Tintoretto
Venice’s rapid dramatist.
Tintoretto wanted to combine Michelangelo’s drawing with Titian’s colour. In his Last Supper the table runs diagonally into a dark room filled with angels.
Tintoretto’s real name was Jacopo Robusti, and he was born in Venice in 1518 or 1519. His father was a cloth dyer, tintore in Italian, hence the nickname “the little dyer”. Little is known about his training. According to an early biography he was briefly with Titian but was sent away. The same source says that he wrote “the drawing of Michelangelo and the colour of Titian” on the wall of his studio, but this may be a later invention.
His breakthrough came in 1548 with The Miracle of the Slave, now in the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. St Mark plunges down from heaven to free a slave, and the whole picture is full of movement. From 1564 and for more than twenty years he decorated the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, one of the religious confraternities of Venice. It holds over fifty of his paintings, among them a vast Crucifixion. He won the commission by installing a finished painting in the ceiling, in breach of the rules of a competition, while the others submitted sketches.
Tintoretto worked quickly and boldly. He used strong light and deep darkness, dramatic diagonals and deep perspectives. He is said to have built small models with wax figures in boxes to test lighting and compositions. In The Last Supper of 1592–94 in the church of San Giorgio Maggiore the table runs obliquely into the picture, and a lamp and a swarm of translucent angels light up the darkness. His painting Paradise in the great hall of the Doge’s Palace is among the largest paintings on canvas in the world.
He almost never left Venice and was married to Faustina de’ Vescovi. His workshop was run with the help of his children. His daughter Marietta was a portrait painter, and his son Domenico took over the workshop. Tintoretto died in Venice in 1594.
His contemporaries sometimes criticised him for being careless and too quick. But his dramatic light and movement point forward to the Baroque, and the young El Greco was strongly influenced by him during his time in Venice.