Tintoretto

• 1. Introduction

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  Tintoretto placed an inscription over his studio door that announced his entire ambition in seven words: Il disegno di Michelangelo ed il colorito di Tiziano. Michelangelo's drawing and Titian's colour. For a young painter working in Venice in the sixteenth century, those were not modest goals. They were a declaration of war. Who was this man who set his sights so impossibly high, who worked by night as well as by day, who would secretly hang a full-sized painting on a ceiling rather than submit a sketch to a competition? And what drove him to paint fifty-two major canvases for a single confraternity, canvas after canvas, decade after decade, for a fee he himself kept low? The answers lie in the life of Jacopo Robusti, born in Venice in 1518, the son of a dyer, who became one of the most prolific painters in the history of the Venetian Republic.

• 2. The Dyer's Son

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  Jacopo Robusti's father, Battista, worked with cloth dye. In Italian, a dyer is a tintore; in the Venetian dialect, tintor. From that trade came the nickname that would follow Jacopo for the rest of his life: Tintoretto, meaning "little dyer" or "dyer's boy." The family was believed to have come originally from Brescia, in Lombardy, which was then part of the Republic of Venice, though older accounts pointed instead to the Tuscan town of Lucca.

  The only formal apprenticeship Tintoretto is known to have had ended abruptly, according to his early biographers Carlo Ridolfi, writing in 1642, and Marco Boschini, writing in 1660. Both agree that Titian dismissed him from his studio after only a few days. Ridolfi attributed this to jealousy; Boschini to a clash of personalities. Whatever the true cause, the rupture was lasting. Titian would actively disparage Tintoretto for the rest of his career, and his circle followed suit, even as Tintoretto continued to admire Titian's work from a distance.

  Left without a teacher, Tintoretto taught himself with an almost punishing discipline. Ridolfi records that he gained experience working alongside craftsmen who decorated furniture with mythological scenes. He drew from live models. He dissected cadavers to understand anatomy from the inside. He collected casts, bas-reliefs, and prints, and used them as his daily curriculum. At some point, possibly in the 1540s, he acquired models of Michelangelo's Dawn, Day, Dusk, and Night, studying them from every angle in drawings made on blue paper.

• 3. The Cost of a Commission

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  By the time Tintoretto was painting work for the Scuola della Trinita in the early 1540s, including four subjects from Genesis, contemporaries could already see that something unusual was happening. Two of those Genesis panels, Adam and Eve and the Death of Abel, survive in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice. They point to an artist of the highest order who had somehow arrived at mastery without any recorded formal training.

  Tintoretto's strategy for building his career was unconventional and, in some quarters, resented. He regularly worked for nothing, or close to nothing, in order to obtain commissions and establish relationships. His two earliest known mural paintings were done for almost no pay. He assisted his younger friend Andrea Schiavone, four years his junior, with wall paintings at no charge. When Paolo Veronese arrived in Venice in 1551 and began receiving the prestigious commissions Tintoretto wanted, Tintoretto went directly to the leaders of his neighbourhood church, the Madonna dell'Orto, and offered to paint two colossal canvases on a cost-only basis.

  Those two paintings, depicting the Worship of the Golden Calf and the Last Judgment, were each 14.5 metres tall. Both date to around 1559-1560, and they earned Tintoretto a reputation across Venice as an artist who could complete massive projects on a limited budget. That reputation, combined with his technique of painting quickly, became a deliberate competitive weapon he used against rivals for the rest of his working life.

• 4. The Ceiling Gambit

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  In 1564, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco invited four artists to compete for a ceiling commission. The finalists were Tintoretto, Federico Zuccaro, Giuseppe Salviati, and Paolo Veronese. Each was asked to submit a modello, a preparatory sketch, on the subject of Saint Roch in Glory for the hall called the Sala dell'Albergo. Tintoretto did not submit a sketch. He produced a full-sized painting, had it secretly installed on the ceiling, and then presented the gathered judges with a fait accompli. He then announced that he was offering the painting as a gift, apparently aware that the foundation's own bylaws forbade the rejection of any gift.

  This incident became, as later accounts described it, the most notorious episode of Tintoretto's career. It was also the beginning of a relationship between the artist and the Scuola di San Rocco that would span more than two decades. Between 1565 and 1567, and again from 1575 to 1588, he filled the walls and ceilings of the Scuola with paintings. In November 1577, he formalised the arrangement, offering to execute works at 100 ducats per year, with three paintings due each year. That proposal was accepted and honoured on both sides. The total sum paid to Tintoretto across the entire project came to 2,447 ducats. The scuola and its adjacent church of San Rocco ended up containing fifty-two paintings, including Crucifixion, the Plague of Serpents, the Paschal Feast, Moses striking the Rock, and scenes from the Passion of Christ.

• 5. Paradise and Its Price

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  The largest single work of Tintoretto's life was the Paradise painted for the Doge's Palace. At 9.1 by 22.6 metres, it is reputed to be the largest painting ever executed on canvas. Tintoretto told the Venetian senators, while the commission was still pending, that he had prayed to God to be given the task, so that paradise might be his reward after death.

  The competition was genuine. A sketch he submitted in 1577 now hangs in the Louvre in Paris. In 1583, he produced a second sketch with a different composition, now held in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. The commission was initially awarded jointly to Paolo Veronese and Francesco Bassano, but Veronese died in 1588 before the work could begin. The commission then passed to Tintoretto.

