Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

that he could see the future Tintoretto in the drawings of a student

just admitted to his school. It is possible that the drawings offended

Titian by their carelessness rather than by their excellence; careless

drawing remained a fault in Tintoretto through many years. Iacopo

throughout his life expressed great admiration for Titian, treasured a

picture that Titian had given him, and put upon the wall of his studio

a constant reminder of what he aspired to achieve in painting: "The

design of Michelangelo and the color of Titian." `052226

According to Ridolfi and tradition, Iacopo had no instruction

after leaving Titian, but taught himself by assiduous copying and

experiment. He dissected bodies to learn anatomy. He observed almost

every object in his experience with predatory eagerness, resolved to

capture it in full detail in one or another of his paintings. He

made models in wax, wood, or cardboard, dressed them, and drew them

from every angle to find ways of portraying three dimensions in two.

He had casts made and sent to him of ancient marbles in Florence and

Rome, and of Michelangelo's statuary; he set up these casts in his

studio, and painted images of them in divers shadows and lights. He

was fascinated by the variations produced in the appearance of objects

by changes in the quantity, character, and incidence of light; he made

a hundred pictures by lamp or candle illumination; he grew too fond of

dim backgrounds and heavy shadows; he became a specialist in picturing

the play of light and shade upon hands and face and drapes,

buildings and landscapes and clouds. He left no pebble unturned in his

struggle for excellence.

Nevertheless there was an impatient haste, and lack of finish, in

his work- possibly a penalty of self-instruction- which deferred the

public recognition of his art. For years after reaching manhood he had

to solicit opportunities. He painted furniture, frescoed house fronts,

begged builders to get him decorative jobs at low fees, and tried to

sell his pictures by displaying them in St. Mark's Square. `052227

Everybody wanted Titian; and Titian and Aretino saw to it that

nobody of extractable substance should get anyone but Titian, or, if

Titian was busy, Bonifazio Veronese. Iacopo must have resented

Aretino's pictorial pandering, but later, when the great Scourge

came to him for a portrait, the artist pulled an impressive pistol

from his pocket, pretended to measure with it Aretino's majestic

dimensions, and enjoyed the mighty blackmailer's fright; `052228

thereafter Pietro's pen was polite to Tintoretto. When Iacopo noted

the vast unpainted walls- fifty feet high- of the choir in the

church of the Madonna dell' Orto, he offered to cover their

nakedness with frescoes for a total fee of 199 ducats ($1250?);

whereupon the Venetian painters complained that he was "injuring the

trade" by underselling art. But Tintoretto was resolved to paint.

He was thirty before his first triumph came. The Scuola di San Marco

opened a competition for a painting of St. Mark delivering a slave.

The story was in Iacopo de Voragine's Golden Legend: a Provencal

servant had promised St. Mark to make a pilgrimage to his grave in

Alexandria; his master refused him permission to go, but he went

nevertheless. When he returned the master ordered his eyes to be

gouged out, but the iron points pressed upon them failed to

penetrate their surface. The master ordered the slave's limbs to be

broken, but the iron rods failed to make any impression upon them. The

master, recognizing the intervention of St. Mark, pardoned the

slave. Tintoretto's picture told the tale with magnificent color,

convincing realism, and dramatic intensity: the evangelist, clinging

to his gospel, descends from heaven to rescue his devotee, who is

about to be beheaded by a Moor, while a score of diverse figures

look excitedly on. Iacopo seized every opportunity the story gave him:

to limn powerful male and graceful female figures; to study the action

of light upon Oriental velvets, silks, and turbans; to bathe the scene

in colors learned from Giorgione and Titian. The directors of the

Scuola were a bit frightened by the fleshly realism of the painting;

they debated whether to place it on their walls; the impetuous

Tintoretto proudly snatched it from their hands and took it home. They

came and begged him to return it; he let them wait a chastening while,

then yielded it. Aretino sent him a word of praise, and career was now

open to his talent.

