Jacopo Tintoretto

Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti, b. c. 1518/19–d. 1594) was born and died in Venice, rarely leaving his natal city. It is here that Tintoretto’s talents can be best appreciated since numerous works by him are still displayed throughout Venice, many still in their original location, most famously at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Tintoretto was an astute entrepreneur who cultivated his professional artisan identity in a city dominated by the international success of his older contemporary Titian. Tintoretto’s breakthrough came in 1548, with his painting of the Miracle of the Slave for the Scuola Grande di San Marco, its pulsing energy and dynamic movement announcing both his admiration for Michelangelo and a radical break with the traditional modes of Venetian narrative painting. Yet, throughout his career, Tintoretto was criticized for both his speed of production and his lack of finish, particularly influential in this regard was the negative account of Giorgio Vasari. After his death, Tintoretto was greatly admired by artists, including El Greco and Rubens. In the seventeenth century, accounts penned by the Vicentine Carlo Ridolfi and the Venetian Marco Boschini sought to counter central Italian critiques of Tintoretto’s style and instead celebrate him as emblematic of the great tradition of Venetian painting. The teaching of an empirical hierarchy of artistic excellence fostered by art academies in Europe meant that Tintoretto’s reputation dipped considerably for much of the long eighteenth century. The eccentricities of his paintings were compared unfavorably to those of Titian and Veronese, as well as to other contemporary works from Florence and Rome. One positive outcome of this decline in appreciation for Tintoretto’s art was that relatively few of his paintings left Venice during the Napoleonic suppressions of 1797. From the last years of the eighteenth century onward, Tintoretto’s reputation began to blossom anew, first due to the aesthetic pluralism encouraged by the Romantic movement and then through the widely read works of Hippolyte Taine in France and John Ruskin in England. In the following century Tintoretto attracted the admiration of novelists, philosophers, and critics, who often stressed the modernity of his paintings, in some cases understanding aspects of his identity in light of their own ideological stances. For roughly the first half of the 1900s there was a preoccupation with Tintoretto as an exponent of mannerism, as well as an interest in the impact of the Counter-Reformation on his style. In common with the development of art history as a discipline from the mid-twentieth century onward, in this period attention was paid to achieving a richer understanding of the nature of Tintoretto’s patronage, the techniques and materials deployed in his workshop, aspects of his identity and personality, and the full multimedia range of his artistic output. The quincentenary anniversary events of 2018–2019 testified to the immense popularity of Tintoretto in our own times, now perceived as one of the greatest of the great old masters.