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It appears that Jacopo Tintoretto (1518/19–94) has finally come
of age as a respectable old master. In 2018, the quincentenary of
his birth, an ambitious series of interlinked exhibitions has been
mounted in the painter’s home city, Venice. An excellent display of
his paintings and drawings at the Palazzo Ducale, curated by the
American scholars Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman, will
transfer to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, early in 2019,
albeit with a slightly different selection of works.1 A further
exhibition, focused on Tintoretto’s early work, deftly co-curated
by Roberta Battaglia, Paola Marini and Vittoria Romani (with input
from Echols and Ilchman) is at the Gallerie dell’Accademia.2
Smaller supporting exhibitions at the Scuola Grande di S. Marco and
Palazzo Mocenigo do not include paintings by Tintoretto but display
a useful range of artefacts to illuminate the wider historical and
cultural contexts in which he worked.3 The scale and ambition of
this Tintoretto fest reflects the burgeoning interest in the
painter over the past few decades, during which time several major
loan exhibitions have been organised: in Madrid (2007), Rome
(2012), and Cologne and Paris (both 2017), alongside the
publication of a rich array of catalogues, conference collections
and scholarly monographs.4
This level of interest represents a significant departure from
past scholarship, much of which has been sceptical about
Tintoretto’s artistic quality. Criticised by Giorgio Vasari in 1568
as ‘working at haphazard and without design’, Tintoretto was long
thought to be wildly eccentric and untrustworthy and to have
painted too much too quickly.5 He was partially
Coming of age: Jacopo TintorettoA series of exhibitions in
Venice marking the 500th anniversary of Tintoretto’s birth
emphasises the painter’s ‘Venetianess’ and central place in the
city’s artistic culture, but his often difficult relations with
local patrons and concern with social outcasts should not be
forgotten.
by tom nichols
reintegrated into the history of art during the twentieth
century, when his work was broadly interpreted as ‘Mannerist’,
although the application of this label was injudicious, given the
expressive urgency of his narrative painting and the rough
non-finito of his technique. An extensive catalogue raisonné of his
religious and mythological works, published in 1982 was far from
conclusive, as it included many paintings from the master’s
workshop or by more distant followers and misdated several others.6
Echols and Ilchman took issue with many of the attributions and
dates offered in the catalogue and in 2009 published an important
revision in the form of a checklist of autograph works and
dates.7
The Tintoretto œuvre they propose is leaner and more accurate,
thereby throwing the master’s high artistic quality into sharp
focus. An excellent selection of autograph works – based on Echols
and Ilchman’s stringent criteria for attribution – underpins the
success of the new round of exhibitions. These shows are
substantial without being overlong and are easy to navigate. The
Palazzo Ducale exhibition usefully highlights Tintoretto’s
virtuosic technique and his unusually abbreviated process of
artistic production. Tintoretto’s handling was necessarily
‘personal’ and unique, but it also supported the almost industrial
scale of his artistic output. His constant recycling of individual
forms and reuse of canvases for different paintings indicate the
economies he operated in the workshop, reflecting a well worked-out
marketing ‘strategy’ based
1 Tintoretto 1519–1594, Palazzo Ducale, Venice (7th September
2018–6th January 2019) and National Gallery of Art, Washington
(10th March–7th July 2019). Catalogue: Tintoretto Artist of
Renaissance Venice. Edited by Robert Echols and Frederic Ilchman.
294 pp. incl. 238 col. ills. (National Gallery of Art, Washington
2018). $65. ISBN 978–0–300–23040–6. The exhibits are not numbered.
2 The Young Tintoretto, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice (7th
September 2018–6th January 2019). Catalogue: Il giovane Tintoretto.
By Roberta Battaglia, Paola Marini and Vittoria
Romani. 238 pp. incl. numerous col. ills. (Marsilio; Venice
2018). €35. ISBN 978–8–831–74341–9.3 Art, Faith and Medicine in
Tintoretto’s Venice, Scuola Grande di S. Marco, Venice (6th
September 2018–6th January 2019). Catalogue: Art, Faith and
Medicine in Tintoretto’s Venice. By Gabriele Matino and Cynthia
Klestinec. 135 pp. incl. numerous col. ills. (Marsilio; Venice
2018). €21. ISBN 978–8–831–74349–5; and Tintoretto’s Venice, Museo
di Palazzo Mocenigo, Venice (6th September 2018–6th January 2019).
There is no catalogue.
4 M. Falomir, ed.: exh. cat. Tintoretto, Madrid (Museo Nacional
del Prado) 2007; V. Sgarbi, ed.: exh. cat. Tintoretto, Rome
(Scuderi del Quirinale) 2012; and R. Krischel: exh. cat.
