Date: 04-02-2007
Owning Institution: The Prado Museum
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2010      
Subject: Renaissance        

On returning to London from Venice in 1843, John Ruskin remembered with awe his first encounter with the art of Tintoretto. “I feel,” he wrote, “as if I had got introduced to a being from a planet 1,000,000 miles closer to the sun, not to a mere earthly painter.” Ruskin placed Tintoretto at the centre of his pantheon of the world’s great artists. He saw the Venetian master as both a titan and a redeemer, a painter who had departed from the superficial naturalism of his immediate predecessors to weave myriad, dream-like visions of the spiritual world.

In the twentieth century, Jean-Paul Sartre added a different element to Tintoretto’s legend. He saw the painter as a sullen revolutionary, one who pursued his own inspiration with such singleminded disregard for the mercantile values of his rich Venetian patrons that he became “an intruder, almost a pariah in his own city”. Sartre was fascinated by Tintoretto’s emphasis on the poverty of Christ and his disciples, reflected not only in his disconcertingly direct approach to the stories of the New Testament, but also in his very technique – his preference for browns, for russets, the low-toned colours of the earth, and for the dirty yellows of manger-straw. In Sartre’s eyes, Tintoretto’s painting expressed a form of Counter-Reformation piety so fiercely attuned to the plight of the working classes as to predict the politics of Marxism.

Although his work has touched many people for many different reasons, Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-1594) has always been above all a painter’s painter. The imprint of his style and his innovations can be seen across time and space, throughout the traditions of subsequent Western art. El Greco was transfixed by the experience of seeing the grand cycle of canvases by Tintoretto in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice – and propelled, by their example, into the sublime mysteries of his own late style. Rubens was profoundly impressed by the Venetian artist’s theatrical flamboyance, his sense-bewildering manipulations of space and scale, and his cast of swooping, floating or inverted figures. Caravaggio’s shocking immediacy and troubling low-life realism, as well as his radical use of light and shade, suggest that he too had made the pilgrimage to see Tintoretto’s works in Venice, and been vitally inspired by them. Velazquez loved Tintoretto; and so too, moving into modern times, did Jackson Pollock. In the dizzying, cloud-borne maelstrom of Tintoretto’s Paradise – still one of the largest paintings in the world even now, more than four hundred years after it was painted – Pollock found much of the courage to paint his own enormous, abstract, “all-over” compositions.

Yet for all his stature and influence, there has been no serious exhibition devoted to the full span of Tintoretto’s career for seventy years. The last such event took place at the Ca’ Pesaro, in Venice, in 1937. Until now there has been no successor to that show. But last week a new exhibition of some 50 major works by Tintoretto, drawn from churches and palaces in Venice, as well as museums and private collections all over the world, opened at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. As a tribute to the painter’s central role in the history of post-Renaissance art, the pictures have been installed along the museum’s central spine of galleries. The result is a fascinatingly strange and uneven exhibition. Despite its flaws – and even, to a certain extent, because of them – it does much to illuminate the unruly and deeply idiosyncratic nature of Tintoretto’s achievement.

The exhibition is bookended by two self-portraits. The first, a work of 1546 now owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is a portrait of the artist as a pensive young man. Done rapidly, and using oil paint so dry it looks almost like pastel, it shows him meeting the gaze of posterity with a hunted, haunted look on his face. The picture bears a resemblance to the wistful Self-Portrait as David painted by the earlier Venetian master Giorgione – with whose poetic ghost Tintoretto clearly felt an affinity – although it has a nervy, edgy quality all of its own. The lighting is nocturnal, enhancing the introspective mood. The handling is clumsy in places, notably in a smudged ear and one or two slightly botched, overemphatic highlights on forehead and cheeks. But this too is part of the portrait’s truth. “He has not a great deal of patience … and he certainly takes on too much,” remarked Tintoretto’s friend, Francesco Sansovino. At the end of the exhibition hangs the great late self-portrait painted in 1589 and now owned by the Louvre. The artist’s face once more is nocturnally lit but far older. Edginess has been transmuted to stoicism. He looks exhausted but the fire in his eyes suggest that his mind is still seething with ideas.

Tintoretto certainly took on a lot, during the course of his long life. It has been calculated that he and his workshop painted around seven hundred paintings for the churches and religious confraternities of Venice. Many of those works were many metres across. When Giorgio Vasari visited, in 1566, it seemed to him that Tintoretto “has executed, as he continues to do, the greater part of the pictures painted in Venice”. A very high proportion of these large and immovable works remain, in situ, in the city where they were painted. In fact, it is largely because Venice itself contains this vast, permanent installation of Tintoretto’s work that museums have been so reluctant to put on exhibitions devoted to him.

The artist’s first biographer, Carlo Ridolfi, emphasised Tintoretto’s restlessness, describing him as a man possessed by the desire to make his mark as a quite new kind of artist: “since his fertile genius bubbled continuously with ideas, he was always thinking of ways to make himself known as the most daring artist in the world.” The Prado’s exhibition opens with a number of works marked by an originality so extreme as to seem almost crazed. The Conversion of Saint Paul, which Tintoretto painted in 1544, is a deliriously chaotic depiction of a fabled moment of divine intervention. The setting is a panoramic landscape that has been made to resemble a centrifuge, such is the force with which figures and horses fly off in all directions as the saint is struck by God’s thunderbolt. Pennants fly in the wind and a storm whips up a patch of sea where a group of castaways, heads bobbing, struggle to stay afloat.