Soon commissions came in multitude. A dozen churches solicited

him, a dozen lords, half a dozen princes and states. For these he told

again, in a hundred paintings, the mighty epic of the Christian

cosmology, theology, and eschatology, from the Creation to the Last

Judgment. He was not a religious man; few artists were in this

sixteenth-century Venice- half molded in soul and dominions by the

heretical or Islamic East; art was his religion, to which he

sacrificed night and day. But what finer subjects could a painter

fancy than the legends of Adam and Eve, and the story of Mary and

her Babe, and the tragedy of the God-man crucified, and the sufferings

and marvels of the saints, and the awful climax of all history in

the summoning of the quick and the dead to the judgment seat of

Christ? *05056 The best of this long series is The Presentation

(c. 1556), which Tintoretto painted for the church of Madonna dell'

Orto: the Temple of Jerusalem pictured in classic splendor; a timid

little Mary welcomed by the high priest with outstretched arms and

beard; a woman, drawn with the majesty of Pheidias, pointing Mary

out to her daughter; other women and their children, vividly realized;

a prophet preaching enigmatic prophecies; beggars and cripples half

naked, crouching on the Temple steps; this is a picture rivaling the

best of Titian, one of the grand paintings of the Renaissance.

Tintoretto's success was confirmed when (1564) the Scuola di San

Rocco, or the Confraternity of St. Roch, named him to decorate their

albergo or assembly rooms. To choose a painter for the vast wall

surfaces, the directors invited artists to submit drawings for a

picture to fit into a ceiling oval, showing St. Roch in glory. While

Paolo Veronese, Andrea Schiavone, and others made sketches, Tintoretto

painted a finished picture, flaming with color and alive with

action; had the canvas secretly pasted in the assigned place and

covered; and, on the day when the others presented their drawings, had

this painting uncovered, to the consternation of judges and

competitors. He excused this unorthodox strategy on the ground that he

could work best in this impulsive way, instead of following a cartoon.

The other artists cried foul; Tintoretto withdrew from the contest,

but left the painting as a gift to the Fraternity. The Scuola

finally accepted it, made Tintoretto a member, gave him a salary of

a hundred ducats a year for life, and required of him, in return, to

paint for them three pictures per year.

In the next eighteen years (1564-81) he placed fifty-six scenes upon

the albergo walls. The rooms were poorly lighted; Tintoretto had

to work in semidarkness; he worked rapidly, laying on his colors

coarsely, as to be seen from twenty feet below. These paintings became

the most famous one-man exhibition in Venetian history; and later

artists came to study them almost as students in Florence went to

study Masaccio. Rain and damp attacked the pictures through the years,

but they are still impressive in their scope and power. "Twenty or

thirty years ago," wrote Ruskin a hundred years ago, "they were

taken down to be restored; but the man to whom the task was

committed providentially died, and only one of them was

spoiled." `052229

In this astonishing museum Tintoretto told the Christian story

once more, but as it had never been painted before, with an

audacious realism that took the episodes out of the world of ideal

sentiment and placed them in such natural surroundings that legend

seemed transformed into the most indubitable history. The capacity

to see, to note every detail of a scene, to feel these details as

giving life, to dash them on to the wall with a stroke or two of the

brush- like the water visible through the laurel roots in the

Magdalen - these were sparks of Tintoretto's fire. He devoted the

lower floor of the albergo to Mary: her humble surprise in the

Annunciation, her modest grace in the Visitation, her simple awe

at the precious Oriental gifts in the Adoration of the Magi, her

slow procession on donkeyback across a peaceful landscape in The

Flight into Egypt, safe from that "massacre of the innocents" which

provides the most powerful picture in this group. On the walls of

the main upper room Tintoretto recounted events in the life of Christ:

the baptism by John, the temptation by Satan, the miracles, the Last

Supper; this last was so unconventionally realistic that Ruskin called

it "the worst I know of Tintoretto": `052230 Christ at the farther

end, the Apostles absorbed in eating or conversing, servants

bustling about with food, a dog inquiring when he too may eat. In an

inner room of the upper story Tintoretto painted two of his greatest

paintings. Christ Before Pilate shows an unforgettable figure clad

in a white robe as if in a shroud, standing quietly in weariness and

resignation, and yet in dignity, before a Pilate trying to wash away

the guilt of yielding to the bloodlust of a mob. And last of all-

judged by Tintoretto to be his best work- The Crucifixion,

challenging and surpassing Michelangelo's Last Judgment in power and

range of composition, in artistry of execution; forty feet of wall,

and eighty figures, with horses, mountains, towers, trees, all with

incredible fidelity to detail; Christ in visualized agony of body

and soul; one robber being forced down upon a prostrate cross, and

resisting to the last; another, a Titan of strength and desperation,

being raised to his death by rough soldiers too angry at his weight to

have a mind for pity; women huddled in terrified groups; spectators

crowding eager to watch men suffer and die; and, in the distance, a

lowering sky offering no answer to the human tragedy but thunder and

lightning and an indifferent rain. Here Tintoretto has reached his

zenith, and equaled the best.

