A soft grey, gossamer haze clung to the sky over the lagoon, threatening drizzle, on my first morning in Venice. No matter. I stepped onto the fondamenta of the canal abutting the locanda’s facade, the slightly damp stones seemingly having succumbed to the humid air. In the 1850’s, John Ruskin wrote about these stones, quarried and shipped for centuries from the former Venetian territories of Istria, now decorating the city’s grand palaces and churches and paving the streets and campos, atop what once were island marshes. artes fine arts magazine

Crossing a small bridge, I popped into a dark, weary sotoportego, (one of those ubiquitous tunnels under the many aged buildings—short cuts from one canal or campo to another) and out to Campo San Barnaba. These sottoporteghi might well have witnessed the assassination of a doge, eased the escape of Casanova, or veiled the furtive trysts of clients and their prostitutes– numbering about 11,000– in the 1500’s (Cinquecento). What Henry James said of Venice rings so true: “Is it really your fault if the place makes you want so desperately to read history into everything?”

The stones led me to another canal and bridge, then on to a labyrinth of nearly claustrophobia-inducing, store-fronted calles, requiring some negotiation to squeeze past women with colorful sacks on their way to market. Passing a large gate of a former grand palace of the fifteenth century, Doge Foscari, now campus to Ca’Foscari University, and leaving Dorsoduro, I crossed yet another bridge to San Polo. More twists and turns on a calle brought me to a small campo opposite the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, still standing after 460 years. Housed here are some of the greatest masterpieces of Cinquecento Venetian art by Jacopo Robusti (Comin), also known as Tintoretto (b. Venice, 1518-1593). From 1564, until his final years, he had created these paintings.

Finally inside, one is enthralled with the unpretentious beauty, deep spirituality, ferocious imagination and lively story-telling of the works. It is oil painting at its glorious height. Viewing each of Tintoretto’s narrative paintings, one is experiencing grand theatre—like Shakespeare on canvas—a virtual cast of characters inhabiting their roles, however small, on a large, deep stage. The artist’s textured highlighting brushwork, dynamic imagination of spatial perspectives, play of light and shade (chiaroscuro), like modern stage spot-lighting, and atmospheric, geometric multi-dimensional placement of characters in his compositions, propel his stories to vivid drama.

The paintings are not pleasing to the eye at first glance, in terms of subtle tone or harmonious color. But they do astound. They possess a palpable, tugging spirituality, as if baring Tintoretto’s soul, revealing his relationship with his god and faith. So seem his masterpieces found in the upper room, Sala dell’Albergo of San Rocco, scenes of the great sacrifice: Christ before Pilate, The Crowning with Thorns, The Ascent to Calvary,  in which the path tread by Christ slants in angles of deep shadow set against the illuminated, condemned men, bent and laden with heavy crosses. The story culminates in his Crucifixion,  spanning the inner wall.

Upon viewing the Crucifixion,  the otherwise verbose art critic and wordsmith, John Ruskin, was rendered nearly wordless: “I must leave this picture to work its will on the spectator, for it is beyond all analysis, and above all praise.”

And through the centuries, the painting and his others have worked their will—El Greco, Velasquez and Rubens studied Tintoretto’s brushwork and copied his compositions. Rembrandt was especially influenced by his chiaroscuro. Manet copied Tintoretto’s self-portrait at the Louvre. Sartre, with fascination, wrote of Tintoretto as an artist of plebian ilk. Jackson Pollack saw a print of the Crucification and sketched its spatiality and character placement in his drawing book. Henry James, no stranger to art, remarked: “Titian was assuredly a mighty poet, but Tintoret—well, Tintoret was almost a prophet.”

Scuola San Rocco was one of the six grand scuole (guilds or co-fraternities) of Venice established by wealthy merchants and successful artisans comprising the cittadini class, to aid the sick and poor and provide dowry for young women. It was they who built these grand houses for meetings and paid commissions for their decoration, thereby demonstrating their wealth and influence.

According to Tintoretto’s biographer, Carlo Ridolfi, in competing for the commission, instead of providing the drawings for the ceiling painting as his rivals, Veronese and Schiavone did, Tintoretto, in a pre-emptive stroke, installed a completed oval painting of San Rocco onto the ceiling. In the face of anger and rebuke, Tintoretto made a gift of his painting to the scuola, offering low fees for additional work each year to fill the scuola. Typical of Venetians to recognize a good bargain, the scuola accepted his terms. The infamous San Rocco painting remains there to this day.

How Tintoretto must have wanted the commission for San Rocco– not for the money, but for his legacy!

It had taken him nearly 46 years to arrive at San Rocco. He was born in Venice in 1518, but hardly left that city. There was no need, for the rest of the world would happily come to the rich, cosmopolitan Venice.