Even stranger and more haunting is the slightly earlier Christ Among the Doctors, of 1542. Here, Tintoretto imagines the temple of the disputation as if it were a phantasmagoric version of the temple of learning in Raphael’s famous School of Athens. In the foreground, groups of baffled doctors wearing crazily voluminous swathes of windswept drapery wrestle with books as massive as tombstones. They look like the Prophets and Sibyls painted by Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, but afflicted by convulsions and hysteria. In the background, a minuscule, haloed figure of Christ dispenses his wisdom to a swooning multitude. It was typical of the young Tintoretto to take his inspiration from the art of central Italy rather than Venice. Conversing with the ghosts of Raphael and Michelangelo was in part his way of setting himself apart from the dominant Venetian tradition of his time – that of Titian, whose mantle would be taken on by Paolo Veronese, Tintoretto’s principal rival during the latter stages of his career. But he does not merely invoke the art of the Roman High Renaissance, he reinvents its forms, whipping them up into a new kind of spectral, visionary painting. The picture also shows Tintoretto’s profound disdain for Renaissance conceptions of “finish” – his embrace of a new aesthetic of fast, impressionistic painting, which enabled him, as his friend Pietro Aretino said, to paint whole churches in the time it would take other artists to make their preparatory drawings. He leaves whole areas rough and sketchy – something that infuriated Vasari so much he accused Tintoretto of playing a joke on the very profession of the painter.

Tintoretto’s reworkings of Renaissance forms and conventions often come close to pastiche. It is no coincidence that he should have associated with a group of Venetian writers and intellectuals known as the poligrafi – who were themselves young turks, filled with disdain for the high-flown conventions of Renaissance poetry, whose literary productions were both admired and criticised for their innovative but frequently slapdash approach to form. There was, this show reveals very clearly, a similarly mischievous and iconoclastic side to Tintoretto’s artistic personality. This is particularly evident in his secular paintings. In his Venus and Mars Surprised by Vulcan, of 1545, he transforms the well-established Renaissance form of the poesia – a poetic retelling of classical myth – into a piece of bawdy bedroom farce. Venus reclines on a bed while Vulcan suspiciously lifts the drapery that preserves her modesty, as if looking for physical evidence of adultery. Mars nervously pokes his head out from under a nearby table, waiting for the right moment to make his getaway. Another of the revelations of the exhibition is Tintoretto the portrait-painter, an artist who painted his Venetian contemporaries with utter frankness and lack of pretension.

What a museum show offers, that no single church or confraternity in Venice can match, is an overview of Tintoretto’s art. One of the most interesting aspects of the Prado’s show is the way in which it throws into relief the different elements from which Tintoretto would forge the great synthesis of his profound, predominantly religious art. His juvenilia reveal a compelling blend of competing, complementary traits: an impatience with the accepted norms of art that bred a fundamental irreverence towards the work of even the greatest masters of the past; an imagination so inherently hallucinogenic as to cast everything in the light of a strange and surreal dream; yet at the same time, counterbalancing his inclination to spiritually charged fantasy and idealism, a strong sense of real and ordinary and sometimes absurd human life.

All these aspects of Tintoretto’s work come together in the two works that have been placed at the heart of the show: The Last Supper and The Washing of the Feet, of 1547. Both were originally painted for San Marcuola’s Scuola del Santissimo Sacramento, in Venice, although only the former is still owned by the Church of San Marcuola. The Washing of the Feet, which used to be owned by Charles I of England, is part of the Prado’s own collection. Both are masterpieces, albeit of a very different kind. The Last Supper is a dark and brooding work that treats the subject both as sacrament and as compelling human drama. The figures of the apostles, each outlined by a line of light that shimmers like an electrical forcefield, huddle together around Christ, each – other than the static figure of Judas revealing consternation – at the news that one of them will turn out to be a traitor. The Washing of the Feet, by contrast, is an open, light-filled painting in which Tintoretto’s powerful realism and flamboyant idealism are held in perfect balance. Within a fantasy Venetian loggia, like an operatic stageset, one disciple tugs and heaves at another’s leggings, while others take off shoes and sandals and the bearded figure of Christ – kneeling and wearing a servant’s smock – goes about the business of washing their feet. It is a remarkable painting, although looking at it in an art gallery is, and always will be, a rather odd and misleading experience. It was designed as a laterale, a picture that could only be viewed from the side, hung in a narrow alley of space within the sacred building for which it was originally painted – hence the distortions of scale and perspective and the placement of Christ so far to the right of the composition, closest to where the original viewer would have had to stand to see the work.

So many of Tintoretto’s devices were thought up in response to the specific spatial constraints of their religious settings that his pictures often simply do not work when seen in an art gallery, with its even lighting and implict invitation to view every work straight on, from both near and far. On the occasion of the last great Tintoretto exhibition, of 1937, the art historian Johannes Wilde complained that most of the artist’s pictures were rendered simply incomprehensible by being uprooted from their original contexts. The same criticism can be levelled at the Prado’s exhibition, which reaches its climax with a grand gallery filled with the convulsive mythological and religious paintings of his maturity. But it could also be argued that many of the strange and distorting effects that arise from a museum display of his work also reveal an essential truth about it.

Tintoretto’s art simply is overwhelmingly weird, so much so that looking at his pictures often feels like looking at the real world while under the influence of some hallucinogenic drug. His art is a compound of whirling forms, chutes and voids of space and figures like flames or phantoms; and to see these works in the neutral space of a museum, rather than the dark and often theatrical spaces of Counter-Reformation Venice, is to see just how singular a painter Tintoretto was. Perhaps the greatest achievement of this exhibition is to make his fundamental strangeness seem more naked than ever before.