Saint Marks takes the figure of Saint Mark as the occasion to explore relations between painting and writing. Emphasizing that the figure of the saint is not a singular biographical individual in the various biblical and hagiographic texts that involve someone named Mark, it first studies representations of St. Mark in Venetian art of the sixteenth century that have virtually nothing to do with early scriptural mentions, nor with the gospel ascribed to Mark. Paintings by Gentile Bellini and Giovanni Bellini and their followers, and by Jacopo Tintoretto made for the Venetian Scuola Grande di San Marco. Theorizations of the relations between painting and writing are explored in a chapter that centers on John Ruskin's Stones of Venice as well as writing inspired by it, by Adrian Stokes, as well as by contemporary art historians Paul Hills and T.J. Clark. These are engaged to further arguments about what painting does as painting. A final chapter analyzing the Gospel of St. Mark; the earliest of the gospels, it does not mention the Sermon on the Mount among supposedly crucial events in the life of Jesus. The chapter also considers another gospel of Mark, the so-called Secret Gospel that has occasioned controversy for its homoerotic implications (concerns about sexuality are raised throughout the book). From the incommensurate, anachronic, multiple instances in which Saint Mark can be located that are studied in depth in this book - Mark as patron saint of Venice, Mark as author - the book takes as its ultimate concern the kind of material life that persists beyond that of any human subject. This is what the gospel named Mark calls the Kingdom of God. Saints have posthumous lives; so too do paintings and texts. Aby Warburg, a strong proponent of the afterlife of the image stands behind this inquiry, as well as work inspired by him by Giorgio Agamben and Georges Didi-Huberman, while the analysis of Christianity depends upon work by Jean-Luc Nancy.