Venice had been a republic since 410 AD. Its doge was elected by the nobility. It had a socially mobile cittadini class of merchants, master artisans and state administrators, unlike the company towns: the de Medici’s Florence, or the pope’s Rome. This merchant republic amassed enormous wealth from its maritime trade and control of the Adriatic and the eastern Mediterranean. For the brutal, bloody Fourth Crusade (1202-1204), Venice provided galley ships built at the Arsenale, oared by the Venetians who constructed them. They forcibly wrested from the Byzantine Greeks warehoused trading posts along the Adriatic, all the way to Constantinople and the Black Sea. Their plunder comprised gold, silver, crown jewels, silks, and precious relics, such as a chip of wood from Christ’s crucifix and four bronze horses now at San Marco’s Basilica, pillaged and stolen from churches and palaces of Constantinople.

Even the corpse of its own patron, Saint Mark, was stolen from Alexandria and brought to Venice, then buried beneath the basilica now bearing his name. These exploits instilled in the Venetians a sense of ecclesiastical and political independence from Rome, with an inclination towards religious tolerance. This proved more conducive to trade, much to the irritation of the papacy. The city had Jewish, Turkish, Greek and German/Dutch communities. By the 1400’s Venice was the richest city-state in Europe, second only to Paris in population. Its wealth supported the arts, enabling centuries of enrichment and beautification of the city.

It was into this universe that Tintoretto was born. His father was a textile dyer, a tintor, hence his name, little dyer or “Tintoretto.” They lived in the northerly Cannaregio district, in a community of other tintori and artisans. At 12, evincing talent, he was taken to the workshop of the most famous painter at the time, Titian (Tiziano Vecello, b. Pieve di Cadore, 1488-1576), some twenty years his senior. Ridolfi recounted that within days, Tintoretto was ejected from Titian’s workshop, allegedly the result of the elder’s jealousy of the young upstart’s ferocious talent. Titian later blocked commissions that might have gone to young Tintoretto and directed them toward his protégé, Paolo Veronese (Paolo Caliari, b. Verona, 1528-1588).

Rejected by a grandmaster, without sponsor or patron, but still undeterred, Tintoretto held on to his brush, and perhaps in defiance, turned to Michelangelo’s forms and sculpture, the clay and bronze figures of which were then being introduced to Venice. Michelangelo (b. Caprese, 1475-1564) disdained, as lesser art form, oil painting and its resultant light and colors, founded mainly by Giorgione (b. Castelfranco,1477/8-1510), to be later developed further by his pupil, Titian.  Sculpture, drawing of forms and figures, and frescos were the currency of the Central Italian mannerist masters, exemplified by Michelangelo. But oil painting and color were the language of the Venetian School.

Young Tintoretto studied and sketched Michelangelo’s figures in all of their contortions and from different light and angles: those viewed from bottom to top, “dal sotto in su” for dramatic effect, as in The Presentation of Virgin at the Temple, whose sweeping stairways rise to temple and ceiling paintings at San Rocco, in which we see the underside of San Rocco’s cape from beneath. He ate up “il disegno di Michelangelo ed il colorito di Tiziano,” (the drawing of Michelangelo and the color of Titian), digested and then synthesized them for his compositions. His brush and color conjured the chiaro light to illuminate spirituality and pureness, add texture or make a figure move; and the scuro dark, to intensify the mystery of a shaded visage, the haunting recesses of dark space or inner core. Contrary to the conventions of the day, where subtle tones prevailed, as if impatient, he let loose his brush, creating his trademark, energetic lines on canvas. They are most visible in the depiction of the ghostly figures, retreating in The Theft of the Body of Saint Mark, and in The Baptism of Christ at San Rocco, in which the procession of people witnessing the baptism are highlighted in swift, seemingly unbroken white lines that are almost abstracted. An artist’s visible brushstroke was quite revolutionary and scandalous at the time!

Tintoretto was essentially self-taught and declared himself a painter at twenty. Dubbed “il furioso,” he worked with unparalleled skill and speed or prestezza del fatto, then disfavored by traditional Florentian art critics as vulgar and unfinished, but otherwise championed by his close literary friends as improvisational naturalism. These friends included Anton Francesco Doni (1513-1574) and Andrea Calmo (1550-1571). They were part of the poligrafi satirists and comedic playwrights from other regions, who’d settled in Venice, and criticized the prevailing corruption and papacy, while sympathizing with the reformist winds of the Lutheran north. They, like Tintoretto, were without rich patrons and wrote hastily to sell their books to the larger public and advocated humility and personal faith between individual and God. The Venetian printing presses, by then a major industry in Cinquecento, churned out pocket-sized pamphlets for the reading public, merchants and sailors on long voyages.