Tintoretto: A Star was Born, Cologne (Wallraf-Richartz Museum) and
Paris (Musée du Luxembourg) 2017–18. The Madrid exhibition was
reviewed by Paul Hills in this Magazine, 149 (2007), pp.352–54. The
Rome exhibition was reviewed by Frederick Ilchman in this Magazine,
154 (2012), pp.445–46. Monographs include: G. Cassegrain: Tintoret,
Paris 2010, and R. and G. Villa: Tintoretto, Milan
2012. See also the conference collections M. Falomir, ed.:
Jacopo Tintoretto: Actas del Congreso Internacional, Madrid 2009;
and G. Cassegrain, et al.: La Giovinezza di Tintoretto, Venice
2017.5 G. Vasari: Lives. . ., transl. G. de Vere, London 1996, II,
p.509.6 R. Pallucchini and P. Rossi: Jacopo Tintoretto. Le opere
sacre e profane, Milan 1982.7 R. Echols and F. Ilchman: ‘Towards a
new Tintoretto catalogue, with a checklist of revised attributions
and a new chronology’, in Falomir 2009, op. cit. (note 4),
pp.91–150.
1. The apparition of the Virgin to St Jerome, by Jacopo
Tintoretto. c.1580. Canvas, 275.5 by 194 cm. (Ateneo Veneto, Sala
di Lettura, Venice; exh. Palazzo Ducale, Venice).
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on rapid production, high turnover and low price. The only very
briefly indicated figures in Tintoretto’s drawings suggest his
overarching concern to save time rather than his theoretical
engagement with the Renaissance principle of disegno. Rapidly
adumbrating the outlines and musculature of the male figures or
statuettes that he typically studied with just a few smudgy marks,
Tintoretto was also remarkably accurate, generating a sense both of
the entire three-dimensional form in space and of the torsions and
stresses of its movement (Fig.2).
The Palazzo Ducale show also helps to define Tintoretto’s
particular qualities as a painter of portraits and mythologies.
Although the artist modified his non-finito style in such works,
they nonetheless share certain characteristics with his sacred
paintings. Tintoretto pointedly withdraws from the depictions of
lavish surfaces, textures and accessories that are typical of
Venetian Renaissance portraiture in favour of formal austerity
(Fig.3). He often allows his sitters to make direct eye contact
with the viewer, establishing an effect of intimate immediacy that
is quite distinct from the kind of subtle deflections and
mediations at play in Titian’s portraiture, for example. In his
many group portraits for public buildings, Tintoretto’s approach is
different again; he places emphasis on the physiognomic and
psychological similarities between sitters, whose collective
identity is more significant than the definition of their
independent personhoods (Fig.4). Despite the tighter handling and
higher levels of local colouration in his mythological works,
Tintoretto makes his pagan world subject to the same kind of
narrative energies and sudden transformations found in
his sacred paintings, eschewing the more passive erotic
sensuality typical in Venetian works of this type. Flesh does not
quite attract or invite in the way it does in a Titian poesia. In
Tintoretto’s extraordinary Tarquin and Lucretia (Fig.5), the
radical instability of the ‘snapshot’ view of tumbling or upended
bodies and objects brilliantly captures the physical and moral
disorder attendant on Tarquin’s sexual violation.
Little is known about Tintoretto’s training or early career,
despite repeated attempts to clarify matters in the specialist
literature over the past seventy years.8 By the end of the
Accademia exhibition it is no clearer who (if anyone) might have
taught Tintoretto, and the question of how he managed to transform
himself from an unexceptional minor painter of rather ugly and
conceptually scrambled works into a masterfully original narrative
painter on a monumental scale also remains unanswered. The climax
of the exhibition is inevitably the Miracle of the slave (Fig.6),
the outstanding painting of Tintoretto’s early period, which is
exhibited in close proximity to related drawings, engravings,
sculptural reliefs and paintings that illuminate its artistic
gestation. Whether one considers the Miracle of the slave alongside
bronze reliefs by Tintoretto’s friend Jacopo Sansovino, or a print
after a recent fresco by Michelangelo, the Conversion
2. Male nude seen from behind, by Jacopo Tintoretto. 1578.
Charcoal heightened with white on brown paper, 27.6. by 18 cm. (The
Courtauld Gallery, London; exh. Palazzo Ducale, Venice).
3. A young man of the Doria family, by Jacopo Tintoretto.
c.1560. Canvas, 108 by 73 cm. (Museo Cerralbo, Madrid; exh. Palazzo
Ducale, Venice).
