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Tintoretto
Tintoretto (real name Jacopo Robusti; 1518 - May 31, 1594) was
one of the greatest painters of the Venetian school and probably
the last great painter of Italian Renaissance. For his phenomenal
energy in painting he was termed Il Furioso. He had a passion for
special lighting effects, making wax figures of his subjects and
experimenting by placing them before differently angled spotlights
before painting them. As a result, certain figures reappear in different
works, though they are depicted in different angles and with different
lighting, thus prefiguring baroque art.
The years of apprenticeship
He was born in Venice in 1518, though most accounts say in 1512.
His father, Battista Robusti, was a dyer, or tintore; hence the
son got the nickname of Tintoretto, little dyer, or dyer's boy,
which is Englished as Tintoret. In childhood Jacopo, a born painter,
began daubing on the dyer's walls; his father, noticing his bent,
took him round, still in boyhood, to the studio of Titian, to see
how far he could be trained as an artist. We may suppose this to
have been towards 1533, when Titian was already (according to the
ordinary accounts) fifty-six years of age.
Ridolfi is our authority for saying that Tintoret had only been
ten days in the studio when Titian sent him home once and for all.
The reason, according to the same writer, is that the great master
observed some very spirited drawings, which he learned to be the
production of Tintoret; and it is inferred that he became at once
jealous of so promising a scholar. This, however, is mere conjecture;
and perhaps it may be fairer to suppose that the drawings exhibited
so much independence of manner that Titian judged that young Robusti,
although he might become a painter, would never be properly a pupil.
From this time forward the two always remained upon distant terms,
Robusti being indeed a professed and ardent admirer of Titian, but
never a friend, and Titian and his adherents turning the cold shoulder
to Robusti. Active disparagement also was not wanting, but it passed
unnoticed by Tintoret. The latter sought for no further teaching,
but studied on his own account with laborious zeal; he lived poorly,
collecting casts, bas-reliefs, &c., and practising by their
aid. His noble conception of art and his high personal ambition
were evidenced in the inscription which he placed over his studio
Il disegno di Michelangelo ed il colorito di Tiziano ("Michelangelo's
design and Titian's color").
He studied more especially from models of Michelangelo's Dawn,
Noon, Twilight and Night, and became expert in modelling in wax
and clay method (practised likewise by Titian) which afterwards
stood him in good stead in working out the arrangement of his pictures.
The models were sometimes taken from dead subjects dissected or
studied in anatomy schools; some were draped, others nude, and Robusti
was wont to suspend them in a wooden or cardboard box, with an aperture
for a candle. Now and afterwards he very frequently worked by night
as well as by day.
Early works
Finding of the body of St Mark (1548).The young painter Schiavone,
four years Rohusti's junior, was much in his company. Tintoret helped
Schiavone gratis in wall-paintings; and in many subsequent instances
he worked also for nothing, and thus succeeded in obtaining commissions.
The two earliest mural paintings of Robusti - done, like others,
for next to no pay - are said to have been Belshazzar's Feast and
a Cavalry Fight, both long since perished. Such, indeed, may be
said to have been the fate of all his frescoes, early or later.
The first work of his which attracted some considerable notice was
a portrait-group of himself and his brother - the latter playing
a guitar - with a nocturnal effect; this also is lost. It was followed
by some historical subject, which Titian was candid enough to praise.
One of Tintoret's early pictures still extant is in the church
of the Carmine in Venice, the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple;
also in S. Benedetto are the Annunciation and Christ with the Woman
of Samaria. For the Scuola della Trinity (the scuole or schools
of Venice were more in the nature of hospitals or charitable foundations
than of educational institutions) he painted four subjects from
Genesis. Two of these, now in the Venetian Academy, are Adam and
Eve and the Death of Abel, both noble works of high mastery, which
leave us in no doubt that Robusti was by this time a consummate
painter - one of the few who have attained to the highest eminence
by dire study of their own, unseconded by any training from some
senior proficient.
Saint Mark paintings
Towards 1546 Robusti painted for the church of the Madonna dell
Orto three of his leading works - the Worship of the Golden Calf,
the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, and the Last Judgment
now shamefully repainted; and he settled down in a house hard by
the church. It is a Gothic edifice, looking over the lagoon of Murano
to the Alps, built in the Fondamenta de Mori, still standing. In
1548 he was commissioned for four pictures in the Scuola di S. Marco
- the Finding of the body of St Mark in Alexandria (now in the church
of the Angeli, Murano), the Saint's Body brought to Venice, a Votary
of the Saint delivered by invoking him from an Unclean Spirit (these
two are in the library of the royal palace, Venice), and the highly
and justly celebrated Miracle of the Slave. This last, which forms
at present one of the chief glories of the Venetian Academy, represents
the legend of a Christian slave or captive who was to be tortured
as a punishment for some acts of devotion to the evangelist, but
was saved by the miraculous intervention of the latter, who shattered
the bone-breaking and blinding implements which were about to be
applied.
