Venetian painter, probably born in Venice, NE Italy, the son of a dyer (Ital tintore). Except for visits to Mantua (1580, 15903), he lived all his life in Venice, painting portraits and biblical subjects in which he attempted (according to a contemporary critic) to combine the energetic drawing of Michelangelo with the glowing colour of Titian. His most spectacular works are sacred murals painted for religious confraternities, especially the 50 or so canvases decorating the Church and Scuola of S Rocco. The Scuola contains a vast iconographical scheme from the Old and New Testaments, including the Crucifixion (1565) and Annunciation (15837). Other major works include The Last Supper (1547, Venice), The Last Judgment (c.1560, Venice), and the Paradiso, famous for its great size (1588, Venice). Three of his seven children also became painters, including Marietta (156090), known as la Tintoretta.
Tintoretto (real name Jacopo Robusti; September 29, 1518 - May 31, 1594) was one of the greatest painters of the Venetian school and probably the last great painter of the Italian Renaissance.
Biography
The years of apprenticeship
He was born in Venice, Republic of Venice, in 1518. hence the son got the nickname of Tintoretto, little dyer, or dyer's boy, which is Anglicized as Tintoret.
Tintoretto had only been ten days in the studio when Titian sent him home once and for all, the reason being that the great master observed some very spirited drawings, which he learned to be the production of Tintoretto; 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 Tintoretto.
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. Now and afterwards he very frequently worked by night as well as by day.
Early works
The young painter Schiavone, four years Robusti's junior, was much in his company. Tintoretto 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. The first work of his to attract some considerable notice was a portrait-group of himself and his brother - the latter playing a guitar - with a nocturnal effect;
One of Tintoretto's early pictures still extant is in the church of the Carmine in Venice, the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple; 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 in the absence of any formal training.
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; 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.
These four works were greeted with signal and general applause, including that of Titian's intimate, the too potent Pietro Aretino, with whom Tintoretto, one of the few men who scorned to curry favor with him, was mostly in disrepute. It is said, however, that Tintoretto at one time painted a ceiling in Pietro's house; The painter having now executed the four works in the Scuola di S.
Scuola di S. Marco
The next conspicuous event in the professional life of Tintoretto is his enormous labor and profuse self-development on the walls and ceilings of the Scuola di S.
In that year five principal painters, including Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, were invited to send in trial-designs for the centre-piece in the smaller ball named Sala dell Albergo, the subject being S. Tintoretto produced not a sketch but a picture, and got it inserted into its oval. 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, Tintoretto 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.
Scuola di S. Rocco
Robusti next launched out into the painting of the entire scuola and of the adjacent church of S. He offered in November 1577 to execute the works at the rate of 100 ducats per annum, three pictures being due in each year.
It was probably in 1560, the year in which he began working in the Scuola di S. Rocco, that Tintoretto commenced his numerous paintings in the ducal palace; 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.
After the fire Tintoretto started afresh, Paolo 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 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;
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. 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 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. 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.
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. Robusti is said to have abated something from it, an incident perhaps more telling of his lack of greed than earlier cases 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.
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;
Of pupils Robusti had very few; 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 of a very large scale; they would at best be mediocre, and, coming from the son of Tintoretto, are exasperating; There are reflections of Tintoretto to be found in the Spanish painter El Greco, who likely saw his works during a stay in Venice.
Style of life and assessment
Tintoretto scarcely ever travelled out of Venice. 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.
Out of doors his wife made him wear the robe of a Venetian citizen;
An agreement is extant showing that he undertook to finish in two months two historical pictures each containing twenty figures, seven being portraits. Sebastiano del Piombo remarked that Robusti could paint in two days as much as himself in two years; Annibale Carracci that Tintoretto was in many pictures equal to Titian, in others inferior to Tintoretto.
A comparison of Tintoretto's final The Last Supper with Leonardo da Vinci's treatment of the same subject provides an instructive demonstration of how artistic styles evolved over the course of the Renaissance. In the hands of Tintoretto, the same event becomes dramatically distorted, as the human figures are overwhelmed by the eruption of beings from the spirit world. In the restless dynamism of his composition, his dramatic use of light, and his emphatic perspective effects, Tintoretto seems a baroque artist ahead of his time.
User Comments Add a comment…