To all these masterpieces in the albergo Tintoretto added eight

pictures for the church of the same Fraternity, chiefly concerning St.

Roch himself. One of these paintings stands out, if only through its

terribilita - The Pool of Bethesda. The artist takes his text

from the fifth chapter of the Fourth Gospel: "a crowd of invalids used

to lie" there, "the blind, the lame, and folk with shriveled limbs,"

waiting for a chance to bathe in the healing pool. Tintoretto sees not

the miraculous healing of the cripple, but the variously diseased or

stricken multitude, and he draws them unflinchingly as he sees them,

in their malformations, their rags and filth, their hope and

despair. It is a scene as from Dante's Inferno or Zola's Lourdes.

The same man who could so rage, with his art, against the ills

that flesh is heir to, responded eagerly to the splendors of the flesh

in the beauty of its health, and almost rivaled Titian and Correggio

in portraying nudes. Though we might have expected his turbulent

spirit and swift brush to fail in conveying the ancient sense of

beauty in repose, we find, scattered over Europe, such delectable

figures as the Danae of the Lyons Museum, dressed in jewelry, the

Leda and Swan of the Uffizi, the Venus and Vulcan of the Munich

Pinacothek, the Dresden Deliverance of Arsinoe, the Mercury and

Graces and Bacchus and Ariadne of the Doges' Palace.... Symonds

thought this last "if not the greatest, at any rate the most

beautiful, oil painting in existence." `052231 And yet more perfect is

the London Gallery's Origin of the Milky Way from Cupid's pressure

upon Juno's breasts- as good an explanation as any. The Louvre, the

Prado, Vienna, and the Washington Gallery have Susanna and the

Elders in four Tintoretto versions. The Prado has a roomful of

sensuous Tintorettos: A Young Venetian Woman drawing her robe

aside to reveal her bosom; even in the Battle of the Turks and

Christians two distracting breasts appear amid the gleam of arms. And

in the Verona Museum is a Concert of nine women musicians, three

of them bare to the waist- as if ears could hear when eyes had so much

to see. These pictures are not the best of Tintoretto; his forte was

in the massive representation of virile life and heroic death; but

they show that he too, like Giorgione and Titian, could turn a

perilous curve with a steady hand. And in all his nudes there is no

immodesty; there is a healthy sensualism; these gods and goddesses

take nudity as natural, and are not conscious of it; it is divine of

them to greet the sun "all face," whole-bodily, and not be harassed

and jailed with buttons and laces and bows.

After avoiding marriage for nearly forty years, Tintoretto took to

wife Faustina de' Vescovi, who found him so disorderly and helpless

that she achieved happiness in mothering him. She gave him eight

children, three of whom became pardonable painters. They lived in a

modest house not far from the church of Madonna dell' Orto; and the

artist seldom wandered from that vicinity except to paint in a

Venetian church, palace, or fraternity; consequently he can be

appreciated in his variety and power only in the city of his birth.

The Duke of Mantua offered him a place at his court; he refused. He

was happy only in his studio, where he worked literally night and day.

He was a good husband and father, but cared nothing for the social

pleasures. He was almost as solitary, independent, moody,

melancholy, nervous, vehement, and proud as the Michelangelo whom he

ever worshiped and ever strove to surpass. There was no peace in his

soul or his works. Like Angelo, he honored strength of body and mind

and spirit above surface beauty; his Virgins are often as

unprepossessing as the Doni Madonna. He has left us his own portrait

(now in the Louvre), painted when he was seventy-two; it could have

been the head and face of Angelo himself- a strong and somber face,

profound and wondering, and bearing the marks of a hundred storms.

His own was his best portrait, but he painted some others that

attest the depth of his insight and the integrity of his art. For

there too he remained a realist, and no man dared sit for him who

hoped to deceive posterity. Many a Venetian worthy has come down to us

through Tintoretto's brush: doges, senators, procurators, three

proveditori of the mint, six treasurers; above all, in this group,

Iacopo Soranzo - one of the great portraits in Venetian art; here

too, are Sansovino the architect and Cornaro the centenarian.

