TINTORETTO, Jacopo ROBUSTI known as Il — Born in Venice between 1518 and 1519. This date, in contrast with that provided by Ridolfi (1512) and Borghini (1524), appears the most probable from the necrologies and the indication of “seventy years old” appended to his engraved portrait in 1588; died there in 1594. The nickname “T.” derived from his father’s trade, a dyer of cloths, originally from 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 achievements. Of his children, he educated three in the art of painting and kept them as collaborators: Marco, poorly identifiable; Marietta “la Tintoretta,” a good portraitist; Domenico, the most capable of his followers and continuators. He was honored with countless and substantial commissions, often insistently solicited by him, sometimes “stolen” from colleagues by tricks such as the one for the competition of a ceiling at the School of San Rocco in 1564, to which he delivered the finished painting while the other competitors presented only sketches. Commissions for churches and convents (San Marcuola, San Marziale, Crociferi, San Severo, Madonna dell’Orto, Santa Maria del Giglio, Santa Maria Mater Domini, San Zaccaria, San Trovaso, San Polo, San Cassiano, San Stefano, San Giorgio, San Rocco, San Marco, music, etc.). For private patrons, especially as portraitist of high society; for the Signoria (Ducal Palace, Library, Camerlenghi); for the major Scuole (the imposing cycles in that of San Marco and especially in that of San 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 training is obvious, given Titian’s authority in Venice at the time. The alleged program, however, cannot reveal the absurd intention of combining two such contrasting poetics. Tintoretto is by no means an “eclectic” avant la lettre, nor can luminism, which is the most distinctive accent of his language, be considered a dialectical synthesis of opposing form-color elements; rather, it is an original intuition of the relationship among the various elements of visibility and the poetic values attainable in his pictorial representation. The ideal of Michelangelesque disegno, therefore, can only signify the intention of experimenting to acquire knowledge of the intimate structure of the visible and to attain the means of expression and technique (characteristic among these being the constructive brushstroke for achieving his simple forms) indispensable for expressing the artist’s own sentiment through the representation of that world of motifs that most interests him. And this is what might be called “historical” in contrast to “iconic” (and in his work one sees precisely the tendency to “historicize” and “dramatize” even iconic subjects such as altarpieces and Madonnas). Themes that, congenial to the temperament of the Master, allow him to display his prodigious inventive flair in creating a “spectacle” not only surprising for its grandeur, complexity, and novelty of staging (Boschini speaks of “necromancy,” and Ridolfi recalls the little theater of flying figures, the first spur to scenic invention), but also powerful for the vital charge of the characters enveloped in an atmosphere vibrant with emotion. In this way, Tintoretto happily grafts onto the trunk of the Venetian tradition the liveliest and most valid motif of Mannerism: the richness and variety of content, taking up again the tasks of large-scale narrative composition that had particularly engaged painters of previous generations such as Gentile Bellini, Carpaccio, and, in general, the illustrators of the Venetian Deeds in the Hall of the Great Council.
After the grand initial efforts of Pordenone and the attempts of Bonifacio, Mannerism took root, rigorously, in Venetian soil through the work of Tintoretto, when the knowledge of the problems and interests of Mannerist taste was becoming more 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 diffusion of Raphael’s engravings and Michelangelo’s drawings. Tintoretto’s overpowering imaginative vigor evokes into light, almost from the womb of nothingness, prodigious worlds, throngs of images with a piercing presence and at the same time an hallucinatory unreality in a staging endlessly renewed. In luminism, which he was the first to use consistently and extensively, he found the most suitable and effective language to express the impetuous dramatic force of his temperament and, at the same time, the fervor of his sincere religious faith, which sometimes reaches the impetus of a true mystical rapture, as in the impressive final work, the Supper at Saint George, in which the wondrous sense of Transubstantiation is expressed with a power of persuasion and emotion unmatched and perhaps unnarratable. Luminism, by placing the entire poetic accent of the representation on luminous vibration, simplifies, strips down, and essentializes forms reduced to patches and profiles of shadow and light in contrast, abolishes or rather surpasses all psychological mimesis and transfigures the expression of human sentiments into a cosmic breath: the terror of the mothers in the Massacre of the Innocents (School of San Rocco) bursts forth in a telluric upheaval; the ecstasy of the holy hermits (also at San Rocco) becomes a stellar blaze of sparks bursting forth in the monochromatic nocturnal darkness (yet pregnant with color); the joy of the Blessed in the boundless Paradise of the Ducal Palace erupts in an oceanic roar that overflows, spreads on all sides like a triumphal hymn, into boundless space; in the Crucifixion at San Rocco, more than a weeping of people, it is an anguish of heavens laboring and torn.
Luminism and the constructive brushstroke are the distinctive features of his language, which he forged through a multiplicity 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 fashionable painters. Thus, while before achieving full and free mastery of the constructive brushstroke—already notable in the Miracle of Saint Mark of 1548—he is seen departing from a painting of impasto in the manner of Titian or Bonifacio (as in the early works of San Marcuola or the ceilings for Aretino); and even afterward, sometimes engaging in the description of accurately modeled and clearly detached forms in a resplendent polychromy à la Paolo Veronese (as in the Presentation, now in the Galleries of Venice, or in the Saint George of London). It is possible to recognize in his career, rather than a developed linear progression, an oscillation over long periods between the poles of tonalism and those of luminism prevalent in the works of maturity and old age, with some intermediate stops in positions of slightly accentuated plasticity, such as some paintings for the Camerlenghi, and later the Allegorical Mythologies of the Ducal Palace. — See plates XII–XIII.