  He set up his canvas in the Scuola vecchia della Misericordia and worked with extraordinary intensity, making many alterations and painting heads and costumes directly from life. When the painting was nearly finished, he had it moved to the Doge's Palace, where it was completed largely by assistants, with his son Domenico doing the most work. His early biographer Ridolfi wrote that it seemed to everyone that heavenly beatitude had been disclosed to mortal eyes. Modern art historians have been more measured, generally considering the Paradise inferior in execution to both preparatory sketches.

  When Tintoretto was asked to name his own price for the Paradise, he left the decision to the authorities. They offered a handsome sum. He reportedly reduced it, a gesture his contemporaries read as a sign that his motivation had never been primarily financial.

• 6. Family, Secrecy, Studio

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  Around 1560, Tintoretto married his second wife, Faustina de Vescovi, the daughter of a Venetian nobleman who served as the guardian grande of the Scuola Grande di San Marco. Their household was large and lively. Three sons, Domenico, Marco, and Zuan Battista, and four daughters, Gierolima, Lucrezia, Ottavia, and Laura, survived to adulthood. Faustina, by all accounts, ran the domestic side of things firmly. She required that Tintoretto wear the robe of a Venetian citizen when he went outdoors. She pressed money on him in a handkerchief when he left the house and expected a strict accounting when he returned. His usual explanation was that he had given it away to the poor or to prisoners.

  Before this marriage, Tintoretto had a daughter, Marietta Robusti, whose mother is not recorded. Marietta trained as an artist under her father, as her half-brothers Domenico and Marco would later do. As a girl she accompanied him to his work, dressed as a boy. She became a portrait painter of considerable skill, and also a musician and vocalist. Few of her works can be traced now. She died at the age of thirty, in 1590, and tradition holds that a heartbroken Tintoretto painted her final portrait as she lay in her final repose.

  Tintoretto kept his studio methods closely guarded. Even intimate friends were rarely admitted to his working room. He was by nature sociable, full of witty remarks to princes and ordinary people alike, but he almost never smiled himself. He maintained friendships with writers and publishers, and Pietro Aretino, who had praised the Miracle of the Slave, became an important early patron. As a young man Tintoretto played the lute and other instruments, some of his own invention, and he designed theatrical costumes. He was also versed in mechanics. But from the moment he was at work, the studio door closed to the world.

• 7. Style and Its Discontents

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  Sebastiano del Piombo once remarked that Tintoretto could paint in two days as much as he himself could accomplish in two years. Annibale Carracci offered a more layered verdict: that Tintoretto was, in many of his pictures, equal to Titian, and in others, inferior to Tintoretto himself. Venetians put it this way: he had three pencils, one of gold, one of silver, and one of iron.

  His style was built on bold, long brushstrokes used to define contours and highlights. He emphasised bodies in motion, relied on extreme foreshortening, and built perspective effects designed to heighten drama. In his laterali, horizontal paintings meant for the side walls of Venetian chapels, he composed the image with an off-centre perspective, calculated so that the illusion of depth would read correctly from the viewpoint of a worshipper standing near one end of the painting.

  His wit was inseparable from his visual intelligence. In his painting Saint George, Saint Louis, and the Princess, dated 1553, he overturned the conventional image of Saint George slaying the dragon to rescue the princess. In Tintoretto's version, the princess sits astride the dragon, holding a whip, while Saint George spreads his arms in a gesture of helplessness, his lance broken on the ground. The art critic Arthur Danto described the result as having the edginess of a feminist joke, painted with a sophisticated Venetian audience in mind.

  His portraits have drawn more divided responses. Modern critics have often treated his large studio output of portrait work as routine, though his depictions of elderly men, such as his portrait of Alvise Cornaro dated to around 1560-1565, have drawn wide admiration. Art historians Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman argued that the many studio-assisted portraits have clouded appreciation of his autograph work, which is notably understated and somber in contrast to his narrative paintings. Lawrence Gowing called Tintoretto's portraits of figures who seemed consumed by their own inner fire his most irresistible works. Edouard Manet, who painted a copy of the late self-portrait of around 1588 now in the Louvre, called it one of the most beautiful paintings in the world.

• 8. Aftermath and Legacy

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  Tintoretto died on the 31st of May 1594, two weeks after being seized with severe stomach pains complicated by fever that kept him from sleeping and nearly from eating. He was buried in the church of the Madonna dell'Orto, beside his daughter Marietta, who had died four years before him. In 1866, the grave of the Vescovi family and Tintoretto was opened; the remains of nine members of the joint families were found inside. The grave was then moved to a new location, to the right of the choir.

  El Greco, the Greek painter of the Spanish Renaissance, likely saw Tintoretto's work during a stay in Venice and absorbed enough of it to carry its influence into his own painting style. The recognition of Tintoretto's range has continued to widen in the centuries since his death. In 2013, the Victoria and Albert Museum confirmed that The Embarkation of St Helena in the Holy Land, which the museum had acquired in 1865 and long attributed to Andrea Schiavone, was in fact one of three paintings by Tintoretto on the legend of St Helena. The misattribution had stood for generations; the correction came through a project cataloguing continental European oil paintings held in the United Kingdom.

  In 2019, honouring the anniversary of his birth, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, working in cooperation with the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice, organised the first travelling exhibition of his work in the United States, featuring nearly fifty paintings and more than a dozen works on paper. That exhibition ranged from portraits of Venetian aristocracy to religious and mythological narratives, the same range Tintoretto had commanded across a working life spent almost entirely within the city where he was born.