TINTORETTO, JACOPO ROBUSTI called il - Born in Venice between 1518 and 1519. This date, in contrast with that given by Ridolfi (1512) and by Borghini (1524), emerges as the most probable from the necrologies and from the indication of "seventy years old" appended to his portrait engraved in 1588; d. there in 1594. The nickname "T." derived from his father's trade, a cloth dyer, a native of Lucca.
He spent his life in Venice, except for a journey to Mantua in 1580 for the placement in the Ducal Palace of the Gonzaga Fasti. Of his children, he educated three in the art of painting and kept them as collaborators: Marco, difficult to identify; Marietta "la Tentoretta," a good portraitist; Domenico, the most capable of the followers and continuators. He was honored with very numerous and conspicuous commissions, often instantly solicited by him, sometimes "snatched" from colleagues with tricks such as the one for the competition for a ceiling at the Scuola di S. Rocco, in 1564, to which he delivered 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 (Ducal Palace, Libreria, Camerlenghi); 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 confrere and to which he gave, almost gratuitously, a good part of his activity for about half a century).
That there is at least a generic Titianesque foundation in his formation is obvious, given the authority of Titian, then, in Venice. The alleged program cannot, however, reveal the absurd intention of combining together two such contrasting poetics. T. is by no means an "eclectic" before the letter, nor can luminism, which is the most peculiar accent of his language, be considered a dialectical synthesis of the opposites form-color; rather it is an original intuition of the relationship between the various elements of visibility, of the poetic values attainable in its pictorial representation. The ideal, therefore, of Michelangelesque drawing can only mean the intention of experiences, to acquire knowledge of the intimate structure of the visible and to arrive at the possession of linguistic and technical means (characteristic among these the constructive brushstroke for the attainment of his simplified forms) indispensable to the expression of the feeling proper to the artist through the representation of that world of motifs that interests him most. And it is what might be called "historical" in comparison with the "iconic" (and in his work one sees tending precisely to "historicize themselves" and to "dramatize themselves" even iconic subjects such as altarpieces, Madonnas, etc.). Themes that, congenial to the Master's temperament, allow him to display his prodigious inventive genius, in the creation of the "spectacle" not only surprising for the grandeur, complexity, novelty of the staging (Boschini speaks outright of "necromancies" and Ridolfi recalls the little theater with flying figurines, the first spark for the scenic invention), but also powerful for the vital charge of the characters enveloped in an atmosphere vibrating with emotions. By such a path T. happily grafts onto the trunk of the Venetian tradition the most living and most valid motif of Mannerism: the richness and variety of content, taking up again the tasks of the great narrative composition that had particularly engaged painters of previous generations such as Gentile Bellini, Carpaccio and, in general, the illustrators of the Pasti Veneziani in the hall of the Maggior Consiglio.
After the first grandiose trials of Pordenone and the attempts of Bonifacio, Mannerism takes root, luxuriant, in Venetian territory through the work of T., when the knowledge of the problems and interests of Mannerist taste was increasingly imposing itself and was asserting itself also in Venice, both through the arrival of painters, such as Cecchino Salviati (1539) and Vasari (1541), and through the diffusion of Raphaelesque prints and Michelangelesque drawings. The overmastering fantastic vigor of T. evokes into the light, almost from the womb of nothingness, prodigious worlds, peoples of images with a pungent presentness and at the same time with a hallucinatory unreality in an inexhaustibly renewed direction. In luminism T., who is the first to make coherent and very extensive use of it, finds the language most suited and effective for expressing the impetuous dramatic quality of his temperament and at the same time the fervor of his sincere religious faith, which sometimes reaches the ardor of a true mystical raptor, as in his impressive last work, the Cena of S. Giorgio, in which the miraculous sense of the Transubstantiation is expressed with a power of persuasion and emotion unequaled and perhaps unequatable. Luminism, placing all the poetic accent of the representation on luminous vibration, simplifies, strips bare, essentializes forms reduced to patches and profiles of shadow and contrasting light, abolishes or rather surpasses every psychological mimicry and transfigures the expression of human feelings into a dilation of cosmic breath: the terror of the mothers in the Strage degli innocenti (Scuola di S. Rocco) erupts in a telluric upheaval; the ecstasy of the Sante eremite (also at S. Rocco) becomes a stellar palpitation of sparks spurting in the nocturnal monochrome darkness (but nonetheless pregnant with colors); the joy of the Blessed in the vast Paradiso of the Ducal Palace bursts forth in an oceanic roar that overflows, spreads on every side as in a triumphal hymn, into boundless space; in the Crocifissione of S. Rocco it is less a weeping of persons than an anguish of labored and streaked skies.
Luminism and constructive brushstroke are the peculiar characteristics of his language, which he came to fashion through abundance and variety of experiences and researches, with frequent oscillations, sometimes even with curious, intentional mimetic counterfeits - revealed by the sources - of the language of other painters in vogue. Thus while before arriving at the full and free possession of the constructive brushstroke - already notable in the Miracolo di S. Marco of 1548 - one sees him starting from a painting of impasto in the manner of Titian or of Bonifacio (as in the youthful works of S. Marcuola or in the ceilings for the Aretino); and even afterward, sometimes engaging in the description of forms carefully turned and limpidly detached in a ringing polychromy in the manner of Paolo Veronese (as in the Presenza, now in the Galleries of Venice, or in the S. Giorgio of London). It is possible to recognize in his career, rather than a rectilinear development, 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 pause on positions of a slightly accentuated plasticism, such as some paintings for Camerlenghi, and later the Mitologie allegoriche of the Ducal Palace. - See plates XII-XIII.
Bibliography7 works
Luigi Coletti