St Mark's Body Brought to Venice (1548).These four works were greeted
with signal and general applause, including that of Titian's intimate,
the too potent Pietro Aretino, with whom Tintoret, one of the few
men who scorned to curry favor with him, was mostly in disrepute.
It is said, however, that Tintoret at one time painted a ceiling
in Pietro's house; at another time, being invited to do his portrait,
he attended, and at once proceeded to take his sitter's measure
with a pistol (or a stiletto), as a significant hint that he was
not exactly the manto be trifled with. The painter having now executed
the four works in the Scuola di S. Marco, his straits and obscure
endurances were over. He married Faustina de Vescovi, daughter of
a Venetian nobleman. She appears to have been a careful housewife,
and one who both would and could have her way with her not too tractable
husband. Faustina bore him several children, probably two sons and
five daughters.
Scuola di S. Marco
The next conspicuous event in the professional life of Tintoret
is his enormous labor and profuse self-development on the walls
and ceilings of the Scuola di S. Marco, a building which may now
almost be regarded as a shrine reared by Robusti to his own genius.
The building had been begun in 1525 by the Lombardi, and was very
deficient in light, so as to be particularly ill-suited for any
great scheme of pictorial adornment. The painting of its interior
was commenced in 1560.
In that year five principal painters, including Tintoret and Paul
Veronese, were invited to send in trial-designs for the centre-piece
in the smaller ball named Sala dell Albergo, the subject being S.
Rocco received into Heaven. Tintoret produced not a sketch but a
picture, and got it inserted into its oval. The competitors remonstrated,
not unnaturally; but the artist, who knew how to play his own game,
made a free gift of the picture to the saint, and, as a bylaw of
the foundation prohibited the rejection of any gift, it was retained
in situ, Tintoret furnishing gratis the other decorations of the
same ceiling.
In 1565 he resumed work at the scuola, painting the magnificent
Crucifixion, for which a sum of 250 ducats was paid. In 1576 he
presented gratis another centre-piece - that for the ceiling of
the great hall, representing the Plague of Serpents; and in the
following year he completed this ceiling with pictures of the Paschal
Feast and Moses striking the Rock accepting whatever pittance the
confraternity chose to pay.
Scuola di S. Rocco
Robusti next launched out into the painting of the entire scuola
and of the adjacent church of S. Rocco. He offered in November 1577
to execute the works at the rate of 100 ducats per annum, three
pictures being due in each year. This proposal was accepted and
was punctually fulfilled, the painters death alone preventing the
execution of some of the ceiling-subjects. The whole sum paid for
the scuola throughout was 2447 ducats. Disregarding some minor performances,
the scuola and church contain fifty-two memorable paintings, which
may be described as vast suggestive sketches, with the mastery,
but not the deliberate precision, of finished pictures, and adapted
for being looked at in a dusky half-light. Adam and Eve, the Visitation,
the Adoration of the Magi, the Massacre of the Innocents, the Agony
in the Garden, Christ before Pilate, Christ carrying His Cross,
and (this alone having been marred by restoration) the Assumption
of the Virgin are leading examples in the scuola; in the church,
Christ curing the Paralytic.
It was probably in 1560, the year in which he began working in
the Scuola di S. Rocco, that Tintoret commenced his numerous paintings
in the ducal palace; he then executed there a portrait of the doge,
Girolamo Priuli. Other works which were destroyed in the great fire
of 1577 succeeded - the Excommunication of Frederick Barbarossa
by Pope Alexander III and the Victory of Lepanto.
The Deliverance of Arsenoe (ca. 1560).After the fire Tintoret started
afresh, Paul Veronese being his colleague; their works have for
the most part been disastrously and disgracefully retouched of late
years, and some of the finest monuments of pictorial power ever
produced are thus degraded to comparative unimportance. In the Sala
deilo Scrutinio Robusti painted the Capture of Zara from the Hungarians
in 1346 amid a Hurricane of Missiles; in the hail of the senate,
Venice, Queen of the Sea; in the hall of the college, the Espousal
of St Catherine to Jesus; in the Sala dell Anticollegio, four extraordinary
masterpieces - Bacchus, with Ariadne crowned by Venus, the Three
Graces and Mercury, Minerva discarding Mars, and the Forge of Vulcan
which were painted for fifty ducats each, besides materials, towards
1578; in the Antichiesetta, St George and St Nicholas, with St Margaret
(the female figure is sometimes termed the princess whom St George
rescued from the dragon), and St Jerome and St Andrew; in the hall
of the great council, nine large compositions, chiefly battle-pieces.
