TINTORETTO, JACOPO ROBUSTI known as il - Born in Venice between 1518 and 1519. This date, in contrast with that given by Ridolfi (1512) and Borghini (1524), appears the more probable from the obituaries and from the indication “seventy-year-old” appended to his engraved portrait in 1588; died there in 1594. The nickname “T.” derived from his father’s trade, cloth-dyer, originally from Lucca.
He spent his life in Venice, apart from a journey to Mantua in 1580 for the installation in the Palazzo Ducale of the Gonzaga Fasti. Of his children, he trained three in the art of painting and kept them as assistants: Marco, difficult to identify; Marietta “la Tentoretta,” a good portraitist; and Domenico, the most able of his followers and continuators. He was honoured with very numerous and important commissions, often solicited by him directly, and at times “blown” to his colleagues through tricks such as the one he employed in the competition for a ceiling at the Scuola di S. Rocco in 1564, for which he submitted the painting already finished, while the other competitors presented only sketches. Commissions for churches and convents (S. Marcuola, S. Marziale, Crociferi, S. Severo, Madonna dell'Orto, S. Maria del Giglio, S. Maria Mater Domini, S. Zaccaria, S. Trovaso, S. Polo, S. Cassiano, S. Stefano, S. Giorgio, S. Rocco, S. Marco, mosaics, etc.); for private individuals, especially as a portraitist of high society; for the Signoria (Palazzo Ducale, Libreria, Camerlenghi); and for the major Scuole (the imposing cycles in that of S. Marco and, above all, in that of S. Rocco, of which he was a confraternity member and to which he devoted, almost free of charge, a large part of his activity for about half a century).
That his training had at least a general Tizianesque foundation is obvious, given Titian’s authority in Venice at that time. The alleged programme cannot, however, disclose the absurd intention of combining two such contrasting poetics. T. is not at all an “eclectic” avant la lettre, nor can the luminism, which is the most distinctive accent of his language, be considered a dialectical synthesis of opposing forms and colours; rather, it is an original intuition of the relationship between the various elements of visibility and of the poetic values attainable in his pictorial representation. The ideal, therefore, of Michelangelesque drawing can signify nothing other than the intention to undertake experiments in order to acquire knowledge of the inner structure of the visible and to attain command of the linguistic and technical means (among which the constructive brushstroke for achieving his simplified forms is characteristic) indispensable for expressing the artist’s own feeling through the representation of that world of motifs which most interests him. And this is what might be called “historical” in contrast to the “iconic” (and in his work even iconic subjects such as altarpieces, Madonnas, etc., can precisely be seen tending to become “historicized” and “dramatized”). These themes, congenial to the temperament of the Master, enabled him to unfold his prodigious inventive flair in the creation of the “spectacle,” not only astonishing for the grandeur, complexity and novelty of its staging (Boschini speaks outright of “necromancies,” while Ridolfi recalls the little theatre with flying figures, the first inspiration for the scenic invention), but also powerful in the vital energy of its characters, enveloped in an atmosphere vibrating with emotion. In this way T. successfully grafted onto the trunk of the Venetian tradition the most vivid and valuable motif of Mannerism: the richness and variety of content, taking up once more the tasks of the great narrative composition that had particularly engaged painters of earlier generations such as Gentile Bellini, Carpaccio and, generally, the illustrators of the Pasti Veneziani in the hall of the Maggior Consiglio.
After the first grandiose experiments of Pordenone and Bonifacio’s attempts, Mannerism took vigorous root in Venetian territory through T., at a time when awareness of the problems and interests of Mannerist taste was becoming increasingly widespread and was also asserting itself in Venice, both through the arrival of painters such as Cecchino Salviati (1539) and Vasari (1541), and through the dissemination of Raphaelistic prints and Michelangelesque drawings. T.’s overpowering imaginative vigour calls forth into the light, almost from the womb of nothingness, prodigious worlds, populations of images with a piercing presence and, at the same time, a hallucinatory unreality, in an endlessly renewed direction. In luminism, T., who was the first to employ it coherently and on a very broad scale, found the language best suited and most effective for expressing the impetuous drama of his temperament and, at the same time, the fervour of his sincere religious faith, which sometimes reaches the impetus of a true mystical raptor, as in his impressive final work, the Last Supper of S. Giorgio, in which the miraculous sense of Transubstantiation is expressed with a power of persuasion and emotion never equalled and perhaps never to be equalled. Luminism, placing the entire poetic emphasis of the representation on luminous vibration, simplifies, strips down and essentializes the forms, reducing them to patches and profiles of contrasting shadow and light; it abolishes—or rather surpasses—all psychological mimicry and transfigures the expression of human feelings into an expansion of cosmic breadth: the terror of the mothers in the Massacre of the Innocents (Scuola di S. Rocco) unfolds in a telluric upheaval; the ecstasy of the Holy Hermit Women (also at S. Rocco) becomes a stellar throbbing of sparks bursting forth in the monochrome night-time darkness (yet pregnant with colour); the joy of the Blessed in the boundless Paradise of the Palazzo Ducale erupts in an oceanic roar that overflows and spreads in every direction like a triumphant hymn through limitless space; in the Crucifixion of S. Rocco, it is more than the lament of persons: it is the anguish of breathless, striated skies.
Luminism and the constructive brushstroke are the distinctive features of his language, which he fashioned through a wealth and variety of experiences and investigations, with frequent oscillations, at times even with curious, intentional imitative counterfeits—revealed by the sources—of the language of other painters then in vogue. Thus, before arriving at the full and free command of the constructive brushstroke—already notable in the Miracle of S. Mark of 1548—he can be seen beginning from a painting of the Tizianesque or Bonifacian impasto (as in the youthful works at S. Marcuola or in the ceilings for Aretino); and even afterwards he sometimes applied himself to the description of carefully rounded and limpidly detached forms in the ringing polychromy of Paolo Veronese (as in the Presentation, now in the Gallerie di Venezia, or in the S. Giorgio in London). In his career, rather than a linear development, it is possible to recognize an oscillation over long periods between the poles of tonalism and those of the luminism prevailing in the works of his maturity and old age, with some intermediate pauses at positions of slightly accentuated plasticism, as in certain paintings for the Camorlenghi and, later, the Allegorical Mythologies of the Palazzo Ducale. - Vedi tavv. XII-XIII.