Left, above: Tinoretto’s Theft of the Body of Saint Mark (1548). Sometimes called St. Mark’s Body Brought to Venice, A Votary of the Saint Delivered. Seen here at the Court la Biennale di Venezia. Photo Francesco Galli.  Coll: Royal Palace, Venice; Right, above: A pamphlet for the performance of The Spanish Comedy, by satirist and Tintoretto contemporary, Andrea Calmo. 

To make a name and earn a living, young Tintoretto did what he could, painting countless frescos for the facades of palazzi, most eaten away by the wet, salty air of the lagoon. He decorated furniture, theatre sets and painted portraits in the style of Titian to sell at bargain prices in the shops of the mercerie, near the Rialto Bridge. He gave paintings to art critics, like the famous Pietro Aretino, whose writings influenced artistic taste not only in Venice, but also in Florence. He began to be noticed.

Tintoretto’s breakthrough came in 1548 with Miracle of the Slave, commissioned by the other grand Scuola di San Marco. The contorted muscular characters around the supine slave were clearly modeled after those of Michaelangelo—San Marco swooping from the sky like Superman in a deep pink cape to save the slave, vivid colors not far from those of Titian. The painting was scandalous for its visible brushwork and highlighting lines that accentuated the movement of the figures. Yet even the most severe art critics had to defer to its masterfulness and daring composition. The scuola rejected it at first, then took it back. Tintoretto had made his mark. Titian, it was said, did not endeavor another narrative painting after seeing it, and concentrated on portraiture, thereafter.

Tintoretto married the daughter of a member, then-head, of Scuola di San Marco, when his painting was chosen. They had eight children and settled in Cannaregio district. He eventually afforded a bottegha workshop with his painter-son, Domenico, as foreman, a Dutch assistant, and his favorite daughter, Marrietta, a noted painter-portraitist, who pre-deceased him, by his side. Still, he had to fight for each commission, competing with Titian and Veronese, just as in the case of San Rocco.

Like Venice, Tintoretto was probably not impervious to Rome’s Counter-Reformation. Perhaps the religious ferment during the Cinquecento informed Tintoretto’s narrative paintings later on, as those in San Rocco. They tend to suggest that Tintoretto was not unsympathetic to reform. His were big stories of humble people. The Mary in Tintoretto’s The Annunciation at San Rocco dwells in a modest setting, with an old, worn straw chair, a dilapidated column, garbed in coarse dress. She is caught startled– arms raised, torso turned away– by the sudden appearance from above of the Archangel, an alien, the Holy Spirit in the form of an illuminated white dove, a swarm of cherubic space creatures hovering, unaware of what fate has yet in store. As with the Last Supper at San Rocco, the plain table, Jesus slightly illuminated, and the apostles in bare feet on simple wood benches are at an angle from the viewer, recessed into an illuminated kitchen framed by a worn column. The simplicity of the round plates in the cupboard is highlighted with few brushstrokes, the humble setting of working folks in everyday clothing, about their business, oblivious to the momentous occasion. The artist did not prettify Mary or Jesus. He ennobled them with humility and modesty.

In Tintoretto’s last Self Portrait now at the Louvre, he is an old man, droopy layers under his eyes, long white beard augmenting a clinging weariness. Despite his age, the artist’s eyes are still penetrating, but with a touch of melancholia. His white hair and full beard enlivened by some of their curls, but are softened by brushstrokes that seem not so ferocious as before. His rivals Titian and Veronese gone, his legacy preserved, his name not forgotten.

Perhaps Tintoretto sensed the decline already underway in his beloved city. Venice never fully recovered from the onslaught of the League of Cambrai made up of Spain, France, Austrian Habsburg and organized by the Papal States at the beginning of the Cinquecento, which exacted large tributes and its territories on the terra firma of Veneto. It lost Cyprus to the Ottomans. Not least, the Portuguese found a new spice route around Africa and the burgeoning Atlantic trade with the New World, beyond its reach, accrued handsomely to other European powers.

Venice is a lesson in history of a mighty civilization and its eventual downfall. It is a reliquary that retains its glorious singular beauty. As its native-born titan, Tintoretto had produced at least 650 known pieces of art and given over his life’s work to the only city he had ever known. Venice remains brushed with his paintings, many masterpieces of which cannot be moved from the city.

Rather, one must come to Venice, and again.

By Linda Y. Peng, Contributing Writer

Writer’s note:Tintoretto was chosen to illustrate the theme of the 2011 Venice Biennale: ILLUMInations—which “opens interesting perspectives, well beyond the mere fact that Tintoretto was a painter of light” according to the curator’s statement. For its Central Pavilion at the Giardini, in the grand gallery, hung Tintoretto’s three masterpieces from the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, including his other Last Supper at the center spot. Illuminating and much more.