Paradise
We here reach the crowning production of Robusti's life, the last
picture of any considerable importance which he executed, the vast
Paradise, in size 74 ft. by 30, reputed to be the largest painting
ever done upon canvas. It is a work so stupendous in scale, so colossal
in the sweep of its power, so reckless of ordinary standards of
conception or method, so pure an inspiration of a soul burning with
passionate visual imagining and a hand magical to work in shape
and color, that it has defied the connoisseurship of three centuries,
and has generally (though not with its first Venetian contemporaries)
passed for an eccentric failure; while to a few eyes (including
those of the present writer) it seems to be so transcendent a monument
of human faculty applied to the art pictorial as not to he viewed
without awe nor thought of without amazement.
While the commission for this huge work was yet pending and unassigned
Robusti was wont to tell the senators that he had prayed to God
that he might be commissioned for it, so that. paradise itself might
perchance be his recompense after death. Upon eventually receiving
the commission in 1588 he set up his canvas in the Scuola della
Misericordia and worked indefatigably at the task, making many alterations
and doing various heads and costumes direct from nature.
Miracle of the Slave (1548).When the picture had been brought well
forward he took it to its proper place and there finished it, assisted
by his son Domenico for details of drapery, &c. All Venice applauded
the superb achievement, which has in more recent times suffered
from neglect, but fortunately hardly at all from restoration. Robusti
was asked to name his own price, but this he left to the authorities.
They tendered a handsome amount; Robusti is said to have abated
something from it, which is even a more curious instance of ungreediness
for pelf than earlier cases which we have cited where he worked
for nothing at all.
Death and pupils
After the completion of the Paradise Robusti rested for a while,
and he never undertook any other work of importance, though there
is no reason to suppose that his energies were exhausted had his
days been a little prolonged. He was seized with an attack in the
stomach, complicated with fever, which prevented him from sleeping
and almost from eating for a fortnight, and on the May 31, 1594
he died. He was buried in the church of the Madonna dell Orto by
the side of his favorite daughter Marietta, who had died in 1590,
aged thirty; there is a well-known tradition that as she lay dead
the heart-stricken father painted her portrait.
Marietta had herself been a portrait-painter of considerable skill,
as well as a musician, vocal and instrumental; but few of her works
are now traceable, it is said that up to the age of fifteen she
used to accompany and assist her father at his work, dressed as
a boy; eventually she married a jeweller, Mario Augusta. In 1866
the grave of the Vescovi and Robusti was opened, and the remains
of nine members of the joint families were found in it; a different
locality, the chapel on the right of the choir, was then assigned
to the grave.
Of pupils Robusti had very few; his two sons and Martin de Vos
of Antwerp were among them. Domenico Robusti (1562-1637), whom we
have already had occasion to mention, frequently assisted his father
in the groundwork of great pictures. He himself painted a multitude
of works, many of them oh a very large scale; they would at best
be mediocre, and, coming from the son of Tintoret, are exasperating;
still, he must be regarded as a considerable sort of pictorial practitioner
in his way.
Style of life and assessment
Tintoret scarcely ever travelled out of Venice. He loved all the
arts, played in youth the lute and various instruments, some of
them of his own invention, and designed theatrical costumes and
properties, was versed in mechanics and mechanical devices, and
was a very agreeable companion. For the sake of his work he lived
in a most retired fashion, and even when not painting was wont to
remain in his working room surrounded by casts. Here he hardly admitted
any, even intimate friends, and he kept his modes of work secret,
save as regards his assistants. He abounded in pleasant witty sayings
whether to great personages or to others, but no smile hovered on
his lips.
The Last Supper (1594).Out of doors his wife made him wear the robe
of a Venetian citizen; if it rained she tried to indue him with
an outer garment, but this he resisted. She would also when he left
the house wrap up money for him in a handkerchief, and on his return
expected an account of it; Tintoret's accustomed reply was that
he had spent it in alms to the poor or to prisoners.
An agreement is extant showing that he undertook to finish in two
months two historical pictures each containing twenty figures, seven
being portraits. The number of his portraits is enormous; their
merit is unequal, but the really fine ones cannot be surpassed.
Sebastiano del Piombo remarked that Robusti could paint in two days
as much as himself in two years; Annibale Caracci that Tintoret
was in many pictures equal to Titian, in others inferior to Tintoret.
This was the general opinion of the Venetians, who said that he
had three pencils - one of gold, the second of silver and the third
of iron.
A comparison of Tintoretto's The Last Supper with Leonardo da Vinci's
work of the same name provides an instructive demonstration of how
artistic styles evolved over the course of the Renaissance. Leonardo's
is all classical repose. The disciples radiate away from Christ
in almost-mathematical symmetry. In the hands of Tintoretto, the
same event becomes dramatically distorted. The human figures are
overwhelmed by the eruption of beings from the spirit world.
The paintings are the excellent portrayal of the events and scenes
that we see around us. The painters are the best cameras of the
world. They reproduce many different types of pictures. They even
draw imaginary pictures that do not exist in this world. We tend
to use both thinned oil paints and dense oil paints. Masterpieces
can be dyed more than once, but each time it may be different from
the existing paintings.h
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