Tintoretto

Jacopo Robusti, known as Tintoretto—”Little Dyer”—in reference to his father’s trade, paints for the church of the Madonna dell'Orto around 1546 three of his leading works—the Worship of the Golden Calf, the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, and the Last Judgment, now shamefully repainted.

The prolific Venetian painter had taken the commission for two of the paintings, the Worship of the Golden Calf and the Last Judgment, on a cost-basis in order to make himself better known.

He settles down in a house hard by the church: a Gothic edifice, looking over the Fondamenta de Mori, which is still standing.

Paolo Pino, a Venetian painter who champions the practice of conscious eclecticism among artists, urges in 1548 that the drawing of Michelangelo be wedded to the coloring of Titian.

Tintoretto, seemingly fulfilling Pino’s ideal, displays a new and unique vigor in his earliest known works.

In 1548, Tintoretto is commissioned to paint four pictures for the Scuola di S. Marco: the Finding of the body of St Mark in Alexandria (now in the church of the Angeli, Murano), the Saint's Body brought to Venice, a Votary of the Saint delivered by invoking him from an Unclean Spirit (these two are in the library of the royal palace, Venice), and the Miracle of the Slave.

The latter, which forms at present one of the chief glories of the Venetian Academy, represents the legend of a Christian slave or captive who was to be tortured as a punishment for some acts of devotion to the evangelist, but was saved by the miraculous intervention of the latter, who shattered the bone-breaking and blinding implements which were about to be applied.

These four works are greeted with signal and general applause, including that of Titian's intimate, the too potent Pietro Aretino, with whom Tintoretto, one of the few men who scorns to curry favor with him, is mostly in disrepute.

It is said, however, that Tintoretto at one time painted a ceiling in Pietro's house; at another time, being invited to do his portrait, he attended, and at once proceeded to take his sitter's measure with a pistol (or a stiletto), as a significant hint that he was not exactly the man to be trifled with.

Having now executed the four works in the Scuola di S. Marco, painter's straits and obscure sufferings are at an end.

Tintoretto paints Susanna and the Elders, a version of the old Testament episode, in about 1550, the year that he marries Faustina de Vescovi (or Episcopi?), daughter of a Venetian nobleman who is the guardian grande of the Scuola Grande di San Marco.

She appears to have been a careful homemaker, and one who both would and could have her way with her not too tractable husband.

Faustina is to bear him several children, probably two sons and five daughters.

The mother of Jacopo's daughter Marietta, a portrait painter herself, is probably a German woman, who had had an affair with Jacopo before his marriage to Faustina.

Venetian painter Tintoretto, aided by numerous assistants and pupils, among them his sons Domenico and Marco and his daughter Marietta, had begun an extensive cycles of paintings for the Scuola of the Confraternity of San Rocco in 1560.

He resumes work at the scuola in 1565, painting the magnificent Crucifixion, for which he is paid a sum of two hundred and fifty ducats.

Luca Cambiasi, born at Moneglia, then part of the Republic of Genoa, the son of a painter named Giovanni Cambiasi, had been a precocious youth, and at the age of fifteen he had painted, along with his father, some subjects from Ovid's Metamorphoses on the facade of a house in Genoa.

He had in 1544, at the age of seventeen, been involved in the decoration of the Palazzo Doria, now the Prefettura, perhaps working with Marcantonio Calvi, a painter of his father's generation.

He aided in the vault decoration of the church of San Matteo, in collaboration with Giovanni Battista Castello.

His Resurrection and Transfiguration altarpieces for San Bartolomeo degli Armeni date from around 1560.

He painted a Resurrection for San Giovanni Battista in Montalto Ligure in 1563, followed by frescoes for the Villa Imperiale at Genoa-Turalba (also called the Palazzo Imperiali Terralba) with a Rape of the Sabines (circa 1565) and the Palazzo Meridiana (formerly Grimaldi; also in 1565).

In the Capella Lercari of the Duomo di San Lorenzo, Cambiasi had frescoed a Presentation and Marriage of the Virgin in 1569.

He paints Vanity of Earthly Love in about 1570.

A prolific draftsman, he had begun in the mid-1560s to draw in a simplified, geometric style that may have been inspired by similar works by Albrecht Dürer and other German artists.

A bold designer in a Raphaelesque mode, his main influences are said to have been Correggio and the Late Renaissance Venetian school.

His extreme facility astonishes the Spanish painters.

It is said that Philip II, watching one day with pleasure the offhand zest with which Cambiasi was painting a head of a laughing child, was allowed the further surprise of seeing the laugh changed, by a touch or two upon the lips, into a weeping expression.

The artist paints sometimes with a brush in each hand, and with a certainty equaling or transcending that even of Tintoretto.

The Counter-Reformation Church is building huge new churches in Rome and paintings are needed to fill them, and likewise the enormous new palazzi.

The artificial conventions of Mannerism, which have ruled art for almost a century, seem inadequate to the task of countering the threat of Protestantism, and the search is on for authentic religious art.

Caravaggio's radical naturalism combines close physical observation with a theatrical shift from light to dark with little intermediate value.

This is tenebrism, a very pronounced chiaroscuro style that Caravaggio is generally credited with inventing, although his predecessors Tintoretto and El Greco are sometimes described as tenebrists.

Tintoretto's dramatic use of perspectival space and special lighting effects make him a precursor of Baroque art.

A notable exponent of the Venetian Renaissance school, Tintoretto’s heyday had been the previous era: the last picture of any considerable importance which he executes, the vast Paradise, at seventy-four feet by thirty reputed to be the largest painting ever done upon canvas, is commissioned in 1588.

He sets up his canvas in the Scuola della Misericordia and works indefatigably at the task, making many alterations and doing various heads and costumes direct from nature.

When the picture has been nearly completed he takes it to its proper place and there finishes it, assisted by his son Domenico for details of drapery, etc.

All Venice applauds the superb achievement: it is the crowning production of Tintoretto's life, the last picture of any considerable importance that he executes.

A comparison of Tintoretto's final version of The Last Supper with Leonardo da Vinci's treatment of the same subject provides an instructive demonstration of how artistic styles evolved over the course of the Renaissance.

Leonardo's is all classical repose: the disciples radiate away from Christ in almost-mathematical symmetry.

In the hands of Tintoretto, the same event becomes dramatic, as the human figures are joined by angels.

A servant is foregrounded, perhaps in reference to the Gospel of John 13:14-16.

Tintoretto, in the restless dynamism of his composition, his dramatic use of light, and his emphatic perspective effects, seems a baroque artist ahead of his time.