Surpassed in Tintoretto's gallery of portraits only by the Soranzo

are anonymous pictures of The Man in a Cuirass (Prado), the

Portrait of an Old Man (Brescia), the Portrait of a Man

(Hermitage, Leningrad) and A Moor in the Morgan Library in New York.

In 1574 Tintoretto disguised himself as an attendant of Doge Alvise

Mocenigo, secured entry to the Venetian flagship Bucentaur, and

clandestinely made a pastel sketch of Henry III of France; later, in

the corner of a chamber where Henry gave audience to notables,

Tintoretto perfected the portrait. Henry liked it so much that he

offered a knighthood to the artist, who begged to be excused. `052232

His acquaintance with the Venetian aristocracy had begun about 1556,

when, with Veronese, he received a commission to paint canvases in the

Ducal Palace. In the Sala del Maggior Consiglio he pictured The

Coronation of Frederick Barbarossa and Barbarossa Excommunicated

by Alexander III; in the Sala del Scrutinio he covered an entire wall

with a Last Judgment. These so pleased the Senate that it chose

him in 1572 to commemorate the great victory at Lepanto. All four of

these paintings were destroyed in the fire of 1577. In 1574 the Senate

engaged Tintoretto to decorate the Anticollegio (or antechamber); here

the artist inspired the solons with Mercury and the Graces, Ariadne

and Bacchus, the Forge of Vulcan, and Mars Pursued by Minerva. In

the Sala de' Pregadi or Senate Hall Tintoretto painted (1574-85) a

series of spacious panels celebrating the doges of his time,

pictured against the background of the majestic Square: St. Mark's and

its sparkling cupolas, or the Clock Tower, or the Campanile, or the

stately facade of the Libreria Vecchia, or the radiant arcades of

the Doges' Palace, or the misty or sunny vistas of the Grand Canal.

Then, crowning this sequence to the taste of the proud government,

he painted on the ceiling a triumphal picture of Venice Queen of

the Seas, robed in splendor as a dogaressa, surrounded by circles

of admiring divinities, and receiving from Tritons and Nereids the

gifts of the waters- corals, shells, and pearls.

After the great fire the undiscourageable Senate called upon

Tintoretto to redeem the ruined walls with pictures that would drown

all memory of the loss. In the Hall of Scrutiny he painted a

tremendous battle scene, The Capture of Zara. On a wall of the Great

Council chamber he pictured the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa

Receiving Envoys from the Pope and the Doge, and on the ceiling a

masterpiece, The Doge Niccolo da Ponte Receiving the Homage of

Conquered Cities.

When (1586) the Senate decided to cover the old fresco by

Guariento on the east wall of the Council Chamber, they judged

Tintoretto, then sixty-eight, to be too old for the task. They divided

the assignment and the space between Paolo Veronese, then fifty-eight,

and Francesco Bassano, thirty-seven. But Veronese died (1588) before

the work was actually begun. Tintoretto offered to take his place, and

proposed to cover the entire wall with one picture, The Glory of

Paradise. The Senate agreed, and the old man, aided by his son

Domenico and his daughter Marietta, laid out in the near-by Scuola

della Misericordia the canvas sections that were to compose the

picture. Many preliminary sketches were made; one, itself a

chef-d'oeuvre, is in the Louvre. When all was set in place (1590)

and Domenico had painted and concealed the seams, it constituted the

largest oil painting that had yet been seen- seventy-two feet long

by twenty-three feet high. The crowds that flocked to see it agreed

with Ruskin that it was the culminating achievement of Venetian

painting- "the most wonderful piece of pure, manly, and masterly oil

painting in the world." `052233 The Senate offered Tintoretto so great

a fee that he returned part of it, again to the scandal of his

fellow artists.

