TINTORETTO (Jacopo Robusti; c. 1518–1594)

TINTORETTO (Jacopo Robusti; c. 1518–1594), Italian painter. Jacopo Tintoretto was easily the most prolific painter in late-sixteenth-century Venice. The son of a Venetian cloth dyer, he advertised the fact in his professional nickname. Unlike certain other leading artists of the time, Tintoretto—"the little dyer"—did not seek to conceal his lower-class social origins. He was trained in an unidentified Venetian workshop during the 1530s. Early reports that he was summarily ejected from Titian's shop may represent nothing more than flattering legend. But the older master's professional hostility is nonetheless corroborated by a number of other early sources and was probably an important shaping factor in Tintoretto's career.

In very early works, such as the dramatic Christ among the Doctors (c. 1541–1542, Museo del Duomo, Milan), Tintoretto's style and technique pointedly depart from Titian's long-established naturalistic idiom. Forms twist and writhe in arbitrary fashion within a vertiginous spatial recession that relegates the protagonist to the far distance. In many of his earlier works, the painter's debt to the art of central Italy, and particularly to Michelangelo, is evident. But Tintoretto's conceptual and formal individualism, like his penchant for leaving the broad (although thinly loaded) marks of his brush exposed on the picture surface, took his art beyond such sources and also beyond anything yet seen within Venetian Renaissance art. His production of paintings at high speed and in great volume, and his readiness to offer them at a low price, quickly became notorious. But the strategy proved very successful at a time in which demand for paintings was rapidly increasing.

Tintoretto did not select between patrons as Titian did: rather than prioritizing prestigious foreign clients, he concentrated on fulfilling local demands. By 1560 he was already the dominant painter across the city. From this point onward, he was almost constantly at work in the Ducal Palace. Following two disastrous fires in the palace (1574 and 1577), Tintoretto and his workshop undertook a series of large-scale commissions, culminating in the vast Paradise (c. 1588–1590) for the main State Room. He also produced many paintings for the city's non-noble lay confraternities (the so-called Scuole, or Schools). In 1548 he made his name with the startling Miracle of the Slave (Accademia, Venice) for the Scuola di San Marco, and between 1564 and 1588 produced more than sixty paintings for the meeting house of the Scuola di San Rocco.

These included wall paintings showing scenes from the Life of Christ and the Virgin, and typologically related scenes from the Old Testament on the ceiling of the upper room (Sala Superiore). The enormous Crucifixion (1565) is the most important work of Tintoretto's maturity, painted in an epic narrative style that brilliantly combines passages of earthy naturalism with more idealized formal sequences. In later paintings such as The Baptism and The Agony in the Garden (both 1578–1581), complex formal masses are cloaked in brownish shadow, illuminated only at certain points by angled shafts of golden light, which imply the immanent presence of the divine. But this spiritualized schema is brought alive by the inclusion of startling passages of naturalism, for example in the extraordinary Annunciation (1581–1582). The unprecedented formal manipulations exacted at San Rocco reflect Tintoretto's mature commitment to an ideal of sacred poverty, which brings together the selfless spiritual ideals of the commissioning confraternity with those of the wider Catholic Counter-Reformation, but also refers to his own lowly artistic identity as the "little dyer."

Tintoretto's dynamic manner dominated for only a short while in Venice: Veronese and even the old Titian were influenced by his art in certain ways, while El Greco and Palma Giovane were probably members of his workshop. After his death in 1594, the Tintoretto workshop continued to operate into the 1630s under the control of his painter sons, Domenico and Marco. But Tintoretto's artistic individualism, particularly in matters of technique, meant that his style was not easily emulated, and it was increasingly perceived as antithetical to the classicism of European artistic tradition. Despite John Ruskin's ecstatic appreciations in the post-Romantic era, Tintoretto has continued to be an elusive figure in the history of art. Recent attempts to see his work as mannerist typically founder on the passionate drama of his style and the radical abbreviations of his brushwork. And while his exposed paint surface owes something to the earlier Venetian Renaissance tradition of coloring (colorito), his approach is very different from that of artists such as Giorgione or Titian. It is, though, the very resistance of Tintoretto's manner to an easy integration within artistic tradition that makes it so interesting for the contemporary viewer.

See also Painting ; Titian ; Venice, Art in .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nichols, Tom. Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity. London, 1999.

Pallucchini, Rodolfo, and Rossi, Paola. Tintoretto. Le opere sacre e profane. 2 vols. Milan, 1982.

Rossi, Paola, and Puppi Lionello, eds. Jacopo Tintoretto nel quarto centenario della morte. Venice, 1996.

Tom Nichols