Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution:
Publication: Sunday Telegraph Features    
Subject:   20th Century  

Just who was Jacopo Robusti, alias Tintoretto? Something of a mystery, if his Self-Portrait of 1589 in the Louvre is anything to go by. Spotlit, isolated in circumambient darkness, he turns a melancholy crag of a face towards us. His eyes are bottomless black pools and there are heavy bags under them. A solemn greybeard with a droopy  and somewhat walrus-like aspect, he seems to look through rather than at us.

The bags under his eyes, at least, are easily explained. When he painted this portrait of the artist as an old man Tintoretto had spent much of the preceding 15 years decorating the Scuola Grande di San Rocco - the meeting house of one of Venice’s many religious confraternities - with no fewer than fifty monumental canvases illustrating the stories of the Bible. The result of all his labour was one of the most ambitious and original cycles of painting in the history of Western art. A grand but rather cool building, designed in the opulent classical style which had only recently become fashionable in Venice, was transformed - turned into an all-absorbing theatre of religious contemplation, a bewitching space, its every wall a window on to a religious vision.

Tintoretto was one of the great innovators. Taking the chiaroscuro pioneered by earlier Renaissance artists to new extremes, he created a new world of dramatically penumbral light effects, so that the holy events in his paintings seem to unfold in a universe crackling with spiritual electricity. The climactic work in the San Rocco cycle, and the principal painting in its albergo, or chief council chamber, is an enormous depiction of the Crucifixion forty feet wide. The artist seems to have taken as his text John 12:32-33:  “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to me. This he said, signifying what death he should die.” Tintoretto painted Golgotha as a great panorama to which, as if magnetised, the whole world seems to have been drawn. A mass of people, some on horseback, some on foot, have gathered to witness the most momentous event in Christian history. The penitent thief’s cross is being raised, while the impenitent thief continues faintheartedly to resist the attentions of those tying him to his cross. All the lines of force and perspective in the painting - lines literally made by ropes and ladders and slabs of rock, as well as lines implied by pointing hands and pointed looks - converge on the figure of Christ. His shadowed head emits lines of radiance, a halo that makes of him a second sun as well as the Son of God, the very centre of all the busy world that surrounds him, and the still point that gives a meaning to all its bustle. Behind him, as storm clouds gather, the real sun sets in colours of blood. Tintoretto’s solemn Christian drama is thus set in a landscape that echoes Christ’s own Passion. You could remove all the figures and the painting would still communicate the emotion of tragic loss.

The Scuola di San Rocco has remained a pilgrimage site for artists and lovers of art for four centuries and more. There is nothing in the world quite like it: a palace on the outside but, within, a fascinating cave where supernatural apparitions loom out of darkness on all sides. But posterity has been divided on the subject of its unruly and unpredictable creator. Giorgio Vasari, the pioneering Renaissance art historian and author of The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, thoroughly disapproved of Tintoretto, partly because of the indecent haste with which he was able to complete huge and demanding pictures and partly because he had a habit of leaving “as finished works sketches still so rough that the brush strokes may be seen”. (This was a frequent  criticism which seems to have amused rather than disconcerted Tintoretto, to judge by his wry deathbed instruction to his son and studio assistant, Domenico to finish, “with all the usual diligence”, all incomplete pictures). Following Vasari’s lead, generations of academically minded critics persisted in seeing him as a wilfully bizarre perverter of art’s true course. But his critical reputation revived during the Romantic period, largely because both Goethe and John Ruskin idolised him. On returning from Venice in 1843 Ruskin wrote of his “first acquaintance with Tintoretto” that “I feel as if I had got introduced to a being from a planet 1,000,000 miles nearer the sun, not to a mere earthly painter.” The eminently Victorian art critic saw Tintoretto as the great redeemer of the High Renaissance, a man who turned away from the “evil” sensualism of painters such as Raphael and Michelangelo to create an art of pure and elevated inner vision. Then, in the twentieth century, the last great twist in the tale of his posthumous reputation, Jean-Paul Sartre reinvented Tintoretto yet again, this time as a kind of Marxist hero-cum-existentialist avant la lettre - a man who identified with the working classes and their struggles and who was regarded with such distrust, as a result, by the merchants and aristocrats running Venice that he became “a frantic, harassed outlaw … an intruder, almost a pariah in his own city.”

Tom Nichols, the author of a wonderfully informative and entertaining new study of the painter, Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity, sets out to revise these and other myths but he ends up by acknowledging that (as is often the way) there is a little bit of truth in each of them. His book is a milestone of a kind, being the first full-length account of the artist’s life and work to appear in English for nearly 50 years. It contains so much new and unfamiliar material that it should should shake more or less anyone who reads it out of whatever preconceptions they may have about one of the most remarkable painters in history.

What emerges from Nichols’s researches with particular clarity is the extent to which - and the ingenuity with which - Tintoretto invented himself, both as an artist and as an artistic personality. From the start of his career, like the rest of his generation of painters, he was faced by the not inconsiderable problem of Titian’s enormous fame and reputation. Not only was Titian unprecedentedly rich and well-respected; not only was his work so sought after by kings and princes from all over Europe that it sometimes seemed as if his art was Venetian art, both its summary and its apogee; Titian also, even more irritatingly, refused to die, living (and painting with increasing solemnity and brilliance) into his nineties.

