the green robed man. This is physically impossible, as he is a metre behind him. What it does though is prevent the space becoming dislocated by giving the central green robed figure too dominant a position. If the work was spatially logical this bearded figure would drop back and break the "visual phrasing" of the figures. With the head gently overlapping the main green robed figure the pictorial (illusory) space relaxes back elastically into its rhythm and the unfolding drama of the scene plays out both wholistically as a coloured surface and also sequentially if being "read' as a series of figures playing their part in the narrative of the scene. It demonstrates that the visual will always transcend the literal even in the most extreme examples of figurative work - only (note!) if the artist is of a higher order. One who understands the difference between subject and content!