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of St Paul, or a woodcut featuring stage-set architectural
perspectives from Sebastiano Serlio’s Il Secondo Libro di
Perspettiva (1545), it is not quite clear just how Tintoretto
pulled off this extraordinary work. The assemblage of supporting
artistic materials at the Accademia only serves to draw attention
to the work’s astonishing originality and to the way in which its
creation immediately redefined the scope of narrative painting
beyond the possible promptings of the sources.
The Accademia exhibition is naturally of more specialist
interest, its ‘local’ flavour apparently acknowledged by the fact
that the accompanying catalogue is available in Italian only.9 Its
contents are, however, more digestible than the larger book
supporting the Palazzo Ducale show.10 Whereas the Accademia
publication is meticulously laid out in traditional style, with an
impressive series of interpretative essays followed by a detailed
chronological catalogue of the works on display, the Palazzo Ducale
publication includes only a shorter checklist of the works
exhibited. Il giovane Tintoretto will probably serve as a better
aide-memoire of its exhibition, while Tintoretto 1519–1594 has
grander aims, seeking to offer (in the words of its editors), ‘a
definitive modern account’ of Tintoretto. It is not entirely clear
whether this ambition will be fulfilled, given the somewhat casual
combination of closely argued essays interspersed with workaday
chunks of text providing chronological orientation for the more
general reader. This layout militates against the development of a
sustained or coherent overarching argument or thesis such as one
would hope to find in a scholarly monograph. Its parts might,
however, ultimately prove of greater value than the whole, given
that the volume includes some outstanding new contributions to the
literature, especially in the thematic essays by Stefania Mason
(documents), Roland Krischel (working practice), Peter Humfrey
(altarpieces), Michiaki Koshikawa (drawings) and Giorgio
Tagliaferro (works for the Palazzo Ducale).
8 See R. Pallucchini: La giovinezza del Tintoretto, Milan 1950;
R. Echols: ‘Giovanni Galizzi and
the problem of the young Tintoretto’, Artibus et Historiae 31
(1995), pp.69–110; and,
more recently. Cassegrain et al., op. cit. (note 4).9 Battaglia,
Marini and Romani,
op. cit. (note 2). 10 Echols and Ilchman, op. cit. (note 1).
In the small but intriguing exhibition mounted at the Scuola
Grande di S. Marco – in the very room for which the Miracle of the
slave was painted – much can be gleaned about the culture of the
lay confraternities or scuole for whom Tintoretto so often worked.
This modest but insightful show, supported by an excellent short
catalogue, stresses the overlapping interests of the fratelli of S.
Marco in science and religion and the questions of faith and
artistic representation these generated.11 New
4. Madonna of the treasurers, by Jacopo Tintoretto. 1567.
Canvas, 221 by 520.7 cm. (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice).
5. Tarquin and Lucretia, by Jacopo Tintoretto. c.1578–80.
Canvas, 172.7 by 152.4 cm. (The Art Institute of Chicago; exh.
Palazzo Ducale, Venice).
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documentary discoveries by the curators, Gabriele Matino and
Cynthia Klestinec, establish the correct subject matter and
original positioning of the works that Tintoretto’s eldest
painter-son, Domenico, produced to complete the St Mark cycle in
the Scuola’s Sala Capitolore. Jacopo Tintoretto’s paintings for
this room are among his most experimental works (Fig.8), but are no
longer in situ. It would, of course, have been a great coup to have
returned these missing masterpieces to their original positions in
the Sala, but they were in any case removed twice from the room
within Tintoretto’s own lifetime. The Miracle was initially
returned to him as unacceptable shortly after it was painted, and
his three later contributions were sent back in 1573 with the
demand that Tintoretto remove the figure of their patron, the
famous doctor and one-time Guardian Grande of the Scuola, Tommaso
Rangone of Ravenna. Tintoretto had included very prominent
individualised portraits of Rangone in immediate proximity to St
Mark in a manner that radically departed from the studied
mediocritas of the group portraits in earlier contributions to the
cycle. To the tradition-obsessed fratelli of the confraternity, the
painter’s ready collaboration with a narcissistically
self-promoting foreigner
such as Rangone must have seemed like a conspiracy of
individualist outsiders. But Tintoretto never did make the required
erasures.