Tintoretto, who was both trained in Titian’s studio and expelled from it for some unknown transgression, had an uneasy and perhaps even somewhat Oedipal relationship with the great father figure of Venetian painting. He seems to have spent much of his early career deliberately setting himself apart from Titian in every possible way that he could. He borrowed compositions and ideas liberally from Michelangelo, Titian’s great Tuscan rival for the palm of most celebrated Italian Renaissance painter - a gesture which amounted to a coded snub, and which immediately distinguished Tintoretto’s painting from most other Venetian painting of the time. There is also a tremendous perspectival and compositional violence about much of Tintoretto’s early work - with its vertiginously deep spaces, its unconventional angles of vision and its population of paroxysmally agitated and frequently airborne figures - which cannot entirely be explained by the influence of Michelangelo and other central Italian mannerists. The young Tintoretto seems to have been almost possessed by the desire to establish his own, unique style, to be noticed.

Even the painter’s adoption of “Tintoretto” as his name appears to have been an act of calculation and self-invention. The word means “the little dyer” and referred to the painter’s origins - because he was indeed the son of a Venetian textile worker. By taking the name of his father’s lowly craft the artist was declaring that he - in stark contrast once more to Titian, who lived as though he were one of the princes for whom he worked - was unashamed of his humble background. This self-conscious humility was part of a wider business strategy, as Nichols explains in truly fascinating chapters on the artist’s dealings with his clients. Unlike many other Venetian painters who aspired to the new status of the Renaissance artist - to be seen not merely as craftsmen but as noble and intellectual beings - Tintoretto made no secret of the fact that he was happy to paint by the yard, and to adjust his prices to the relative wealth of his patrons. So whereas the great Titian and his followers conspicuously pursued an inflationary pricing policy, asking small fortunes for his pictures, and pleading in justification the length of time which it took to paint each one, Tintoretto knocked them out quickly and sold them cheap.

Indeed he would often paint for almost nothing, simply to win a commission, and many of his most conspicuous devices as an artist - his tendency to shroud much of the action in shadow, his rapid, shorthand abbreviations for many of the background figures, his reduction of landscape to a misty blur - can be explained at least in part by his corresponding need to get his work done as quickly as possible. Even Tintoretto’s palette seems to have been determined by his cut-price policies. He eschewed the more expensive colours - the colours of luxury such as lapis-lazuli blue - to paint in cheaper hues of earth and russet. Hence the predominantly warm and self-consciously “poor” tonalities of his art. Many of the pigments he used were also used by textile dyers, and given his family contacts in the dying business it seems that he may have been able to get a special deal on some of his working materials.

Tintoretto’s style won him the hearty dislike of many of the grander sort of Venetian patrons. They preferred the more openly luxurious and richly coloured work of a painter such as his close contemporary Paolo Veronese, who built on Titian’s achievements in a less turbulent and in many respects less troubling manner. But notwithstanding their somewhat snobbish objections, the little dyer’s work became increasingly popular and prominent in the poorer churches of the city. Even today, to the tourist strolling in and out of Venetian churches at random, his work is liable to seem ubiquitous. He created some 650 paintings during his career, most of them extremely large, and the majority are still to be found in his native city. It comes as no surprise that his business practices should have both scandalised and irritated many of his contemporaries. Not only was he pricing them out of good work. The fear was that he might be giving painting itself a bad name - and just at a time when painters were struggling to be recognised as the practitioners of a liberal and learned art. This was the root cause of Vasari’s hand-wringing over Tintoretto’s hastiness of execution, and his complaint that the pictures seemed “done more by chance and vehemence than with judgement and design”. It was through such slapdash techniques, Vasari hinted darkly, that Tintoretto managed “to execute, as he still does, the greater part of the pictures painted in Venice.”

But it would be wrong, and deeply unfair to Tintoretto, to see the self-conscious “poverty” of his style as a purely cynical and market-driven ploy. (Nichols, to his credit, does not do so.) For while the painter’s style was unquestionably shaped by commercial exigencies, like all great artists he worked within such constraints to forge something that was both new and profound. In many of his greatest works, the modesty and simplicity of his colours, and the plainspeaking directness of his style, take on an unmistakable ethical and religious dimension. By eschewing the rich and bright colours used by so many Venetian artists, Tintoretto put forward a new aesthetic, of restraint and asceticism, which almost certainly reflected the increasingly severe teachings of the Catholic church in Counter-Reformation Europe. Likewise, in experimenting with the effects of free and rapid brushstrokes, he did not merely save himself time and money - he opened up a whole new pictorial language of expression, both for himself, and for generations of painters who came after him, from El Greco to John Constable and beyond.

Looking at Tintoretto’s later paintings for the Scuola di San Rocco, such as his Baptism of Christ or his Seated Saint in Meditation, it is clear enough that, in exploiting the effects of “unfinished” - non-finito - painting, he discovered an extremely original way of suggesting the intensity of mystical experience. Light assumes supernatural properties in these pictures, seeming to flow through and across landscapes almost like water. Perhaps it is not really (not merely) light at all, but illumination. Tintoretto shows us the world not as we see it, but the world as it might appear to someone in a condition of visionary ecstasy. The moral of Tom Nichols’s fine and penetrating book is, in the end, a simple one. A deeper understanding of the painter’s material existence can help us to a deeper appreciation of the intense moral and spiritual power of his art.