Time has had its way with this Paradise, and today, when one

enters the Hall of the Great Council, and turns back to the wall

behind the doges' throne, he does not find the picture that Tintoretto

left there, but a painting so darkened by the smoke and damp of

centuries that of the five hundred figures that filled it only a

minority can now be made out distinctly by the eye. Circle within

circle the figures vibrate- the simple blessed, the virgins, the

confessors of the faith, the martyrs, the evangelists, the Apostles,

the angels, the archangels- all concentered about Mary and her Son, as

if these two, in some fitting recognition of woman as well as man, had

become the real deities of Latin Christendom. And beyond the hundred

figures that can be seen, Tintoretto makes us feel countless

hundreds more. After all, even if only a few are chosen of the many

called, there must have come to paradise, in sixteen Christian

centuries, quite a happy host; and Tintoretto set himself to show

their goodly number and their bliss. He did not deaden heaven with

Dantesque solemnity; it was conceived as a place of joy, and only

the radiantly happy were admitted there. It was the old artist's

exorcism of his own misanthropy.

He had reason to be sad, for in the very year of the great picture's

unveiling his beloved daughter Marietta had died. Her skill in

painting and music had been among the chief delights of his old age;

and now that she was gone he seemed to think of nothing so much as

of seeing her in another life. He went more frequently than before

to Madonna dell' Orto- Our Lady of the Garden- and there spent hours

in meditation and prayer, at last a humble man. He still painted,

and produced in these concluding years a series on St. Catherine for

the church of her name. But in his seventy-seventh year a stomach

ailment gave him such pain that he could no longer sleep. He made

his will, bade good-bye to his wife and children and friends, and died

on May 31, 1594. Madonna dell' Orto received his remains.

If, after boating through Venice to stand face to face in every

corner of the city with this Michelangelo of the lagoons, we try to

clear our conception of his art, the first impression is one of size

and multitude, of enormous walls pullulating with human and animal

forms, in a thousand degrees of beauty or ugliness, in a carnal

confusion that has only this excuse, that it is life. This man who

shunned and hated crowds saw them everywhere, and reproduced them with

fierce veracity. He seems to have taken little interest in

individuals; if he painted portraits it was frankly to earn a fee.

He saw humanity in the gross, interpreted life and history in terms of

masses of human beings struggling, competing, loving, enjoying,

suffering; virile and comely, diseased and crippled, saved or

damned. He covered canvases of awesome immensity, because only such

expanses gave him scope to picture what he saw. While never completely

mastering, as Titian did, the technique of pictorial art, he worked

out for himself the method of these gigantic paintings, and to him

above all is due the grandeur of the rooms in the Palace of the Doges.

Therefore we must not ask of him any finesse of finishing. He is

crude, rough, hurried, and sometimes creates a scene with a splash

of the brush. His real fault is not this coarseness of surface- for

even a coarse surface may illuminate significance- but the

theatrical violence of the episodes he chooses, the unhealthy

turbulence of his moods, the gloom in which he bathes the life he

shows, and the tiresome repetition of his crowds; he was infatuated

with number, as Michelangelo with forms and Rubens with flesh. And yet

even in these multitudes what a wealth of meaningful detail, what

accuracy and insight of observation, what inexhaustible

individualization of the parts, what courageous realism where before

there had only been imagination and sentiment!

Our final feeling in the presence of these pictures is one of

affirmative response: this is art in the grand style. Other artists

have painted beauty, like Raphael, or strength, like Michelangelo,

or the depths of the soul, like Rembrandt; but here in these cosmic

canvases- as in the roar of a city, or in mute masses at prayer, or in

the troubled and affectionate intimacies of a thousand homes- is

humanity. No other artist has ever seen it so large or pictured it

so completely. Sometimes, silent before those fading walls in the

Palace of the Doges or in the Confraternity of St. Roch, the

canvases of better artists fall from our memory, and we feel that if

he could have finished like a jeweler after so conceiving like a

giant, the little dyer would have been the greatest painter of them

all.

V. VERONESE: 1528-88

-

Let us honor, in passing, some stars of the second magnitude; they

too were part of the luminosity of Venice. Andrea Meldola was a

Slavonian, and received the name Schiavone. He studied with Titian,

and made a pretty Galatea on a chest in the Castello of Milan. In

a Jupiter and Antiope (Leningrad) and a Presentation of the Virgin

(Venice) he essayed a larger form, and produced canvases of

brilliant coloring. Artists praised him, patrons ignored him, and

Andrea had to carry his bearded dignity in rags.- Paris Bordone was

the son of a saddler and the grandson of a shoemaker; but in the

Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

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