This episode suggests Tintoretto’s willingness to ride roughshod
over cherished local customs or artistic conventions. At the Scuola
Grande di S. Rocco, as Vasari reported and the documents partially
confirm, Tintoretto secretly inserted a finished ceiling painting
rather than the required sketch during a competition for the
commission in 1564. Although the artist went on to paint more than
fifty pictures for this confraternity, it is clear that many
fratelli at S. Rocco took exception to his departures from
protocol. Some, too, must have found his unorthodox religious
paintings difficult to understand or enjoy. At the same time, as
Vasari noted, Tintoretto’s low prices and quick production made his
paintings available to all comers. His patronage base remained
unusually broad throughout his career, departing from the pattern
of social exclusivity that characterised those of Titian and
Veronese. A late altarpiece, the Baptism of Christ (Fig.7), is
undoubtedly an autograph work, painted in his most experimental and
innovative manner,
6. The miracle of the slave, by Jacopo Tintoretto. 1548. Canvas,
415 by 541 cm. (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice).
11 Matino and Klestinec, op. cit. (note 3). See also the
excellent guide to Tintor-etto’s paintings in Venice published to
support the major exhibitions: T. Dalla Costa, R. Echols and F.
Ilchman, eds.: Tin- toretto in Venice: A Guide, Venice 2018.
12 J. Ruskin: Modern Painters, London 1846, cited in E.T. Cook
and A. Wedder-burn, eds.: The Works of John Ruskin, London 1903,
IV, pp.249–88, and in J.-P. Sartre: ‘Le séquestré de Venise’,
Situations 4 (1964), pp.444–59.
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its watery environment reflecting the occupations of the
commissioning trade scuola of the bargemen. Even these relatively
lowly artisan guildsmen were respectable enough, of course, but
Tintoretto gave a prominent visual role to the socially outcast in
many of his religious paintings, sometimes lending them the heroic
forms of well-known reclining classical or all’antica sculptures.
His imagery sometimes appears to anticipate not just the viewpoint
of charitable citizens, but also that of the poor themselves. In
the great Annunciation that he painted near the entrance to the
Sala Terena at the Scuola Grande di S. Rocco, where impoverished
fratelli regularly gathered to receive handouts, Tintoretto painted
Mary and Joseph in the guise of a poor artisan couple living in a
rough and grimy Venetian backstreet workshop/apartment. In an
emotional late altarpiece for the Scuola di S. Fantin (Fig.1), the
Virgin swoops down to give succour to the desperate St Jerome
suffering in the wilderness. Tintoretto must always have known that
his work was destined to be shown to condemned prisoners on their
way to execution.
The underlying aim of the quincentenary shows is undoubtedly to
cement Tintoretto’s reputation as a great old master painter and to
demonstrate his centrality to the artistic culture of
sixteenth-century Venice. It is his essential venezianità or
‘Venetianess’ that is to the fore, rather than his difficulties
with local patrons or his concern with social outcasts. The
evidence does nonetheless suggest that this artist’s approach to
painting was not easy to digest for his contemporaries, and that it
often stimulated distrust and dislike, even among the locals for
whom it was intended. Just as Tintoretto’s propensity to break
rules worried traditionally minded Venetians, so too his fierce
rivalry with the city’s acknowledged leader in
painting, Titian, challenged their aesthetic judgment. Within a
single work, Tintoretto often exacted dizzying switches between
realism and fantasy, or upset expectations by promoting the visual
and semantic role of marginal accessory figures at the expense of
the usual heroic historical actors.
Given the painter’s undoubted success in Venice, it is tempting
to dismiss John Ruskin’s perception of Tintoretto as a Gothic
spiritualist out of sympathy with the materialistic culture of his
age, or Jean-Paul Sartre’s politically charged idea of him as the
‘Venetian pariah’ out to attack ‘the patrician aesthetic of fixity
and being’.12 Yet the dialectical perception of these writers that
this painter was as much outside his own time as he was a central
figure within it is worth remembering. To the encapsulation
‘Tintoretto the Venetian’ (the title of an essay in the catalogue
for Tintoretto 1519–1594) can justifiably be appended ‘Tintoretto
the individualist’, or even ‘Tintoretto the outsider’. The
quincentenary exhibitions will undoubtedly succeed in smoothing the
way for Tintoretto’s absorption into the cultural mainstream of
old-master art appreciation, but a continued recognition of the
more un-integrated or contradictory elements of his artistic
identity needs to be carefully maintained. Shorn of his more
reactive and radical qualities, the establishment ‘Tintoretto’ now
in the process of being born might be in danger of losing something
of his original bite.
7. Baptism of Christ, by Jacopo Tintoretto. c.1580. Canvas,
283.2 by 161.9 cm. (S. Silvestro, Venice; exh. Palazzo Ducale,
Venice).
8. The removal of the body of St Mark, by Jacopo Tintoretto.
Probably c.1564. Canvas, 403.8 by 320 cm. (Gallerie dell’Accademia,
Venice).
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