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Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
or JACOPO ROBUSTI TINTORETTO (1518-1594), one of the greatest painters of the Venetian school, 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 it colorito di Tiziano" (Michelangelo's design and Titian's colour). He studied more especially from models of Michelangelo's "Dawn," "Noon," "Twilight" and "Night," and became expert in modelling in wax and clay - a 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. The young painter Schiavone, four years Robusti'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 x xvr. 3 2 a 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 Trinita (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.
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, but let out cheap to artisans. 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. 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 favour 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 man to 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.
The next conspicuous event in the professional life of Tintoret is his enormous labour 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 hall 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 by-law of the foundation prohibited the rejection of any gift, it was retained situ - Tintoret furnishing gratis the other decorations of the same ceiling. (This is one version of the anecdote: there is another version, which, though differing in incident, has the like general bearing.) 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. 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 painter's 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." 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 dello Scrutinio Robusti painted the "Capture of Zara from the Hungarians in 1346 amid a Hurricane of Missiles"; in the hall 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. 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 colour, 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 be 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. 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.
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 31st of May 1594 he died. A contemporary record states his age to have been seventy-five years and fifteen days. If this is accurate, the 16th of May 1519 must have been the day of his birth; but we prefer the authority of the register of deaths in S. Marciliano, which states that Tintoret died of fever, aged seventy-five years, eight months and fifteen days - thus bringing us to the 16th of September 1518 as the true date of his birth. He was buried in the church of the Madonna dell' Orto by the side of his favourite 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.
Tintoret painted his own portrait at least twice, one of the heads being in the Uffizi Gallery of Florence and the other, done when his age was advanced, in the Louvre. It is a very serious face, somewhat blunt and rugged, but yet refined without the varnish of elegance - concentrated and resolute, its native ardours of frankness and energy welded down into lifelong laboriousness, with a pent look as of smouldering fire. The eyes are large, dark and round; the grizzled hair close and compact. The face has been held to bear some resemblance to that of Michelangelo, but this does not go very far. Robusti appears also as one of the figures in the two vast pictures by Paul Veronese - the "Marriage in Cana" and the "Feast in the House of Levi." Audacious and intrepid, though not constantly correct, as a draughtsman, majestically great as a colourist, prodigious as an executant, Tintoret was as absolute a type of the born painter as the history of art registers or enables us to conceive. Whatever he did was imaginative - sometimes beautiful and suave (and he was eminently capable of painting a lovely female countenance or an heroic man), often imposing and romantic, fully as often turbulent and reckless, sometimes trivial, never unpainter-like or prosaic. When he chose - which was not always - he painted his entire personages characteristically; but, like the other highest masters of Venice, he conceded and attended little to the expression of his faces as evincing incidental emotion. In several of his works - as especially the great "Crucifixion" in S. Rocco - there is powerful central thought, as well as inventive detail; but his imagination is always concrete: it is essentially that of a painter to whom the means of art - the form, colour, chiaroscuro, manipulation, scale, distribution - are the typical and necessitated realities. What he imagines is always a visual integer, a picture - never treatise, however thoughtfully planned or ingeniously detailed. Something that one could see - that is his ideal, not something that one could narrate, still less that one could deduce and demonstrate. In his treatment of action or gesture the most constant peculiarity is the sway and swerve of his figures: they bend like saplings or rock like forest-boughs in a gale; stiffness or immobility was entirely foreign to his style, which has therefore little of the monumental or severe character. Perhaps he felt that there was no other way for combining "the colour of Titian with the design of Michelangelo." The knitted strength and the transcendent fervour of energy of the supreme Florentine might to some extent be emulated; but, if they were to be united with the glowing fusion of hue of the supreme Venetian, this could only be attained by a process of relaxing the excessive tension and modifying muscular into elastic force. In this respect he was a decided innovator; but he had many imitators, comparatively feeble if we except Paul Veronese.
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. 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. In 1574 he obtained the reversion of the first vacant broker's patent in a fondaco, with power to bequeath it - an advantage granted from time to time to pre-eminent painters. For his phenomenal energy in painting he was termed "Il Furioso." 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. The only pictures (if we except his own portrait) on which he inscribed his name are the "Miracle of Cana" in the church of the Salute (painted originally for the brotherhood of the Crociferi), the "Miracle of the Slave," and the "Crucifixion" in the Scuola di S. Rocco; the last was engraved in 1589 by Agostino Caracci. Generally he painted at once on to the canvas without any preliminary. Some of his dicta. on art have been recorded as follows by Ridolfi: "the art of painting remains increasingly difficult"; "painters in youth should adhere to the best masters, these being Michelangelo and Titian, and should be strict in representing the natural forms"; "the first glance at a picture is the crucial one"; "black and white, as developing form, are the best of colours"; "drawing is the foundation of a painter's work, but drawing from life in the nude should only be essayed by well-practised men, as the real is often wanting in beauty." 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 on 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.
We conclude by naming a few of the more striking of Tintoret's very numerous works not already specified in the course of the article. In Venice (S. Giorgio Maggiore), a series of his later works, the "Gathering of the Manna," "Last Supper," "Descent from the Cross," "Resurrection," "Martyrdom of St Stephen," "Coronation of the Virgin," "Martyrdom of St Damian"; (S. Francesco del Vigna) the "Entombment"; (the Frari) the "Massacre of the Innocents"; (S. Cassano) a "Crucifixion," the figures seen from behind along the hill slope; (St Mark's) a mosaic of the "Baptism of Christ" - the oil-painting of this composition is in Verona. In Milan (the Brera), "St Helena and other saints." In Florence (Pitti Gallery), "Venus," "Vulcan" and "Cupid." In Cologne (Wallraff-Richarts Museum), "Ovid and Corinna." In Augsberg (the town-hall), some historical pictures, which biographers and tourists alike have unaccountably neglected - one of the siege of a fortified town is astonishingly fine. In England (Hampton Court), "Esther and Ahasuerus," and the "Nine Muses"; (the National Gallery), "The Origin of the Milky Way," a memorable tour de force, " Christ washing Peter's Feet," a grand piece of colour and execution, not greatly interesting in other respects, also a spirited smallish work, "St George and the Dragon." The writer who has done by far the most to establish the fame of Tintoret at the height which it ought to occupy is Ruskin in his Stones of Venice and other books; the depth and scope of the master's power had never before been adequately brought out, although his extraordinarily and somewhat arbitrarily used executive gift was acknowledged. Ridolfi (Meraviglie dell' Arte) gives interesting personal details; the article by Dr Janitschek in Kunst and Kiinstler (1876) is a solid account. For an English reader the most handy narrative is that of W. R. Osler ( Tintoretto, 1879), in the series entitled "The Great Artists." Here the biographical facts are clearly presented; the aesthetic criticism is enthusiastic but not per, picuous. Other works deserving of mention are: L. Mesnard, Etude sur Tintoret (1881); T. P. Stearns, Four Great Venetians (1901); H. Thode, Tintoretto (1901); Stoughton Holborn, Jacopo Robusti (1003).
(W. M. R.)
These files are public domain.
Chisholm, Hugh, General Editor. Entry for 'Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto'. 1911 Encyclopedia Britanica. https://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/eng/bri/j/jacopo-robusti-tintoretto.html. 1910.
